The winner of the Scholarly and Research Communication Innovation Award for 2019 is Canadian Literature. Canadian Literature is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal of literary criticism and review established in 1959 and published by UBC. The journal fosters wide academic interest in Canadian literature for both academic and general readers. It publishes Canadian and international scholars, writers, and poets in every issue. http://canlit.ca

The award recognizes recent developments in its CanLit Guides, an online, open access, flexible educational resource designed to assist students and educators to critically engage with Canadian writing while promoting independent study. The Guides cover a range of topics of importance to studying, reading, contextualizing, and writing about Canadian literature, including some on literary theory; literary, cultural, and political history; specific authors and works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama; and skills-based research and composition topics. In doing so the Guides promote engagement with the journal and expand the dissemination of its scholarly discourse across a wider audience.

Canadian Literature’s 2018 Collection consists of 16 new Guides, written and peer-reviewed by field experts and edited by the CanLit Guides team. The Collection is distinctive for its content, the organization of production, and the means of access in a variety of ways.

The results have been dramatic. Since the May 2018 launch, CanLit Guides has been visited over 200,000 times by a global audience of users in 178 countries. Total page views have doubled, the number of users has more than doubled, and the number of Canadian users has increased by 75 percent.

Congratulations to Canadian Literature and particularly to the team responsible for the 2018 Collection and the reconfiguration of the website to encourage interactivity with the journal.

Our thanks go out to all journals that submitted nominations for the awards. We look forward to next year’s submissions.

The judges for the 2019 awards were:

Suzanne Kettley, Executive Director, Canadian Science Publishing

Antonia Pop, Director, Journals, University of Toronto Press

Eugenia Zuroski, Editor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Chair: Rowland Lorimer. Publisher and Editor, Scholarly and Research Communication

The Scholarly and Research Communication Innovation Awards provide recognition to outstanding journal work and highlight the contributions that journals make to scholarly discourse. In a time of prevailing attention to open access, it is important to ensure that the means remain in place for journals to continue their good work in serving and building research communities. It is also important to recognize initiatives that journals are taking to respond to opportunities that digital technology making possible. The SRC Innovation Awards are also intended to encourage Canadian journals to engage in innovation with an eye on enhancing impact.