Save the date:

Nov 24th (evening) and all day Nov 25th

Annual Boot Camp of the Canadian Association of Learned Journal is fast approaching. This year it will be held at the UofT on Nov 24th (evening) and all day Nov 25th.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation announced the funding of 7 national cyberinfrastructures, including the Open Science SSH Cyberinfrastructure under the direction of Vincent Larivière, holder of the Canada Research Chair on the Transformations of Scholarly Communication of Université de Montréal and Érudit scientific director.

With a total funding of 4.3 M, the project will be supported over 3 years by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Governments of Québec and Ontario, and several Canadian universities (Université de Montréal, Simon Fraser University, Université du Québec à Montréal, University of Victoria, University of Ontario Institute of Technology). This funding will enable the implementation of a national digital research infrastructure dedicated to production, aggregation, as well as the enhancement and online searching of essential data for humanities and social sciences research, published in French and in English.

Read online

At our annual meeting this year we discussed the possibility of creating a buying consortium for services. Under this arrangement CALJ members could band together, create an RFP of a large volume of work to increase the contract value to service providers, leading to lower pricing than what we would see as individual journals. We are now at the point where we want to gather information from the whole membership to determine the level of interest in this project and which services you’d benefit from most if they were pooled.

There was interest at the meeting in printing, so unless you indicate otherwise, we’d like to start with it as a test. Please fill out the questionnaire to help us make our decision on both the timing (best time to implement a new printing contract if you are interested in participating) and how you prioritize the other services.

Please note that members of the board initiated some discussions with Digital Science about their products and services. A description of them is given below the link to the questionnaire. If you are not familiar with these products, please take the time to read the descriptions before completing the questionnaire.

Questionnaire - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5KTPQHQ

Digital Science Products and Services (adapted from their Web site)

CALJ comment: Digital Science services are aimed at increasing readership and increasing the ability of readers to analyze and present usage data inclusive of, but not restricted to, formal citations.

ReadCube is a desktop and browser-based program that researchers and other readers can use for managing, annotating, and accessing academic research articles.

Readcube Discover is a free service that enables your content to be fully enhanced and discoverable within ReadCube's suite of scholarly tools.. ReadCube Discover optimizes your content for discovery by our rapidly growing global community of researchers and others interested in accessing academic research - driving referrals directly to the full content on your site.

Note this is a free service; however, content is required to have digital object identifiers (DOIs) in order to participate.

Altmetric Explorer for Publishers is an easy-to-use web-based platform that enables users [publishers] to browse and report on all attention data for every piece of scholarly content Altmetric has found attention for.

Altmetric Badges The easy-to-embed Altmetric donuts provide a colourful, distinctive and instantly recognizable visualization to help showcase the wider influence and dissemination of your published content. Each donut gives your website visitors one-click access to the collated record of online attention for each piece of research, where they can browse all of the original mentions and shares associated with it.

Federation applauds largest annual increase in discovery research in 10 years. Budget 2016.

We have now completed the transfer of our web site and listserv from Athabasca University Press to our own system. We want to thank AUP for over 10 years of generous support to CALJ-ACRS and academic publishing.

We also have set up a Twitter Account and a Facebook page for CALJ-ACRS that we ask you to check out and participate in. You can find links on the web site.

A recent white paper written on behalf of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), Canadian Universities and Sustainable Publishing, provides an overview of scholarly communication in Canada from the perspective of research libraries. The Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ), the national organization who represents Canadian journals and their publishers, was sent a copy of this report only after it was finalized.

Michel Duquet, President of CALJ, feels that the libraries should talk to the experts in journal publishing rather than tackling this situation on their own. According to Duquet, “Canadian journals are already being produced at a low cost. We have a tradition of running fiscally responsible journals, and we follow stringent editorial practices, providing a trusted framework and vehicle for research that is of importance to Canadians. We have a lot of experience in running high-quality journals on a small budget.”

Achieving a Sustainable Canadian Publishing Model through Library-Publisher Partnership

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has issued a new white paper, Canadian Universities and Sustainable Publishing, authored by Martha Whitehead and Brian Owen.

The CALJ Board of Directors has adopted a document to provide guidance on Open Access Policies in order to assist member journals in developing an easily discoverable open access policy that meets the Tri-Agency requirements, maximizes the public dissemination of knowledge and takes into account journal sustainability.

Canadian writers, visual artists, publishers and creator organizations have until February 16, 2016 to send in an application to the Access Copyright Foundation for a Marian Hebb research grant.

Research grants—named in honour of creative advocate and copyright pioneer Marian Hebb—are given out by the Foundation to support research of interest to our country’s writing, artistic and publishing sectors. Research must be conducted with the aim of publishing a work, staging an event, completing a study or report or in relation to a strategic initiative.

Make an application

We are getting geared up for the CALJ Conference to be held May 28 & 29th 2016 at the University of Calgary. Mark your calendars now and plan to attend.

We are also looking for volunteers to assist to organize the sessions. Your input means a conference that meets your needs!

http://congress2016.ca/program/events/98-calj