Annual Report
2017–2018

In partnership with Canadian libraries and scholarly publishers, Érudit works toward the digital dissemination of academic and cultural publications in the humanities and social sciences.

Érudit is an interuniversity consortium made up of the University of Montreal, Laval University and the University of Quebec at Montreal. It receives support from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture. Since 2014, Érudit has been recognized as a major science initiative by the Canadian Fund for Innovation.

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Mission

To promote and disseminate knowledge and to facilitate research by providing access to text corpora. Érudit works to promote open-access dissemination of research.

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A word from Frédéric Bouchard

In the winter of 2017, Érudit endorsed the Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity, an initiative launched in France by a team of researchers and scholarly publishing professionals, declaring its support for recommendations already made by UNESCO, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories and other authorities.

The declaration calls for the implementation of alternative financing models to support open access without relying solely on article publication fees. It maintains that open access should be complemented by support for bibliodiversity (i.e., diversity in scholarly publishing).

Érudit has been an ardent supporter the bibliodiversity movement and independent journals since its founding in 1998. It is committed to preventing access to knowledge from being concentrated in the hands of just a few major commercial publishers. The various collaborative projects initiated by our team have helped redefine power dynamics in scholarly publishing and contributed to promoting the free circulation of knowledge.

As this report bears out, this has been a very eventful year for Érudit. On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to congratulate the entire team on their excellent work.

Frédéric Bouchard

Chair of the board of directors

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A word from Tanja Niemann

With the launch of Coalition Publi.ca this year, we entered a new phase in our collaboration on the national level. Coalition Publi.ca is a partnership created by Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project with the aim of developing an open digital services infrastructure through dialogue with the scholarly publishing community (journals, libraries, academic publishing houses, etc.) across Canada.

We also stepped up our collaboration with the Partnership for Open Access, both in Canada and internationally. The Partnership now works with 90 university libraries and 129 scholarly journals striving to transition to a sustainable and financially viable open-access model.

Another example of successful collaboration in 2017-2018 was the Open Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CO.SHS) research project, which brings together scholarly teams from across Canada through Érudit’s platform. The teams are proud to present their first deliverables.

It has been a period of intensive cooperation and collaborative effort. I wish to thank our partners and our Board of Directors for their support, and I encourage you to read on and discover more about the many projects completed this past year. Happy reading!

Tanja Niemann

Executive director

Consolidating our national mission

Over the years, increasing numbers of scholarly journals from different Canadian provinces have benefited from collaboration with Érudit. Their publications, often bilingual, have enriched the content available on our platform. Since 2011, we have maintained a strategic partnership with the Centre for Digital Scholarship (formerly the Electronic Text Centre) based in the University of New Brunswick. As a result of this partnership, 12 mostly English-language scholarly journals have extended their reach through our platform and expanded their institutional subscriptions thanks to our commercial and partnership agreements.

In view of the increasing number and diversity of solutions now available to journals on the national level, we realized it was necessary to devise a concerted strategy for collaborating with other stakeholders in Canadian digital distribution.

Over the course of several months, we worked on harmonizing our service offer with that of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), a non-profit research initiative led by Simon Fraser University and Stanford University. The PKP offers a free software suite that includes the Open Journal System (OJS), which is used around the world to facilitate the editorial management of journals and promote the dissemination of scholarly content.

These efforts led to the creation, in early 2018, of Coalition Publi.ca, a national infrastructure project uniting a diverse range of scholarly publishing stakeholders across Canada, including Érudit, the PKP, scholarly journals, research libraries and university presses. Coalition Publi.ca seeks to develop a viable and equitable publication model for Canada’s research ecosystem which would challenge the dominance of major commercial publishers.

Seven English-language Canadian journals have already benefited from the joint services of Érudit and the PKP. Their content is produced and disseminated via the Open Journal System and they receive indexing, distribution and archiving services from Érudit.

-> Learn about Coalition Publi.ca

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Ensuring the success of the Partnership for Open Access in Canada and internationally

Initially developed in 2014 with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), the Partnership for Open Access seeks to offer ongoing financial support to journals as part of a transition to an open-access model while strengthening collaboration between university libraries and scholarly journals in Canada. The success of his collaborative model was reaffirmed in the spring of 2018 with the renewed long-term commitment of Canadian and international libraries.

In Canada, 53 CRKN member university libraries reiterated their commitment and vowed to offer financial support to the 129 scholarly journals disseminated by Érudit over a five-year period (2018-2022).

