Érudit has recently become a member of OASPA in the Infrastructure & Services (Non-Commercial) category, further enriching the growing community of members. To gain more insight into their recent affiliation with OASPA and to learn more about them, we conducted an interview with Jessica Dallaire-Clark, Senior Coordinator, Open Access Development.
Q. Tell us a bit about your organisation and the service it provides – and your role within it?
Érudit is the leading research dissemination platform in Canada. Our mission is to support open digital publishing and research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. We are backed by a consortium of three Canadian universities (Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and Université du Québec à Montréal) and supported by public funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec. We have over 25 years of experience serving our bilingual (French/English) user community, which is made up of publishers, editors, librarians, researchers, and readers from around the world. The publications disseminated on our platform –including journals, books and proceedings, theses, and research reports– reflect the wide range of Canadian and international research in the humanities and social sciences.
My role, as Senior Coordinator for Open Access Development, is to advise Érudit on its open access strategy and lead the development of our Partnership for Open Access, which I discuss below.
Q. Why did you decide to join OASPA and what do you hope to get out of your OASPA membership?
OASPA is a well-known and respected organisation within scholarly communications and publishing. It is a leader in enabling ongoing discussions around open access, editorial practices, and current issues. Érudit’s goals to contribute to the development of open access and to a non-commercial scholarly communication system, to promote and enhance research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and to operate an innovative digital research infrastructure, are very much in line with OASPA’s values. By becoming a member, Érudit not only underscores its commitment to open scholarship but also joins like-minded organisations in advancing debates, exchanging expertise, and taking action towards an equitable and sustainable open access environment, a goal that can only be achieved through broad collaboration.
Q. How is your organization showing its commitment to making globally equitable participation in open scholarly communication a reality?
One of our key open access initiatives is the Partnership for Open Access (POA), which provides financial support to Canadian non-commercial scholarly journals through the ongoing commitment of more than 90 library partners in Canada, France and Belgium. Currently, over 250 journals are supported by the POA, which enables the publication of more than 2,000 articles in immediate open access each year. This financial support has been instrumental in aiding journals to adopt a Diamond OA model –over 40 journals have flipped from closed to open without APCs since the POA was established more than 10 years ago. We are very proud that the POA was recently included in UNESCO’s Open and Inclusive Science Hub!
Q. What challenges must funders and institutions overcome to create incentive systems that treat open publishing practices as beneficial for career development?
Research funders and research performing institutions such as universities need to take openness into account when assessing research contributions. But they shouldn’t stop there –they should also value contributions in different formats and languages, and researcher commitment to editorial work, especially for non-commercial, open access venues, be they journals, presses or repositories. This is a fundamental service to scholarly communities that often goes unnoticed and that is very often under-resourced. If we want more researchers to choose open publishing practices as the default or as their first choice, we need to make sure that the authors, the editors and the organizations keeping non-commercial open access venues alive are properly recognized and supported.
Q. How do you think OASPA can help mitigate those challenges?
OASPA already does extensive advocacy work in dispelling myths and providing evidence of the benefits of openness. This kind of promotion of open access is truly important among policy makers, publishers, and researchers alike. Given the diversity of its membership, OASPA is in a unique position to engage with players of all sizes in this field. OASPA is also excellent at highlighting approaches to OA that are thoughtful, careful, and adapted to certain regions or research communities. It is extremely valuable to share expertise and experiences at this more granular level as the international research community moves towards a more open and equitable sharing of knowledge.
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