Each year, several scholarly journals on the erudit.org platform change their delivery model to offer their entire collection in immediate open access. In 2023, seven journals made this transition.
The transition to open access is a carefully considered process that requires considerable work on the part of the journal team. Once the decision is made, concerted efforts are required to review the editorial policies of the journal, as well as its internal operations. Moreover, these journals, whose expertise is well established, still have to face certain persistent prejudices regarding open access publications. In the long run, however, these efforts are rewarded by an increased visibility of their articles.
Journals that have chosen to publish in immediate open access are part of a worldwide movement, recently reaffirmed on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. In line with this movement, many scholarly and granting organizations are contributing to the development of this dissemination model.
Discover the New Open Access Journals
We would like to highlight the efforts of the seven journals that transitioned to open access in 2023, and we invite you to discover their collections:
- The bilingual journal Aequitas focuses on the development and dissemination of knowledge about personal and environmental determinants of the social participation of people with disabilities. The journal values interdisciplinary, cross-disability and transgenerational perspectives: all disciplines, impairments and disabilities, as well as age groups are included.
- Les Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique is a scholarly journal interested in the multiple aspects of the study of music, from acoustics to archives, from composition to performance, including perspectives from law, aesthetics, ethnomusicology, history, musicology, organology, pedagogy, and sociology.
- Cinémas is a specialty journal primarily concerned with cinematographic studies. It privileges theoretical or analytical projects that embrace different approaches, methods and disciplines (aesthetics, semiotics, history, communications, human sciences, art history, etc.) likely to stimulate reflection. Particular attention is given to research into the ongoing evolution of both creative practices and theoretical discourse.
- Material Culture Review/Revue de la culture matérielle (MCR/RCM) is Canada’s only scholarly journal dedicated to the study of material culture. It documents cultural artifacts, describing their historical contexts and roles in society. MCR/RCM provides a venue for refereed articles and research reports encompassing a range of approaches to interpreting culture and history through an analysis of people’s relationships to their material world.
- Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations (RI/IR) is a bilingual quarterly published since 1945 by the Industrial Relations Department of Université Laval (Quebec, Canada). It is the world’s first scholarly journal on industrial relations and Canada’s only such publication. Its mission is to be the foremost site in Canada for the publication of high calibre research papers from both established and new researchers in the industrial relations field. At the same time, the journal serves as an international forum for contributions and research debates for both Canadian and international researchers.
- La Revue de Droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke (RDUS) was born out of the desire to promote the dissemination of legal knowledge by Quebec and foreign researchers to a diverse readership. RDUS encourages legal research and contributes to the dissemination of legal knowledge in a transdisciplinary context, in all areas of law. It provides a bridge between legal researchers and the legal community, which includes professors, lecturers, students, judges, lawyers and notaries.
- Sociologie et sociétés is a scholarly journal that reflects current thinking and research in the field of sociology in Quebec and elsewhere. Since its creation in 1969, the publication has described and analyzed the diverse social characteristics of life in Quebec and in other modern societies. Well-known within academia, the journal serves as a major meeting place for discussion among interested members of the global intellectual community.