Annual Report
2018–2019

Presentation

A word from Frédéric Bouchard

In a society where rapid, major changes are the norm, research in the social sciences and humanities is even more valuable and necessary. For example, consider the important role of anthropology in better understanding how algorithms impact our decisions (doi.org/10.7202/1052640ar), of law in the development of renewable energies (doi.org/10.7202/1060980ar) or of semiology in exploring the richness of Indigenous cultures (doi.org/10.7202/1055834ar). The 217 journals that Érudit distributes via its platform demonstrate the great diversity of SSH.

Committed to promoting bibliodiversity and open access, Érudit works alongside the independent and richly varied scientific community, and contributes to the global outreach of Canadian and Quebec research and culture. I am therefore immensely proud that Érudit’s work to support French-language research has been recognized this year with the prestigious Prix du 3-Juillet-1608 from the Conseil supérieur de la langue française. This distinction is a fitting reward for an organization that, with passion and vitality, provides a remarkable set of services to a French-language audience and to the entire French-speaking community of North America. With celebrations for our 20th anniversary underway this year, such recognition could not be more timely.

I wish Érudit all the best for the future, and I hope that the next 20 years prove just as fruitful!

Frédéric Bouchard
Frédéric Bouchard
Chair of the board of directors

A word from Tanja Niemann

Over the years, our organization has enjoyed ever-increasing support from the scientific community, including from researchers, libraries, scientific associations and granting agencies. This support has been, and continues to be, essential in allowing us to promote digital publication, dissemination and preservation of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities. 2018-2019 was our fifth year receiving assistance from the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Major Science Initiatives program, which has allowed us to strengthen our service to the scientific community both in Canada and abroad. As you will see from this report, we have made a great deal of progress!

We have worked hard this year to reinforce the governance of our organization to make it consistent with our development. Firstly, Érudit is now attached to the Université de Montréal library administration, which takes up the mantle from the Bureau de la Recherche-Développement-Valorisation (BRDV). I would like to thank all the staff at the BRDV and library administration, who support us daily in our mission. In addition, Érudit is now one of the five strategic research initiatives at the Université de Montréal. Secondly, we established a solid governance structure for Coalition Publi.ca, our partnership with the Public Knowledge Project. Through the Steering Committee, Stakeholder Committee and International Committee, we will be accompanied by more than 20 professionals from the field of knowledge dissemination. Coalition Publi.ca represents a fantastic opportunity to develop an open national infrastructure dedicated to research and dissemination of results, as well as to open-access scholarly publication.

Finally, this year of our 20th anniversary will bring many occasions to gauge our progress so far, but also to move forwards with confidence in planning our future projects. Happy reading!

Tanja Niemann
Tanja Niemann
Executive director

Major achievements

Launching a national service offering

With over 50 scientific journals added to its platform since 2014, Érudit has significantly developed its national focus. This process has been boosted by our close relationship with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which provides a complementary offering via its Open Journal Systems software. Érudit and PKP, both non-profit organizations created in 1998 and both attached to Canadian universities, have much in common. The launch of the Coalition Publi.ca initiative has brought greater structure to the relationship between the two organizations and has allowed them to plan joint developments.

As part of this process, and following over a year of work, we established a unified service offering by which journals can benefit jointly and in a concerted manner from solutions offered by Érudit and by PKP. The service offering is aimed at three types of client:

  • Canadian scientific journals, through digital publishing and dissemination services.
  • University libraries, through support with disseminating research results.
  • Researchers in the social sciences and humanities, through access to a corpus of unified data for research purposes.

This service offering was made possible thanks to the creation of a coordination position at Coalition Publi.ca; to the recurring meetings between the Érudit and PKP boards; and to the strong governance in place to orient the project. The governance structure, organized around three committees (the Steering Committee, the Stakeholder Committee and the International Committee), will underpin the future development of the service offering.