Érudit’s efforts in recent years to establish international partnerships also bore fruit in France and Belgium. Agreements were signed with Couperin, the consortium of French university libraries (three-year commitment by 31 libraries), and with Belgian consortium BICfB (five-year commitment by six libraries). Successful partnerships with other consortia outside Canada are expected to follow in the coming years.

The exceptional nature of this international collaboration demonstrates the existing interest among libraries in developing a new open-access support model for journals not based on authors’ publication fees. The Partnership for Open Access contributes financial support to the journals on Érudit’s platform while providing them with excellent visibility around the world.

-> Visit the website of the Partnership for Open Access

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Launching new research activities

The consolidation of Érudit’s research initiatives was an important milestone in the 2017-2018 period. Building on the creation of the Scientific Department in 2015 and the Scientific Committee in 2016, Érudit established its Research and Strategic Development Department in early 2017.

The CO.SHS teams also officially launched their technical research and development activities. Financed by the Canadian Fund for Innovation, CO.SHS brings together a large number of institutional partners and around 20 researchers from a variety of fields (information science, literary studies, sociology, history of publishing, computational linguistics and digital humanities) with the aim of offering innovative solutions for the production, dissemination and exploration of scholarly publications. CO.SHS is a unique initiative for the promotion and development of culture and science that consolidates the leadership of Quebec and Canada in the digital humanities and scholarly publishing fields. Detailed information about this major project can be found at: co-shs.ca

-> co-shs.ca

Headed by Professor Professor Vincent Larivière, the Scientific Committee is composed of a team of Canadian professors and researchers with advanced scholarly publishing expertise. The Committee’s mandate is to set guidelines for the development of Érudit’s research activities and select new publications to include on the platform.

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New technological upgrades

Over the past several months, our technology team has carried out several major projects aimed at improving services for our users:

1. Ongoing updates to the erudit.org platform

   • We launched a new version of our platform in the winter of 2017. The upgrade required a complete overhaul of our distribution tools. Numerous improvements and new developments were introduced over the course of the year, including upgraded interfaces and an enhanced user experience, a dashboard for journals and libraries and a revamped search engine.

2. Creation of a backup site

   • This year saw the creation and launch of our backup website. Less visible than the platform overhaul but no less important when it comes to guaranteeing uninterrupted access, the backup site contains all the documents distributed and stored by Érudit in the event of a technical problem or maintenance of the main website.

3. Creation of a tool to aggregate journals produced using the Open Journal System

   • It is now possible to use our platform to distribute scholarly journals produced using the Open Journal System (OJS), the publishing management and digital content production software of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). With our new tool for aggregating content produced using the OJS, we are now able to offer the dissemination of these journals on our platform, helping to maximize their visibility.

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New journals on the platform

Thirteen new journals joined our platform, of which seven are distributed through fully open access. New journals are added to Érudit’s platform each year, increasing the breadth and diversity of the content we offer. Our platform now contains 206 journals, with approximately 6,000 new articles distributed every year. The journals are selected by our Scientific Committee and must meet strict quality criteria.

Digital production

Aggregation of journals produced using OJS

The implementation of a tool for aggregating journals produced using Open Journal Systems (OJS) software, combined with financial support for libraries through the Partnership for Open Access, has enabled us to disseminate new journals through open access on Érudit.

This year, through a pilot project with the PKP (Public Knowledge Project), we worked with seven Canadian scholarly journals produced with OJS software with the purpose of offering them our services:

– Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics - Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée
– Canadian Journal of Higher Education - Revue canadienne d’enseignement supérieur
– Informal Logic
– International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning
– Refuges
– The Trumpeter
– Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice


These journals’ first editions on Érudit will be made available over the course of 2018. New journals produced with OJS software will be added in the coming years.

Interoperability with the LODEL solution

A number of journals disseminated through Érudit’s platform are also available on France-based platform openedition.org. Until recently, these journals were required to produce two separate digital versions, one for Érudit using Tournesol publishing services and one for OpenEdition using the LODEL solution. In an effort to reduce production costs for these journals, we developed a technological solution that allows us to distribute digital versions produced with LODEL on our platform.

