Bridging the language gap: Adapting SciFree for a bilingual audience

Wednesday May 13, 2026

From 12:45pm to 1:00pm

Open Access / Open Scholarship

In the Fall 2025, the University of Ottawa (uOttawa) Library acquired SciFree, a platform that enables researchers to search and identify a journal venue to publish open access and determine whether discounts apply to the article processing charge (APC). As a bilingual institution governed by Regulations on Bilingualism (French and English), the Library must ensure that discovery tools it customizes provide equitable access for users in both official languages. Acquiring SciFree, an English-dominant tool, presented several challenges during the local implementation. A predominant one being that publisher-supplied journal title lists include subject terms in English only, creating a barrier for users attempting to conduct keyword searches in French.

This presentation outlines the uOttawa Library’s collaborative approach to meet this language issue. Recognizing that a manual approach to translating the publisher-supplied subject terms would be labour-intensive, the Metadata and Cataloguing and Scholarly Communication teams partnered to design and implement a technical solution that combined automated translation, using Python scripts and the Scopus API, alongside human validation to verify these results. In the spirit of this year’s CRKN conference, this project demonstrates a “creative collaboration”, where the shared expertise across teams was leveraged to implement a practical solution to a critical problem for a library.