Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ) is pleased to offer 2 student scholarships to this year’s Annual Conference. Students interested should be involved in journal publishing or a related field of study.

Scholarship covers Congress Registration and CALJ Conference registration (Breakfast and Lunch both days are included). Dead line to apply is Friday April 28, 2018.

Applicants should send a brief reply outlining their interest in attending.

Please apply by email – info@calj-acrs.ca

Many of you will know from previous posts to the CALJ listserv that CALJ applied to the Department of Canadian Heritage — Canada Periodical Program — for funds to develop an analytics package that would provide each journal with a set of measures of their readership that is easy to understand and can be shared with others i.e., who reads what articles, from what source (your website, an aggregator), where the reader is located, when the reading took place, and what was read (title and abstract, pdf, html). The measures are not many but they provide considerable insight and in these days of measuring everything, the data will come in handy for submissions to funders, and providing feedback to authors.

I am pleased to inform you that we have received funds and that the project will be getting off the ground in the near future.

Rowland Lorimer will be directing the project so all inquiries and comments should be directed to him.

The main work of the study will have two parts.

1. Hire a programmer/data scientist to create a database that will allow the project to create a page (or 2) of summary analytics for each journal composed of the most important measures on online usage (layout, to the extent that it is possible, like Google analytics). It will also compile the data so that CALJ can create annual performance measures for the membership as a whole.

2. Allows journals to easily query their data, e.g., what were the most often read articles in 2017 compared with 2016 on your website.

There may be some room for journals other than those who wrote letters of support to join the pilot group of journals the data of which will populate the database as it develops. Should you be interested in possible participation, please let Rowly know at lorimer@sfu.ca.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank Rowly for his skillful work in putting together the grant application for this project. It was no small feat and was effective in persuading Canadian Heritage to fund us.

Suzanne Kettley
President, Canadian Association of Learned Journals/
Executive Director, Canadian Science Publishing

The Canadian journal and member of CALJ, Scholarly and Research Communication, has created a new journal award. The purpose of the award is to recognize and publicize new Canadian scholarly journal communication initiatives. Eligibility is defined in the attached poster and is focused on recent innovation that increases the influence of a journal among readers and is notable by other journals as significant. More generally, the award is intended to underline the creative and innovative contributions that scholarly journals make to effective and inspired scholarly communication.

Subject: An Important and Urgent Update on the Future of SSHRC Funding of Journals

The CALJ Executive is very concerned with recent proposed SSHRC changes to the journal funding program. We urge our members to carefully review this update.

In July 2017, SSHRC formed an Advisory Committee to review the Aid to Scholarly Journals (ASJ) funding opportunity. Members of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ) Board of Directors (BOD) were invited to participate in an Advisory Committee.

The Advisory Committee covered a number of topics of interest including: the definition of a “Canadian” journal; the definition of an “article” and the funding model; the maximum funding amount available per year; the term of the grant; Open Access requirements for funded journals; and eligibility of journals published by commercial publishers.

Significant Changes

The consultation process is now drawing to a close, and CALJ’s BOD would like to draw attention to two changes proposed by SSHRC to the funding opportunity that will have a significant impact on some CALJ members:

• In order to be eligible for funding, all journal content must be fully Open Access (OA) with either no embargo period (i.e. Gold OA with or without APCs) or have a moving paywall of no greater than 12 months allowing access to the article of record. Journals will be asked to make their content OA on their respective digital platforms. For journals that do not currently make use of one of these models, a one-year transition period will be permitted. Such journals will need to submit a plan outlining how they will transition within 12 months of the grant start date.
• A financial incentive of $5K will be made available to journals that make use of a Canadian non-commercial publishing/distribution platform to cover associated costs.

Additionally, there is continued discussion at SSHRC of a mandate that funded journals must deposit content on the Érudit platform.

At the same time that these changes are being proposed, the maximum annual grant will remain unchanged at $30,000 per year for a maximum of three years and the funding formula will remain unchanged: peer-reviewed articles being funded at $850 per article with no additional funding available for other manuscript types, such as book reviews, Review Essays, etc.

How These Proposed Changes Will Affect You

The CALJ Executive is very concerned with these changes as they will pose a significant threat to many of our journals that operate on different models, such as subscription, partnership with international for-profit and not-for-profit aggregators (e.g., ProQuest, EBSCO, JSTOR, Project MUSE), and partnerships with commercial publishers.

• The TOTALITY OF THE CONTENT OF ALL FUNDED JOURNALS, not just all SSHRC-supported research, be made open access, including content not covered by the ASJ funding formula such as book reviews and discussion fora;
• Green open access (deposit in an OA repository) no longer qualifies as open access and thus SSHRC is moving beyond the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications
• Maximum funding is being reduced to $25K / year unless a journal signs on with the non-commercial Canadian OA platform Érudit
• The $5K / year incentive of participating in Érudit is tied to costs for platform transfer and access and therefore supporting the platform and not the remaining journal operations
• These proposals penalize successful journals that have found ways of earning revenues outside Canada on their own or via platforms and aggregators, including not-for-profit organizations such as Project Muse or JSTOR.
• These proposals redirect support away from journals and place it with Canadian platforms and aggregators. This will reduce international income that is necessary to the journals’ operating budgets.
• The discussion underway of mandating participation in Érudit interferes with journals’ abilities to pursue online digital strategies best suited to their operations and removes the journals’ option of working with the platform vendor of their choice. This also prevents journals working with commercial publishers from access to SSHRC funding irrespective of other considerations.
• The OA requirement forces Canadian journals that rely on other revenue streams to select between the loss of the grant and the loss of other revenue streams, both of which may be necessary to the journals’ operating budgets.
• The OA requirement could encourage some journals to change their business models to an OA-APC model. The APC model, however, presents a significant challenge for Canadian SSH researchers, and could drive researchers who are unable to raise the necessary funds to opt to submit to journals outside Canada. Notably, SSHRC funds account for approximately 25% of research published in Canadian journals (The entirety of the content of ASJ recipient journal’s, however, would be required to be OA without the presence of alternative funds to help finance the publishing of non-SSHRC supported content).
• No funding will be provided for innovation at the level of individual journals or among journal groups.

CALJ’s position is that diversity in business models is crucial to the Canadian scholarly communication ecosystem. CALJ represents over 100 journals, each of which is unique in its circumstances and business models. SSHRC now feels it has the mandate to limit the business models that have been developed to successfully sustain our journal publishing community. While Open Access is an important consideration for Canadian journals, the proposed changes to the ASJ funding interfere with journals’ abilities to pursue the business models best suited to their unique needs and circumstances. The proposed OA requirement of the SSHRC ASJ application as well as a mandate and/or incentive to enter into a partnership with a specific platform combined with the lack of additional SSHRC funding to offset the loss of revenue from closed access content presents a threat to the sustainability of Canadian journals. We feel that the pressure to flip too many journals to open access without proper consideration of the financial requirements needed to do so nor a guaranteed level of revenue to support the journals will put many journals in precarious positions, including a risk of discontinuing.

Urgent Action Required

Given the impact of these proposed changes to the ASJ application and that SSHRC is moving quickly, we believe it is important for SSHRC to hear directly from the journals’ community. CALJ calls on its members to:

• Carefully consider the proposed changes and the impacts they will have on their journal operations.
• Contact SSHRC directly with your questions, concerns and opinions on the impact of these changes.
• Contact your association or parent organization’s executives and let them know your concerns.

CALJ Letter

Please send your impact statements to:

Kirstie Duncan, Minister of Science : kirsty.duncan@parl.gc.ca
Ted Hewitt, SSHRC President : Ted.Hewitt@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca
Mona Nemer, Canada’s Science Advisor : science@canada.ca
Dominique Bérubé, SSHRC Vice-President Research Programs : Dominique.Berube@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca
Tim Wilson, SSHRC Executive Director, Research Grants and Partnerships: Tim.Wilson@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca
Lorraine Anderson, SSHRC Manager, Research Grants and Partnerships : Lorraine.Anderson@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca
Guy Laforest, President of the Federation) : guy.laforest.2@ulaval.ca

Kent Anderson of CALDERA writes about the demise of PubMed Central Canada

Some interesting things are going on in Canadian publishing these days.

As a publishing market, Canada consists primarily of smaller publishers who are highly collaborative, with budgets that are capped locally in a number of ways by central government grant awards and budgets. As with other markets, science and medical publishers have more commercial options than humanities and social sciences publishers -- that is, the publishers who thrive are able to generate business outside of Canada. Consequently, many of them have commercial arrangements with larger US, UK, and EU publishers which help keep the lights on and their businesses moving ahead.

Article

Another article by Kent Anderson of CALDERA Publishing this time on SSH journal funding.

Article

After reviewing the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) proposed changes to the Aid to Scholarly Journals (ASJ) program the Board of Directors of CALJ has written to the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, who is responsibility of SSHRC. It is felt that if implemented the recommendations will significantly impact the sustainability of many of our most successful journals

The Letter

CALJ is reminding its members that there is still time to sign up for the free service ReadCube Discover. ReadCube Discover is a free indexing service of Digital Science that uses its “suite of scholarly tools” to enhance your articles and increase their discoverability. It boasts a usership of 40 million desktop and mobile readers and refers traffic to the full content on a

journal’s website. See https://www.readcube.com/publishers for more. The enhancement comes in part via the related services of Digital Science:

• Altmetrics, another service of Digital Science that tracks secondary usage of scholarly articles mainly in public media.
• ReadCube for Researchers: Digital Science has a complementary service for researchers that enhances their ability to organize their libraries and create articles and read PDFs through ReadCube’s enhanced PDF viewer. Please see https://www.readcube.com/researchers
• Digital Science’s also operated an interesting data repository https://digitalscience.figshare.com/

The CALJ Executive has reviewed ReadCube Discover and recommends it to its members.

Form

In September of this year, two CALJ members had an opportunity to attend the annual ALPSP conference in The Netherlands.

Rowland Lorimer, Director of CISP Journals Services and Eugenia Zuroski, Editor Eighteen Century Fiction attended numerous sessions, networked with many other publishers and editors and had discussions with some of vendors of publishing services. They have agreed to provide their trip reports and links to these documents are provided below.

Financial support for their participation was in large part provided by the Canada Periodical Fund, Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada. CALJ would like to acknowledge its great appreciation for this support. Without it, this simply would not have happened.

CALJ also made a contribution to this initiative. Our president, Suzanne Kettley acknowledged that: “A global understanding of the trends, issues, technologies and marketing techniques is critical in the success of Canadian Learned journals. The ALPSP conference is a great opportunity for the participants”.

Rowland Lorimer, Director of CISP Journals Services

Eugenia Zuroski, Editor Eighteen Century Fiction

The Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ) is currently seeking an individual with an ability to work with web software to provide services for the following: creation of a list of recommended vendors for its members to refer to when looking for services related to publishing their journals.

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