Five journals received this service in 2018:

– Perspectives interdisciplinaires sur le travail et la santé
– Éducation relative à l’environnement
– Enfances, Familles, Générations
– Téoros
– Environnement urbain/Urban Environment

New journals

Érudit began distributing 13 new journals in 2018:

• Insurance and Risk Management

  • Scholarly journal
    Restricted access
    Economics, management science
  • Since 1932, Insurance and Risk Management has been analyzing changes in the insurance field occurring in Canada and abroad. It looks at many aspects of insurance coverage and risk management from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

• Entrevous

  • Cultural journal
    Restricted access
    Literature
  • Entrevous is the new outreach publication of the Société littéraire de Laval (SLL). The SLL is devoted to promoting French-language literature as a professional and creative discipline in the city of Laval.

• Les Écrits

  • Cultural journal
    Restricted access
    Literature
  • Founded in 1954 under the title Les écrits du Canada Français, Les Écrits publishes works by writers, poets, novelists, playwrights and essayists of all generations and movements from Quebec, the rest of Canada and other parts of the French-speaking world.

• Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics : Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée

  • Scholarly journal
    Open access
    Linguistics
  • The Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics is a bilingual scientific publication dealing with various aspects of applied linguistics of interest to researchers and professionals in the field. The journal is affiliated with the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics.

• Canadian Journal of Higher Education : Revue canadienne d’enseignement supérieur

  • Scholarly journal
    Open access
    Education
  • Founded in 1971, this bilingual journal, which is affiliated with the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education, publishes scholarly articles related to higher education in Canada, its structures and processes, and diverse communities.

• Éthique en éducation et en formation : Les Dossiers du GREE

  • Scholarly journal
    Open access
    Education
  • This journal explores the relationships between ethics and education and training. It examines specific disciplines and programs dedicated to ethics education as well as the role of ethics in education and training, from foundations, approaches and aims to the relationship between ethics and education and training as reflected in scholarly literature, policies, programs, practices and beliefs.

• Nutrition Science en évolution : La revue de l’Ordre professionnel des diététistes du Québec

  • Scholarly journal
    Restricted access
    Health sciences
  • The official journal of the Ordre professionnel des diététistes du Québec (OPDQ) [Quebec Professional Order of Dietitians], this publication contributes to the continuing education of dietitians and nutritionists. The articles cover the four main focus areas of nutrition: clinical nutrition, nutrition and public health, nutrition in the food processing and biopharmaceutical sectors, and food services management. Issues related to the dietitian/nutritionist practice are also discussed.

• Perspectives interdisciplinaires sur le travail et la santé

  • Scholarly journal
    Open access
    Health sciences, Humanities and social sciences, Sociology
  • PISTES addresses the social and human aspects of work and their links to the health of persons and organizations. The publication aims to facilitate ties and exchanges between practitioners and researchers in various fields related to work and health.

• Refuge : Canada’s Journal on Refugees / Revue canadienne sur les réfugiés

  • Scholarly journal
    Open access
    Social work
  • This bilingual interdisciplinary journal examines challenges related to refugees and forced migration. It publishes scholarly articles by researchers, policy-makers and practitioners in the field.

• Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke

  • Scholarly journal
    Restricted access
    Law
  • Founded in 1970, the Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke publishes research works that take a multidisciplinary perspective or go beyond the traditional paradigm of legal positivism. The publication facilitates the transfer of knowledge from academic research to professional environments.

• Revue de recherches en littératie médiatique multimodale

  • Scholarly journal
    Open access
    Education, language, literary studies
  • This journal was launched in response to the proliferation of new media platforms and the need to rethink media literacy from a multimodal perspective. It publishes French-language research articles dealing with multimodality from a wide range of disciplines.

• Revue du notariat

  • Scholarly journal
    Restricted access
    Law
  • Revue du notariat has been published since 1898, making it the oldest legal journal still published in Canada. The journal disseminates scholarly writings on legal theory, civil law and notarial practice, as well as commentaries on case law.

• The Trumpeter : Journal of Ecosophy

  • Scholarly journal
    Open access
    Disciplines
  • The Trumpeter is an environmental humanities journal that publishes research articles, reviews and works with the aim of serving the deep ecology movement’s commitment to developing ecosophy, or wisdom born of a philosophical understanding of environmental challenges.

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Publishing, marketing and partnerships

Consolidation of the Partnership for Open Access

As expressed in the Major Achievements section of this report, the development of the Partnership for Open Access in Canada and Europe marked an important step forward for the distribution and financial support of journals on Érudit. It involved months of communication, negotiation and follow-up leading to the signing of agreements with 90 partner university libraries.
-> Learn about the partner libraries.

