As the current crisis unfolds, a strong sense of community among journals is as important as ever. CALJ continues and will continue to support and advocate Canadian journals through this time of uncertainty.

We want to reach out to members to learn how you are affected by the COVID-10 pandemic. The CALJ Executive wants to make sure we understand the full impact the crisis has had on the industry in order to advocate strongly to partners, stakeholders, and governments.

Please contact us at any time to give us a sense of the challenge’s individual journals, publishers, and editors are facing, and feel free to use the Listserv to reach out to other journals and other members of the community.

We will be communicating with you via email, the Listserv, and our social media platforms over the coming weeks on a variety of important topics; please keep an eye out for them so you don’t miss important updates on:

• CALJ Membership Renewals during the Pandemic
• The CALJ Webinar Series schedule, which will be replacing this year’s face to face conference
• Information and scheduling on our Annual Meeting of the Members
• An update on CALJ-RAP

This week’s topic (below) deals with assisting the research and education community during the pandemic. If any of the options listed below make sense to your journal, please reach out to the appropriate organization or add to the listed Google Doc.

We also invite you to use the Listserv to discuss with your colleagues measures your journal have taken.

The CALJ Executive wants to take this opportunity to wish you, your colleagues, family, and friends good health during this very difficult period.

Please stay safe.

How journals can help the research and educational communities during the pandemic:

If you are like us, you’ve begun receiving requests from the community about what rights your journal is extending during the pandemic to ensure learned content is available, as academics work from home and the education community rapidly switches to online learning. Below is a list of ways you can assist in making your journal content available to your readers who are working or studying from home. The CALJ Executive is neither endorsing nor recommending against any of these; we are simply making you aware a few initiatives, knowing many of you want to do what you can to help during this significant event. Included at the end is a note on the importance of communication should you decide to extend extra rights during this period:

1. Access Copyright (contact RLevy@accesscopyright.ca) has sent us a request to consider facilitating online learning in Canada:

“Like publishers across the country, we are examining how we might assist proactively the education sector in this time of need as they urgently work to move instruction from the classroom to online. We know that publishers are receiving requests from instructors across the country and would like to find a simple way to grant the request for the right to use their content. We examined whether AC can offer a service similar to the Education Continuity Licence offered by the CCC. The CCC licence is currently offered only to US institutions. You can access more details about the licence here: Education Continuity License.

As a goodwill gesture, we would like to offer a service to Canadian educational institutions that would:

• On behalf of opt-in publishers, license the reuse of their repertoire by allowing additional use of materials that the use has lawfully acquired (no content delivery)
• The use must be to facilitate online education in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
• Require the reporting of titles used
• Be at no cost to the user
• Run to August 1, 2020”

In a further email discussion, AC clarified that:

• What they are proposing is not access to the content itself but rather the right to copy and share the content the institutions already have legal access to.
• They would offer the repertoire of only those publishers that wish to Opt-in.
• It would be open to educational institutions that complete a form indicating the works that they are using.
• The use would be limited to educational institutions for educational purposes.
• No work beyond Opting-in is expected

2. Places you can document what your journal is doing in the face of COVID 19.

a. The International Coalition of Library Consortia has issued a statement about the pandemic https://icolc.net/statement/statement-global-covid-19-pandemic-and-its-i... they are looking for help from publishers and have created a Google doc to document the rights we are granting:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xiINlF9P00tO-5lGKi3v4S413iujYCm5...

b. Another Google Doc is being maintained by Sam Simas (Digital Services & Research Librarian) & Rachael Juskuv (Research & Instruction Librarian), Bryant University Library and is available to record the rights you are granting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SqjcSrRPPNpPj7K4B1pUQdCbznSIyLznPKGd...

Communicating the extension of content rights:

Communication around licence and rights changes will be important, and there was a good post in the Scholarly Kitchen that touched on this subject a couple of weeks ago:

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/03/30/marketing-amidst-a-pandemic/

An interesting excerpt from that blog follows:

From Rick Anderson: “First, publishers should remember that it takes very little time for temporary access to begin feeling like an entitlement. If you open up access to a very expensive and high-demand medical journal for a three-month period during a health crisis, doctors and researchers on a medical campus will be grateful and relieved for the first few days, and will then quickly get used to having that access. When the access goes away, it will likely be a jolting experience for them. To be clear: this is not a reason not to open up access during a crisis; however, it is a reason to think carefully about your communication with both libraries and end-users before, during, and after the crisis period.”