Érudit

Background: In 1998, Érudit started as a pilot project to help a small group of journals published by the Presses de l’Université de Montréal transition from paper to digital format. Rooted in Québec, and supported by an inter-university consortium including Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and Université du Québec à Montréal, the erudit.org platform has long been an important outlet for the publication of research in French. Today, Érudit is Canada’s leading dissemination platform for scholarly research in both English and French. It hosts over 300 scholarly journals, working with 1,200 partner libraries and is visited by more than 5 million users worldwide each year.

Mission: As a digital infrastructure for the dissemination of knowledge, Érudit’s mission is to support open digital publishing and research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It provides a low barrier to access knowledge with 95% of Érudit’s documents available for anyone to read for free.

Community over Commercialization:

“The theme of Community over Commercialization really speaks to us. A lot of what we do is based on collaboration. We see most of our relationships with people in our community as a form of collaboration—in the work we do with the journals disseminated on the platform, in Coalition Publica our partnership with the Public Knowledge Project to build infrastructure and services for Canadian journals, and with libraries across Canada that are hosting scholarly journals within their institutions.”

“We are building community through our work at a bunch of different levels—all with the goal to make open access feasible within Canada.”

“We are looking towards what we like to call ‘the diamond horizon,’ which is this place in the future where the Canadian journal community has enough resources to sustain their work in a diamond open access environment. That is really our ultimate goal. It's where we see our work heading. We’re providing everything that we can in the background to make sure that can be a reality.”

“I think that Canadian journals provide a tremendous value to the research community around the world, and they're doing it for a very little amount of money, relatively speaking. It's important to surface what happens when profits are not part of the equation—when you can pull together all the elements, the right data and the right stakeholders—to show that this is what you get when you invest in an open, publicly funded way of sharing knowledge. And what you can see when you do that is a community doing great work and publishing great research.”

“If you take profit out of the equation and figure out ways to still support the really valuable work that is being done by the research community, you'll have a much more sustainable system.”

-Jessica Dallaire-Clark, Senior Coordinator, Open Access Development, Érudit