SSHRC awards national open access platform a Pan-Canadian Knowledge Access Initiative grant

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) is granting $9 million over the next six years through the Pan-Canadian Knowledge Access Initiative (PCKAI) to support Coalition Publica, a bilingual, national, open access platform.

The platform will enhance international dissemination of Canadian social sciences and humanities research, and will increase its readership. The investment will help Coalition Publica expand the research open access community, both in Canada and globally.

Coalition Publica is a partnership between Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project. Its mission is to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. The PCKAI funding will enable Coalition Publica’s to expand a non-commercial, open-source platform for digital scholarly publishing, dissemination and research by combining the Open Journal Systems and erudit.org platforms. The funding will also be used to support research examining the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem.

“We are proud to support Coalition Publica, a leader in open access and circulating knowledge, through the Pan-Canadian Knowledge Access Initiative. This award speaks to SSHRC's commitment to increasing dissemination of research results and accelerating knowledge mobilization. Results of this funding will ensure peer-reviewed articles resulting from agency-funded research are freely and immediately available to benefit researchers, students and, ultimately, all Canadians.”

—Ted Hewitt, President of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

Quick facts

• The grant’s value is $1.5 million per year, over six years.
• The goal of the PCKAI is 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 was established to further advance the Canadian open access ecosystem, and specifically support authors and journals in the social sciences and humanities research environment.
• Coalition Publica launched the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Pilot Project in 2021, a collaboration with the DOAJ, to test a potential new service at the time. Érudit has supported the service’s application process for open access journals wanting to be indexed in the DOAJ, particularly French-language journals, which have been poorly represented in the DOAJ.

For more information

Media Relations
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
medias@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca