21 October 2020
SSHRC has granted $3 million in support for a bilingual, national, open access platform, Coalition Publica. The funding will significantly enhance the international dissemination of, and increase readership for, Canadian social sciences and humanities research outcomes.
Following merit review by a committee of leading members of the social sciences and humanities scholarly and library communities, Coalition Publica was awarded a grant of $1 million per year for three years, up to a total of $3 million, through the Pan-Canadian Knowledge Access Initiative (PCKAI). The funding will help the platform produce incentives and research outputs to encourage journals and researchers to join the open access community.
The PCKAI aims to provide greater access to scholarly journal publications, to increase the discoverability and impact of Canadian social sciences and humanities research, in Canada and internationally. The initiative is set to further advance the Canadian open access ecosystem, and specifically support authors and journals in the social sciences and humanities research environment.
Coalition Publica is a partnership between Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. Through the PCKAI funding, SSHRC is supporting Coalition Publica’s outreach activities for a noncommercial, open source national infrastructure for digital scholarly publishing, dissemination, and research—combining Open Journal Systems and the erudit.org platform. The funding also goes towards coalition research investigating the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem.