$10M to support open-access and open-source research

By awarding a $10-million grant to Coalition Publica through the Major Science Initiatives Fund 2023-2029, the Canada Foundation for Innovation is helping to address the ongoing need to operate and maintain research facilities of national importance, enabling Canadian researchers to undertake activities that rival those of their international colleagues.

Coalition Publica is developing an open, non-commercial infrastructure for digital research, dissemination and scholarly publication in the humanities and social sciences. The infrastructure is based on the complementarity of two leading technology solutions dedicated to open access and open science.

The first of those solutions is the erudit.org dissemination platform of the Érudit Consortium of Université de Montréal (UdeM), Université Laval and Université du Québec à Montréal, while the second is the Open Journal Systems editing and publishing software developed by the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University.

“Research in the humanities and social sciences is essential to help us better understand the world we live in and to offer concrete solutions to today's problems, including climate change, economic crises and social inequalities,” said Marie-Josée Hébert, UdeM’s vice-rector of research, discovery, creation and innovation.

In collaboration with the editorial teams of more than 250 scholarly and cultural journals, Coalition Publica offers access to more than 200,000 publications, with 8,000 new articles published each year and an annual readership of nearly six million. Rich and diverse, the collections are representative of research and creation in Canada and elsewhere in fields as varied as archaeology, economics, history, literary studies, psychology and education.