-> Find out more


Extending support for open access

Open access has been at the heart of Érudit’s activities since the organization’s creation. Our commitment to this movement has been strengthened in recent years by the Partnership for Open Access (POA), which we established with over 100 libraries worldwide. The POA aids Canadian journals in their transition towards open access and is one of Érudit’s key initiatives to transform its business model. Consequently, where libraries previously subscribed to one or several journals, they can now join a collective partnership that supports the full range of journals disseminated by Érudit.

The POA model is now in a phase of internationalization; it will need to be adapted to the reality of each of the countries involved. With this in mind, Érudit joined forces with the French Couperin consortium in 2016, then with the Belgian BICfB consortium in 2017, to present each of the countries with a tailored partnership offer. This strategy proved a success, with over 42 Belgian and French libraries now in the Partnership. We are now pursuing the Partnership adaptation strategy on an international level. Efforts are currently focused on the UK, which—with more than two million page views per year—has the fourth highest number of consultations of the erudit.org platform.


Collaborating on research projects

By establishing a Strategic Direction for research and development to work alongside our Board and Scientific Committee, we have been able this year to achieve our goal of becoming a research platform. This new orientation has been supported by the development of several major scientific collaborations, and by improvements to our services for new digital research practices. Érudit is involved in a number of major innovative research projects. One such project is Technès, an international research partnership that aims to rethink film history and its methods by examining the techniques and technologies that have accompanied the medium’s mutations since its origins. This project brings together universities, archivists and industry technicians who use a range of innovative tools and methods to discover, preserve and disseminate techniques and knowledge related to cinema. We are also pleased to present the Littérature québécoise mobile project, which explores the literary practices of writing and reading in a digital context.

Another important aspect of our Research component is the corpus analysis service for researchers. With this service offering, we propose a single point of access to unified data for millions of documents and archives, thus facilitating the work of researchers. This year, we signed an agreement with Canadiana, giving access to several thousand archival documents (monographs, periodicals and government publications). We benefit from the servers of Compute Canada for this data, which greatly improves the downloading speed of these mega-corpora. Concerning the development of innovative research tools, we can cite the work of researchers Christopher Collins and Adam Bradley from the Vialab laboratory, exploring vast corpora of textual documents.

-> Interview with Vialab

Governance

New Board members

Several new positions have been added to our Board of Directors. This has made the Board more representative of our pan-Canadian activities. We have welcomed Patty Gallilee, Associate Dean of Libraries, Collections and Scholarly Communication, Simon Fraser University; Wendy Therrien, Director of External Relations and Research, Universities Canada; and Martha Radice, Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University.


Creation of the International Committee

As part of the Coalition Publi.ca project, we also created an International Committee whose nine members represent international institutions:

Dominique Babini
Open Access Advisor, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO)
Argentina
Ginny Hendricks
Director of Member & Community Outreach, Crossref
USA
Iryna Kuchma
Open Access Programme Manager, Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL)
Lithuania
Pierre Mounier
Co-coordinator, OPERAS, and Deputy Director, OpenEdition
France
Tanja Niemann
Executive Director, Érudit (ex officio)
Canada
Tom Olyhoek
Editor-in-Chief, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
UK
Ray Siemens
Distinguished Professor of English and Computer Science, University of Victoria
Canada
Katherine Skinner
Executive Director, Educopia Institute
USA
Kevin Stranack
Managing Director, PKP (ex officio)
Canada

Creation of the Advisory Committee for Coalition Publi.ca

The Advisory Committee will allow us to support Coalition Publi.ca in developing its activities and governance and in setting a long-term financial strategy. Led by Jason Luckerhoff (Director of the Approches inductives journal and a professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières), the committee brings together representatives from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (Lesley Balcom), the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (Todd Mundle), Research Data Canada (Mark Leggott), Compute Canada (Robbin Tourangeau, assisted by Marc-Etienne Rousseau) and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (to be determined). The committee also includes representatives from the Canadian social sciences and humanities community, notably Rory McGreal (Co-editor, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning) and Lise Larocque (Editor, Canadian Social Work Review/Revue canadienne de service social).

