By Coby Zucker

Monica Granados has a mission to make research free and accessible. Her steadfast pursuit of that goal—and a little bit of luck—has allowed this alum to turn her mission into a full-time career.

“Right now, the status quo is inaccessible information. The bulk of knowledge should be accessible to anyone, anytime,” says Granados, who earned an honours bachelor of science in 2006 as a member of Woodsworth College, and a master’s in 2010 in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. She went on to earn her PhD in Ecology at McGill University.

Granados works at Creative Commons (CC), a nonprofit organization that supplies open-copyright licenses for creators to distribute their work freely. Their licenses are used worldwide by millions, including artists, photographers, museums, libraries and, increasingly, researchers, who are Granados’s area of concern.

As the director of open science, Granados partners with researchers to apply CC licenses to their manuscripts, data, images and more. These licenses allow other researchers—and the public—to access and use their work freely and legally. Ultimately, providing access increases the reach and potential of the research, says Granados.“We do research because we want to understand the world a little bit better. To get that information out, we need to have as few barriers as possible,” she says.

Most peer-reviewed publications live in journals behind paywalls, which makes them inaccessible to many. Granados wants to see that change with CC-licensed research living in open-access journals or institutional repositories like TSpace, U of T’s own free research repository.

“The point of these licenses is to give creators, like researchers, agency to choose how they want their work to be reused,” Granados says.

The impact of free access to research is not easy to measure, but sometimes its value is abundantly clear. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility—an international data network that uses CC licenses—distributes free data about occurrences of the African land snail, a species invasive in many tropical regions and known to spread rat lung worm disease. This data allowed researchers to map the risk of disease transmission associated with invasion and pet trade of the snail.

“The point of these licenses is to give creators, like researchers, agency to choose how they want their work to be reused.”

The COVID-19 pandemic yielded another example of the value of access to research and data. Sharing preprints — scholarly papers that haven’t yet undergone a peer review — between research labs across the globe was crucial for accelerating vaccine development.

“The pandemic was the ultimate test case for open science,” Granados says.

Granados’s advocacy also extends beyond her workplace. In 2018, not long after completing her PhD, Granados co-founded PREreview, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the scholarly process of peer reviewing, where experts question and eventually validate research papers before publication.

The idea was to help researchers improve their manuscripts early and give them time to integrate the changes.

“What if we as researchers could get feedback earlier in the process and divorced from the traditional peer review workflow?” Granados asks. “Improving these preprints can make a tremendous contribution to science.”

PREreview helped Granados understand open-access research and prepared her for a career in the field. No longer involved in the day-to-day operations of PREreview, she still sits on the organization’s advisory board.

An Office Outdoors: Ecology at U of T

Granados succeeds as an advocate for open science thanks to her background as a researcher, which began at U of T. During her conversations with researchers, she understands their perspective.

“I’m not an administrator or bureaucrat telling them what they should do,” Granados says. “I know how to reduce friction in the system because I understand the system.”

Originally from Mexico, Granados grew up in the United States. She completed high school in Tucson, Arizona, where she first heard about U of T.

Granados came to the university keen to pursue medical school, but that changed when she discovered ecology. She quickly became intrigued by the ways organisms interact and the prospect of having her office outdoors.

“Ecology became my first love,” she reflects.

In the summer of her second year, Granados had her first research opportunity: digging up sediment around mastodon fossils to figure out what they were eating. It was a transformative experience that set her on the path to seek out more similar experiences.

“U of T gave me so many research opportunities that I’m confident I would not have received at any other institution,” she says.

While working on her PhD at McGill, Granados thought she might stay in the lab for her career. A fateful workshop changed that. She was introduced to the world of open-access research, and her entire perspective on research changed.

As a researcher receiving federal funding, Granados felt her duty was to make sure all Canadians could access the knowledge she was producing — something impossible if the data were kept behind a paywall.

“I couldn’t believe the injustice in how we are training students and doing research,” Granados says. “I took it upon myself to preach to other students about the injustice we were complicit in. It’s a cause to which I’m deeply committed.”

Since that time, Granados says she’s been privileged to find herself in roles that allow her to do that advocacy work full time.

“I’m extremely lucky to do this as a career,” Granados says.

Originally published August 20, 2026, on University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science News.