Renewed agreement with college libraries

The agreement between Érudit and 50 college libraries from the Collecto network has been renewed until 2019. Under the agreement, over 140,000 students and professors in Quebec get preferential access to one of Canada’s largest collections of humanities and social sciences journals. The agreement contributes to the development of both parties. Érudit provides the entire college student and teaching body with access to its vast collection, contributing to educational and teaching excellence. Meanwhile, the significant financing contributed by partner college libraries helps provide journals with stable revenue so they can focus entirely on their editorial work.

Signing of an agreement with the Montreal Public Libraries Network

Thanks to an agreement signed by Érudit and the Montreal Public Libraries Network, 400,000 members now have access to all content available on the Érudit platform. All they have to do is go to one of the 45 libraries in the network or log into the digital portal (portal in French only). The agreement also means public libraries will provide substantial financial support for academic and cultural publications. Érudit passes on 70% of the funds from subscriptions or partnerships with libraries to the journals disseminated on the platform. The remaining 30% helps finance the services offered to the journals, such as distribution, indexing and archiving.

Major new institutional agreements

We signed two new agreements with major Canadian institutions: CBC/Radio-Canada and Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Both these institutions will offer access to all of the journals distributed on Érudit and will support the journals financially. They join the many documentation centres around the world that have already partnered with Érudit, with around one thousand agreements currently in place.

Partnership with the Wikipedia Library project

The agreement with Wikimedia in the context of the Wikipedia Library project has now been in effect for over three years. This partnership has resulted in an increase in the number of Wikipedia citations of articles disseminated through Érudit. In 2017, total bibliographic references on Wikipedia pages linking to Érudit rose by 20%. The aim of the Wikipedia Library project is to help Wikipedia’s editors access scholarly sources. The initiative also provides our journals with greater reach.

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Communication

Érudit + Montréal

Montreal is home to an impressive research community in fields ranging from history to sociology, architecture and archeology. Throughout the summer of 2017—the year of Montreal’s 375th anniversary—we featured articles from Érudit journals dealing with themes related to our favourite city.

-> See Part 1

-> See Part 2

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Launch of Salons web magazine

Our web magazine Salons was launched in the summer of 2017. Salons is a free bilingual publication that offers critical and informed perspectives on fundamental issues that are crucial to understanding our society in its cultural, social and scientific dimensions. Combining rigorous analysis with an accessible presentation, Salons features articles supported by research from Canadian open-access scholarly publications.

Salons also invites readers to analyze further by exploring additional free resources selected especially for them, including relevant scholarly journals and bibliographies, films, videos and document and image archives.

So far, seven themed issues written by specialists in their fields have been produced, featuring science (Salons #01), identity (#02), Aboriginal issues (#03), education (#04), feminism (#05), nordicity (#06) and the dissemination of knowledge (#07).

Salons received a Connection Grant from the SSHRC and has been supported by several Canadian partner institutions.

-> Discover the different issues of Salons

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Presentations

2017

• April

  • Montreal
  • Presentation of the results of the downloads study at the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie, University of Quebec at Montreal.

• May

  • Fredericton
  • Meeting with representatives of scholarly journals disseminated on Érudit from the University of New Brunswick.
  • Toronto
  • Participation in the roundtable discussion “An Open Book?: Open Access and Music Scholarship in Canada” as part of the Canada 150: Music and Belonging superconference, University of Toronto.
  • Toronto
  • Co-presentation with the CRKN at the 2017 Canadian Association of Learned Journals Conference.
  • Montreal
  • “Érudit.org: a production, distribution and research platform serving the French-speaking academic community”: presentation at the 2017 ACFAS Conference, McGill University.
  • Montreal
  • “Producing and sharing knowledge in French”: presentation to the ACFAS 2017 symposium, McGill University.

• June

  • Chicago
  • Érudit and the CRKN receive the 2017 Outstanding Collaboration Award at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference. Find out more
  • Rennes, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Paris
  • Meetings with several university libraries in France (Rennes, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Paris) and the Couperin consortium (Paris, France).

• August

  • Montreal
  • Support for the organization of the 2017 PKP International Scholarly Publishing Conference and the 2017 PKP Sprint, University of Montreal.

• September

  • Montreal
  • Presentation on the impact of open access on Master’s students at the École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, University of Montreal.
  • [Online]
  • Webinars presenting the Partnership for Open Access and Coalition Publi.ca offered to Canadian university libraries (in French and English).