Activities

Digital publishing

Better content aggregation
Our collection has been able to expand thanks to several new tools and processes for content aggregation. Working alongside PKP and using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software suite, we have created gateways between our platform and the journals. By making our production chain interoperable with XML JATS (a standard XML format used by several distribution platforms to tag scientific articles), we also encourage new journals to join our platform.

Developing the collection

Eleven journals were added to our platform in 2019:

  • Canadian Journal of Bioethics / Revue canadienne de bioéthique

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Social sciences and humanities
    • The aim of the journal is to provide a space for the publication of high quality and thought provoking bioethics scholarship of diverse forms and from across the full range of specialties in the field (e.g. clinical ethics, research ethics, public health ethics, technology ethics, professional ethics).
  • Captures

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Arts, Literary studies
    • Captures publishes articles at the intersection between literature and cinema studies, humanities, art history and visual and media arts. A French-language journal, it also welcomes publications in English.
  • Circula

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Anthropology and Ethnology, Language Studies, Humanities and Social Sciences
    • Circula : revue d’idéologies linguistiques publishes articles on the conceptualization, construction and circulation of ideologies on language, particularly in communities that speak Romance languages.
  • Communiquer : Revue de communication sociale et publique

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Social sciences and humanities
    • Founded in 2009, Communiquer: Social and Public Communication Journal publishes texts that can help a better understanding of communication phenomena involving human beings. It aims to contribute to the international influence and institutionalization of knowledge produced by Francophone research in social and public communication.
  • Écosystème

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Arts, Education
    • Keen to open the creative space to new horizons and sites of research, the publishing committee at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE examines the relationship between current and digital arts and the various spheres of human activity. The digital collection Écosytème was created for this purpose, with contributors from a wide range of practices. In this context, the concept for Écosystème rests on exchanges between various domains of thought and that of research-creation.
  • Enjeux et société

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Social sciences and humanities
    • A transdisciplinary French-language journal, Enjeux et société examines key social issues of the 21st century through six programming axes and research themes: human plurality, digital cultures, urban environments, globalized economy, educational innovation, and inductive approaches.
  • Imaginations : Revue d’étude interculturelle de l’image

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Sociology
    • Imaginations showcases artistic work and scholarly research. It focuses on innovative artistic practices and interdisciplinary, intercultural theoretical understandings of images, screens and visual culture. The journal provides an online installation venue for original artwork and publishes academic articles in original languages and translated into French or English.
  • Informal Logic

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Social sciences and humanities
    • Informal Logic is deliberately multi-disciplinary, welcoming theoretical and empirical research from any pertinent field, including, but not restricted to, philosophy, rhetoric, communication, linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, education, law.
  • Loading

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Arts, Social sciences and humanities
    • Loading publishes Canadian scholarship, research and art in the interdisciplinary field of digital games studies. Published by the Canadian Game Studies Association, the journal supports the work of Canadian researchers, university students, artists, game designers, programmers and theorists within the domain.
  • Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme

    • Scholarly journal
      12 months embargo
      Literary studies, History
    • The journal publishes articles and book reviews on all aspects of the Renaissance, Reformation and Early Modern world: literature, geography, history, religion, art, music, society and economics.
  • Revue hybride de l’éducation

    • Scholarly journal
      Open access
      Éducation
    • Revue hybride de l’éducation attempts to build a bridge between research and practice, in order to give greater visibility to participative research in education. As such, its participants (researchers and practitioners) can look together at new ways to approach this practice. According to individual contexts, the practice is explained, questioned, revisited, made to evolve, enhanced, complicated, developed, changed or transformed.



21 scholarly journals have signed dissemination agreements with Érudit for 2020 and we are working actively to collaborate with new journals in the coming years.

