For the 2025 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Aid to Scholarly Journals program, Coalition Publica is pleased to provide editorial teams with a series of documents to aid in the preparation of their applications.
The SSHRC’s Aid to Scholarly Journals grants support Canadian scholarly dissemination by offering a contribution to enable journals to explore innovative activities as well as to help them to defray the costs associated with publishing scholarly articles, digital publishing and journal distribution on Canadian not-for-profit platforms. The 2025-2028 grant has two components: one for emerging journals and one for established journals.
A transition period
The 2025 competition introduces new requirements, particularly regarding immediate open access dissemination without the use of APCs, the adoption of an open license, and alignment with DOAJ criteria. Journals still have time to adapt before the full requirements are expected for the 2028 competition, but will be required to submit a transition plan explaining how they plan to align with best practices and the open access requirements with their applications.
Resources available to journals
Preparing a grant application requires a significant amount of effort. To support journals in this task, Coalition Publica has created several practical guides for the software that makes up our infrastructure as well as one to support journals in adopting the required best practices:
1. OJS guide to statistics and reports for SSHRC ASJ
This guide explains how to access the statistics available on your OJS instance, including data on authors, reviewers, article views, etc. It also outlines what information may be available to you, depending on your installation configuration and journal practices. Available here in English and French.
2. Érudit brief for SSHRC ASJ
This document presents the various data available to journals on the erudit.org platform, such as consultation statistics, information on authors, and other important metadata associated with published articles. It also provides some tips for journals to understand their reach that may be helpful for all journals, even if they are not disseminated on Érudit. Available here in English and French.
3. Best practices in diamond open access publishing
In collaboration with our library publishing partners, Coalition Publica is preparing a strategic planning tool for journals that wish to align with best practices and diamond open access requirements, in preparation for the 2028 competition. This document is an adaptation of the Feuille de route pour répondre aux exigences du FRQ en matière de libre accès diamant (only available in French), created by Érudit and the Partenariat des bibliothèques universitaires du Québec (PBUQ) for the Réseau Circé. Available here in English and French.
Our commitment to scholarly journals
In close collaboration with Canadian university libraries, Coalition Publica works to support high quality scholarly publishing in the humanities and social sciences and to promote sustainable and equitable open access.
The combined infrastructure of the erudit.org platform and OJS instances not only enables the dissemination of content, but also the collection of data essential to understanding the impact of journals. It is this data that we wish to make more accessible and usable for editorial teams, with a goal of strengthening their autonomy and outreach capacity.
We would like to extend our warmest thanks to the members of the CARL Library Publishing Community Engagement Team, and in particular Tomasz Mrozewski, Digital Publishing Librarian at York University, for their collaboration in developing the Roadmap to Open Access.
