With a new investment of $4.1 million from the CFI, the Érudit dissemination and research platform hopes to expand its services to a wider Canadian community.
The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) has awarded a new $4.1 million grant to Érudit as part of its 2017-2022 Major Science Initiatives Fund competition. Through this competition, the CFI wishes to contribute to the ongoing operating and maintenance needs of national research facilities, enabling Canadian researchers to undertake world-class research and technology development.
Érudit is the only national research facility in the humanities and social sciences recognized by the CFI as a major Canadian science initiative. The announcement also confirms Érudit’s role as a digital humanities and social sciences platform and bolsters scholarly publishing in French and English.
Promoting the open dissemination of scientific and cultural publications
Created in 1988 by and for the Québec research community to assist scholarly journals in their transition to digital, Érudit has succeeded in disseminating more than 150 journals worldwide and creating effective partnerships in Canada and abroad to support independent publishers. This expertise is of paramount importance in the international context characterized by intense competition within an oligopoly of large commercial publishers whose stringent and increasingly expensive content agreements over the past two decades have put enormous pressure on university budgets.
A new partner to develop scholarly publishing and build tomorrow’s digital infrastructure in the humanities and social sciences
The CFI announcement also highlights the closer activities between the Érudit platform and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) initiative based at Simon Fraser University (SFU). PKP has become an important strategic partner and a major collaborator with Érudit in implementing a more sustainable solution for developing scholarly publishing in Canada.
“Érudit has given prominent place to Canadian French-language and bilingual scholarly journals by quickly integrating them into the digital world. Today, by forging a strong partnership with PKP and SFU, we will be able to expand our services to more academic journals in Canada and further enhance the results of our researchers domestically and internationally,” said Frédéric Bouchard, Associate Vice-President of Discovery, Creation and Innovation at Université de Montréal and President of the Érudit Consortium.
The complementary expertise of Érudit and PKP, supported by the CFI and a network of partners in Canada and abroad, will help establish a truly national infrastructure of production, dissemination and research in French and English based on the principles of open access and open-source software.
About Érudit
In partnership with Canadian libraries and scholarly publishers, Érudit works toward the digital dissemination of scientific and cultural publications in the humanities and social sciences. Érudit is an interuniversity consortium of Université de Montréal, Université Laval and Université du Québec à Montréal. Since 2014, it has been recognized as a major science initiative by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
About PKP
The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative by Simon Fraser University and Stanford University that focuses on making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open-access policies. To do so, the two institutions have developed open-source software and publishing services, and have stimulated community participation in particular. The free, open-source software developed by PKP, including Open Journal System, is used by more than 10,000 scholarly journals around the world.
Source:
Gwendal Henry – Communications Officer
gwendal.henry@erudit.org – 514-343-6111 #2723