Recapping the 2025 CRKN Virtual Conference
By: Mélanie Plante, Communications Coordinator
https://doi.org/10.82389/nasx-7w14
The CRKN Virtual Conference Is Back! Here's a Taste of What's to Come
With the 2026 CRKN Virtual Conference just around the corner, we're looking back at some of the conversations that made last year's event worth talking about.
The 2025 conference brought together the Canadian research community under the theme Open Knowledges and Sustainable Futures, exploring how open scholarship, digital infrastructure, and collaboration can build a more equitable research ecosystem.
Here are just a few of the many standout sessions:
Bridging Gaps, Building Relationships: Understanding Indigenous Humanities Data in the Context of Open Science
Presented by Deanna Reder, Alix Shield, and Susan Glover, the discussion centered on The People and the Text (TPatT), a Simon Fraser University research project dedicated to recovering overlooked Indigenous literature in Canada. The project also contributes to broader digital initiatives that expand access to Indigenous writing for scholars, students, and the general public through digital texts, teaching tools, and curated resources.
The panel highlighted the importance of accountability, relationship-building, and ethical engagement in working with these materials, with a particularly striking example drawn from Alix Shield's research.
Shield discovered that Halfbreed, Maria Campbell's landmark 1973 memoir and a cornerstone of Indigenous literature in Canada, had been quietly censored before publication. Editors removed key passages against Campbell's explicit wishes.
Shield's discovery, along with the care she took in returning the excised passages to Maria Campbell, led to Halfbreed being republished in a restored edition in 2019, finally allowing Campbell to tell her story as she intended.
It's a powerful reminder that filling metadata gaps and building community partnerships isn't just academic busywork. It's about making sure stories like Campbell's are never buried again, and it requires responsibility, respect, and sustained relationships to be done in a good way.
🎥 Watch the full recording here:
Better Data, Lower Burden, Higher Impact: The Value of Persistent Identifiers Across the Research Ecosystem
If you work in research, you've almost certainly and probably unknowingly felt the pain of not having persistent identifiers (PIDs).
Presented by John Aspler, Adam Eikenberry, Mike Nason, and Robyn Nicholson, the panel explored how PIDs are transforming the research ecosystem by creating stable, permanent links between researchers, institutions, publications, datasets, and funding information, across systems worldwide.
The core value proposition is simple: instead of siloed, one-off data entry, PIDs let information flow seamlessly between platforms. A single profile like an ORCID Record can feed into multiple systems at once, removing the need to re-enter the same publications and credentials every time you switch platforms.
Grants are a good example of this in action. As Adam Eikenberry noted, "within the funding landscape, integrations between granting systems and PIDs aren't new, it's just something that's starting to make its way over to Canada." Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) recently took a step in that direction, enabling ORCID integration through their Convergence platform so applicants can pull contribution details directly from ORCID into their applications.
The panel also discussed the bigger picture: a national PID strategy for Canada that would make this kind of seamless information flow standard across the research ecosystem. For researchers already buried in administrative work, it's a promising direction.
🎥 Watch the full recording here:
University libraries and scholarly publishing in Quebec—moving from collaboration to pooling via the Circé Network
The Circé Network has a bold vision for French-language scholarly publishing in Quebec—one that is open, sustainable, and built to last.
In this session, presented in French by Stéphanie Gagnon and Nadia Zurek, we got an inside look at one of the most exciting open access initiatives to emerge in Canada in recent years. Launched in June 2024 with five-year funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ), the Circé Network was created with a clear mission: help French-language scholarly journals in Quebec make the leap to Diamond Open Access, a publishing model with no fees for authors or for readers.
To make that vision a reality, the network operates through four interconnected hubs covering journals, platforms, libraries, and discoverability. Think of it as a full-stack support system for scholarly publishing. The Libraries Hub, coordinated by the Partenariat des bibliothèques universitaires du Québec (PBUQ), is where Quebec's 18 university libraries come together to build the shared services journals need to thrive during this transition, from streamlining editorial workflows and training librarians and journal staff, to boosting journal visibility and welcoming "orphan" journals (those without an institutional home) into the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform.
Of course, building collaborative infrastructure across 18 institutions is no small feat, and Gagnon and Zurek didn't shy away from the hurdles. This was a refreshingly honest look at what it takes to move from goodwill and collaboration to concrete, collective infrastructure, and why it's worth it.
🎥 Watch the full recording here:
Global Access to Local Treasures: A Botswana-Canada Collaboration
Some archival collections are too important to remain out of reach, and the Khama family papers are a perfect case in point.
In this session, Gase Kediseng, Amal Hussien, and Jordan Pedersen walked us through a partnership between the Khama III Memorial Museum in Botswana and the University of Toronto Libraries to digitize a collection documenting Botswana's rich history. The goal is to make locally-held materials accessible to a global audience without leaving local capacity behind, prioritizing digitization and preservation expertise right where the collection lives.
What sets this project apart is how genuinely reciprocal it has been. As Jordan Pedersen reflects: "This will help our scholars [in their professional development], but it will also help folks in Botswana have access to these materials and have that sense of identity — which is really fantastic."
That sense of identity runs through the heart of the project. For Kediseng and many others, opening access to this collection means being able to trace heritage, reconnect with culture, and reclaim stories that might otherwise remain out of reach.
While the University of Toronto Libraries gains a model for thoughtful international collaboration through this project, the Museum gets to share Botswana's story on their own terms.
🎥 Watch the full recording here:
Join Us This Year: The Conversation Continues
We were overwhelmed by the quality of conference submissions once again this year, and we can't wait to share what's in store at the 2026 CRKN Virtual Conference on May 12 to May 14!
This year’s theme, Creative Collaborations, Collective Momentum, highlights the power of partnership across libraries, research institutions, scholarly publishers, and infrastructure providers. By working together, these communities are building the systems, policies, and relationships needed to advance open scholarship and strengthen Canada’s research ecosystem.
Over three days, the conference will feature panels, presentations, and discussions that explore emerging trends in scholarly communication, digital heritage, open access publishing, research infrastructure, and data stewardship. Participants will hear from experts across Canada, sharing practical insights, innovative projects, and collaborative approaches to addressing some of the most pressing challenges in the digital research community today.
This year's program is shaping up to be our most diverse and thought-provoking yet. Whether you are a librarian, researcher, publisher, or historian, the CRKN Virtual Conference offers an opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from colleagues working at the forefront of open knowledge.
We hope to see you there!
Mélanie Plante (https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5563-3743)
Mélanie holds an Honours BA in English from the University of Ottawa. She joined CRKN in February 2024 and is passionate about Canadian literature.