The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and Érudit are pleased to announce the renewal of their Partnership for Open Access (POA) for an additional two-year period. This extension will serve as a transition period to a new long-term partnership agreement planned for 2025 and will allow our organizations to build towards a ground-breaking reimagining of the Canadian open access landscape.
The Partnership for Open Access (POA) is a collective model for providing ongoing financial support to the Canadian scholarly journals disseminated on the erudit.org platform. As part of the movement to transform scholarly publishing, the POA brings together libraries and journals to build a sustainable open access (OA) environment in Canada. The partnership between CRKN and Érudit was created in 2014 to provide support for Canadian journals and to increase OA for scholarly publications, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. CRKN and Érudit extended the agreement in 2017 following the launch of Coalition Publica, and in 2018 entered an historic five-year agreement which focused on adding English and bilingual journals to the Érudit platform, transitioning journals to open access, strengthening governance, and developing the POA internationally.
With a desire to build on our success, including a more than two-fold increase in the number of APC-free / Diamond OA journals on the Érudit platform and support for a total of 223 scholarly journals, CRKN and Érudit came together to discuss plans for the future. With the rapidly changing OA landscape, including the adoption of Plan S by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, CRKN and Érudit agreed to extend the current agreement for two years, to provide time for us to develop a new, long-term, collaborative agreement to begin in 2025, that will bring our shared vision for a sustainable Canadian OA ecosystem to life.
“Érudit is one of CRKN’s most trusted partners, and our relationship has only grown stronger as we approach our tenth year of partnership,” commented Clare Appavoo, CRKN Executive Director. “During the two-year extension to our current agreement, we plan to increase collaboration with key stakeholders in the Canadian scholarly ecosystem while making data-driven decisions about promoting sustainable open access. We look forward to the progress that the next two years will bring.”
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, CRKN and our members support Érudit in the goal of transitioning to a Diamond OA publishing model where OA content is published with the support of the community, with no charges to authors or readers. We will continue our work together to champion bibliodiversity and sustainability in the Canadian scholarly communications landscape. The two organizations will also focus on maximizing CRKN member participation in the POA, with a view towards a longer-term alignment on shared activities in the OA landscape.
"The partnership with CRKN, its members and the Canadian university libraries in general is crucial for Érudit and Coalition Publica and essential for the transition to open access of Canadian journals in the field of social sciences and humanities. This agreement has been in place for almost 10 years and is one of the pillars of support for the journals we disseminate," said Tanja Niemann, Executive Director of Érudit. "The POA is part of the non-commercial, community driven model that is widely used in Canada, but also around the world. We are proud of this sustainable and equitable partnership."
The two-year extension of the CRKN-Érudit Partnership for Open Access took effect on January 1, 2023 and includes 54 participating CRKN member institutions. For more information about the POA, please contact:
Francesca Brzezicki
Communications Specialist, CRKN
fbrzezicki@crkn.ca
Gwendal Henry
Communications Advisor, Érudit
gwendal.henry@erudit.org