This year has also seen the completion of several major archival digitization projects, making thousands of scientific articles available in open access, from the Revue générale de droit (since 1970), the Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe (since 1963) and Documentation et bibliothèques (since 1973). We have developed a new digitization procedure (assisted production) by which journals can contribute to structuring content. In social sciences and humanities, archival articles from scholarly journals are of great interest to researchers and practitioners, whether to offer information that continues to be valid, or to put the evolution of a discipline in perspective.


Digital dissemination

Moving forward in consultations with France and Belgium
In 2018, we signed agreements with the French Couperin library consortium and the Belgian BICfB consortium as part of our Partnership for Open Access (POA). 42 additional university libraries now support our initiative to promote scientific journals and open access. The direct impacts of these agreements are both financial—around 70% of the revenue generated goes straight back into the journals—and symbolic, as shown by the impressive rise in journal consultations. Indeed, since the POA was put in place, the number of consultations of full-text articles increased by 200% in Belgium and by 175% in France in a single year.
Our privacy policy
Following the European Union’s adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Érudit made a privacy policy (view it here) and cookie policy (view it here) that comply with both the GDPR requirements and those of Quebec’s Act Respecting Access to Documents Held by Public Bodies and the Protection of Personal Information (CQLR, chapter A-2.1) and Act Respecting the Protection of Personal Information in the Private Sector (CQLR, chapter P-39.1). The privacy policy summarizes the various personal data that may be collected during a user’s navigation on the platform, while the cookie policy details the different types of cookies used, how they are used and how users can remove consent for their collection.
Transition to open access
In 2014, Érudit established a support fund for open access in collaboration with 53 Canadian university libraries. We work closely with journals throughout the changes to their dissemination model. Close to a dozen journals disseminated by Érudit have already made this transition, and two historical scientific journals have recently moved to open access:

Technological development

In order to consolidate our evolving services, the technology team works continuously to improve our entire range of applications; their approach seeks to respect the technological norms and standards of the scientific publishing sector. Several projects have been developed in this regard, including the dissemination of an ePub format with several scholarly journals, the implementation of the COUNTER R5 standard for statistics and the introduction of alternative metrics.

We are also working for a closer technological collaboration with our partners. As such, we have established a close relationship with PKP in technical domains, not only via the interoperability of our systems, but also by developing plans for mutual technological efforts. It is worth recalling that all Érudit technologies are developed in open-source code. —

Communication

20 years of Érudit

20 years is no regular birthday! To mark our progress thus far, we presented an exhibition in several university and CEGEP libraries in Quebec. We also created a web page outlining our evolution and the major projects still to come.

-> 20 years of Érudit


Video clip on scientific publication

We collaborated with Canal Savoir to produce a short video (in french language) about the future of scientific publication. Bringing together a number of specialists in Quebec, this video explores the current issues and challenges in the domain, and how we can respond to the new realities created by the arrival of digital technologies .

-> See the Video clip


Study day/Scholarly journals assembly

Close to 100 collaborators from journals disseminated on our platform took part in the Study day/Scholarly journals assembly held at the Université du Québec à Montréal in December 2018. The structure of the day was revised from that of previous years to allow more time for discussion between participants, and to better address the numerous pressing questions for Canadian scholarly journals, including how to put in place a Creative Commons licence; how social media can be used to promote articles; and which indexers to choose.

-> See the presentations


Awards and prizes

The Conseil supérieur de la langue française awarded the Prix du 3-Juillet-1608, one of the highest distinctions in the Francophonie, to the Érudit Consortium. This award, commemorating the founding of Quebec City (on July 3, 1608), highlights our commitment to the outreach of cultural and scholarly publications, as well as to promoting French-language research in Quebec, in Canada and in the rest of the world. On the international level, we participated in the launch of the Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms (GLOALL). Organized by UNESCO, this alliance brings together six major platforms for scientific dissemination: AJOL African Network, AmeliCA, Érudit, J-Stage, OpenEdition and the SciELO network.


