Scholar, engine of social innovation | UdeMNews

Each year, the Quebec Social Innovation Network (RQIS) adds a certain number of social innovations to its harvest (the Montreal Declaration for responsible development of artificial intelligence, from the University of Montreal, is there, for example). listed). It is at the initiative and thanks to the support of Inven_T, the Technosocial Innovation Center of UdeM, that the application of the Consortium Érudit and its partnership for open access (POA) was submitted to the RQIS .

“The work that Érudit does is a social innovation that is perhaps less noticeable, but it remains very important. Érudit reaches five million users throughout Quebec each year,” recalls Gwendal Henry, communications advisor at Érudit, who, with Geneviève Létourneau-Guillon, of Inven_T, worked on the application file.

Beyond the commercial

This recognition highlights the importance of collaboration beyond commercial aspects, which will be at the heart of International Open Access Week 2024, whose theme is “Community before commercialization”. “It fits perfectly with our mission and our work,” notes the general director of Érudit, Tanja Niemann, who says that Érudit was founded 25 years ago to preserve local non-profit publication sites. “We wanted to maintain our ways of articulating research results, in our language,” she adds.

The RQIS particularly recognizes the POA, the financial arm of Érudit’s work, which supports open access journals, which thus forego subscription income. Each year, the POA redistributes one million dollars to journals hosted on Érudit, transforming the distribution model. “The fact that the RQIS recognizes the POA as an example of social innovation is another confirmation that open access to scientific publications has repercussions which go far beyond the university framework and directly benefit the whole of society” , notes Gwendal Henry.

Even if the big monopolies continue to take the lion’s share of the scholarly publishing world, more and more players recognize the importance of open access, both for readers and authors, paving the way for “open diamond access” model – what Érudit has ultimately been advocating for 10 years. The Tri-Agency Policy [fédéraux de financement de la recherche] on free access to publications is currently being revised, and UNESCO has expressed its opinion on this subject.

10 years of POA

“Ten years ago, we transformed what was a classic subscription license agreement with libraries into a partnership agreement,” relates Tanja Niemann, general director of Érudit. It didn’t make sense to do commercial transactions with Quebec and Canadian magazines.”

Érudit, with the Canadian Research Documentation Network – the national consortium of Canadian university libraries – has therefore set up a partnership in collaboration with university libraries. Each year, the model is refined, with the help of libraries and journals.

By joining the POA, university libraries help support the small independent journals hosted on Érudit. More than 240 non-commercial scholarly journals receive financial support from 54 Canadian university libraries, as well as support for their editorial activities. “We are an agent who facilitates the transaction. We have an alternative solution that works and allows money to circulate in the research community and not leave it,” explains Tanja Niemann. The POA thus allows small, nested journals to continue their activities and offer their content free of charge to everyone.