• October

  • Montreal
  • Presentation of the Salons project at the Association des communicateurs scientifiques conference.
  • Brussels, Belgium
  • Meeting and presentation of the Partnership for Open Access to Belgian consortium BICfB.
  • Frankfurt, Germany
  • Meeting and presentation of the Partnership for Open Access to to UK consortium Jisc, Frankfurt Book Fair.
  • Montreal
  • Co-presentation with the PKP of Coalition Publi.ca at the Annual General Meeting of the CRKN.
  • Montreal
  • Presentation of Érudit and Coalition Publi.ca partnership at Laval University as part of International Open Access Week at the University of Quebec at Montreal.
  • Montreal
  • Organization of the first CO.SHS daily workshop, University of Montreal.
  • Berlin, Germany
  • Presentation of “Attaining Open Access in HSS in Canada Through Partnerships” at Force11 2017.

• November

  • Ottawa
  • Presentation of Coalition-Publi.ca at the fall meeting of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries.
  • Montreal
  • Meetings with representatives of scholarly journals disseminated on Érudit and the library at four Canadian Universities (University of Montreal, University of Quebec at Montreal, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières).
  • Montreal
  • The Érudit Consortium endorses the Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity. Find out more
  • Montreal
  • “The challenges of open access”, presentation organized by CAPAL-EBSI, University of Montreal.
  • Montreal
  • Support for the organization of the 2017 PyCon conference, Montreal. https://2017.pycon.ca
  • Montreal
  • Presentation of Érudit to documentation science students at Collège Lionel-Groulx.

• December

  • Trois-Rivières
  • Meetings with representatives of scholarly journals published by the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières (UQTR) and disseminated on Érudit, and the university library, Trois-Rivières.
  • Montreal
  • Participation in the Séminaire sur la publication scientifique [Seminar on scholarly publishing], PhD in education, University of Quebec at Montreal.

2018

• January

  • Victoria
  • “CO.SHS: A Cyberinfrastructure for SSH Researchers in the Making”, presentation during “Beyond Open: Implementing Social Scholarship”, an event organized by INKE – Implementing New Knowledge Environments.

• March

  • Ottawa
  • Participation in the “Publier en anglais, une nécessité pour la carrière académique?” [“Is publishing in English a necessity for an academic career?] conference, University of Ottawa.

Our team

• Arrival of Émilie Paquin, Director of Research & Strategic Development.
• Development of the IT team with the arrival of Fabio, Aziz, Mathieu, Bérenger and Virgil.
• Anderson’s role replaced by Érika.

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Our Board of Directors

Érudit’s Board of Directors consists of figures from the worlds of research, university libraries and publishing.

Chair

Frédéric Bouchard

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Montreal

 

Vice-chair

Loubna Ghaouti

Library Director, Laval University

 

Secretary-Treasurer

Lynda Gadoury

Executive Director of Libraries, University of Quebec at Montreal

• Observers

  • Louise Poissant
    • Scientific Director, Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC)
  • Vincent Larivière
    • Associate Professor, École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, University of Montreal, Scientific Director, Érudit
  • Brent Roe
    • CRKN representative, University Librarian, Laurentian University

• Members

  • Marie Audette
    • President of the Commission des études, Laval University
  • Richard Dumont
    • Executive Director, Libraries Branch, University of Montreal
  • Benoît Melançon
    • Professor, Department of French Literature, University of Montreal
  • Philippe Maubant
    • Director of the journal Phronesis and Professor, University of Sherbrooke

Du 1^er avril 2017 au 31 mars 2018

Produits

• 2018
• 2017

• Services d’édition et de commercialisation, partenariats

  • 1 601 185
  • 1 412 715

• Subventions gouvernementales

  • 1 384 369
  • 710 734

• Contributions des 3 associés du Consortium

  • 292 999
  • 278 457

• Autres revenus

  • 3 929
  • 578

• Total

  • 3 282 482
  • 2 402 484

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Charges

• 2018
• 2017

• Services d’édition et de commercialisation, partenariats

  • 1 355 008
  • 933 988

• Salaires et services de soutien informatique

  • 1 411 605
  • 1 471 443

• Honoraires professionnels et sous-traitance

  • 123 717
  • 363 152

• Administration

  • 44 973
  • 39 527

• Promotion et communications

  • 55 614
  • 61 619

• Total

  • 2 990 917
  • 2 869 729

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Bilan

• 2018
• 2017

• Actif à court terme

  • 2 956 757
  • 1 969 034

• Passif à court terme

  • 2 548 893
  • 1 852 735

• Avoir des associés

  • 407 864
  • 116 299

Associates

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Partners

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