Presentations

2018

  • April
    • Glasgow, Écosse
    • Open Access in Social Sciences and Humanities, UKSG 2018.
  • May
    • Chicoutimi, Canada
    • Plateformes, archives et bibliothèques numériques en libre accès : enjeux, possibilités et effets sur la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales dans la francophonie, Congrès de l’Acfas 2018, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.
    • Toronto, Canada
    • PKP/Erudit Update, Canadian Association of Learned Journals Conference.
    • Toronto
    • Panel: Working With a Scholarly Community: Coalition Publica : A Canadian Initiative for a Sustainable Publishing Environment in HSS, Library Publishing Forum.
    • Regina, Canada
    • Presentation at the 2018 Congress of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
    • Sherbrooke, Canada
    • Meeting with scholarly journals and university library - Université de Sherbrooke
  • June
    • Toronto, Canada
    • Economics of Open Access, Funding Models and Sustainability, ELPUB 2018.
    • Berkeley, États-Unis
    • Presentation at Move It Forward - University of California.
  • September
    • São Paulo, Brasil
    • Open Access – Routes Towards Universalization – Golden National Based Solutions, Scielo 20 years.
  • October
    • Montréal, Canada
    • Beyond APCs: The Partnership Model, Force 11, McGill University.
    • Montréal, Canada
    • “Coalition Publi.ca,” 2018 Conference of the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques (CRIHN), Université de Montréal.
    • Montréal, Canada
    • Libre accès, OpenCon 2018.
    • Montréal, Canada
    • Presentation at the Revues 2.0 event, “Repenser les revues savantes en SHS”.
  • November
    • Charleston, États-Unis
    • «International Partnerships for Open-Access Models», Charleston Library Conference.
    • Montréal, Canada
    • «La plateforme Érudit», Salon du livre de Montréal 2018
  • December
    • Montréal, Canada
    • Study day for scholarly journals disseminated by Érudit, Université du Québec à Montréal.
    • Montréal, Canada
    • Exhibition “Érudit, 20 Years at the Service of Open Access” in four university libraries in Quebec.

2019

  • January
    • Victoria
    • Presentation at the Victoria Gathering, INKE - Implementing New Knowledge Environments.
  • February
    • Montréal, Canada
    • Érudit presentation at the Université de Montréal libraries.
  • March
    • Montréal, Canada
    • Presentation on open access at the Bar des sciences.

Financial statement

From April 1, 2018 to March 31, 2019

Income

  • 2019
  • 2018
  • Publishing and marketing services, partnerships

    • 1 717 207
    • 1 601 185
  • Government grants

    • 1 396 572
    • 1 384 369
  • Contributions of the three Consortium members

    • 416 713
    • 292 999
  • Other income

    • 11 006
    • 3 929
  • Total income

    • 3 541 498
    • 3 282 482

Expenses

  • 2019
  • 2018
  • Publishing and marketing services, partnerships

    • 1 496 697
    • 1 355 008
  • Payroll and technology support services

    • 1 524 907
    • 1 411 605
  • Professional fees and subcontracting

    • 89 077
    • 123 717
  • Administration

    • 66 629
    • 44 973
  • Advertising and communications

    • 62 362
    • 55 614
  • Total expenses

    • 3 239 672
    • 2 990 917

Net income (Net loss)

  • 2019
  • 2018
  •  

    • 301 826
    • 291 565

Financial results

  • 2019
  • 2018
  • Current assets

    • 4 041 562
    • 2 956 757
  • Current liabilities

    • 3 331 872
    • 2 548 893
  • Partners’ equity

    • 709 690
    • 407 864

Partners

Associates

  • Université de Montréal
  • Université Laval
  • Université du Québec à Montréal

Partners

  • Agence universitaire de la Francophonie
  • Canadian Science Publishing
  • Centre d’expertise numérique pour la recherche
  • Centre for Digital Scholarship
  • Fondation canadienne pour l’innovation
  • Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et Culture
  • Persée
  • Public Knowledge Project
  • Presses de l’Université de Montréal
  • Réseau canadien de la documentation pour la recherche
  • Société de développement des périodiques culturels québécois