Coalition Publica recognizes the important role that libraries and librarians play in driving the evolution of scholarly publishing. By working together to offer infrastructure, services, funding, and expertise to Canadian scholarly journals, we strengthen the foundation for a diamond open access future.
Libraries

Strengthening Canada’s open access capacity

Coalition Publica brings together researchers, academic libraries, and scholarly publishing stakeholders in a shared vision to advance diamond open access in Canada. As vital contributors, academic librarians provide expert support and help maintain a vibrant, non-profit scholarly publishing ecosystem. Today, over 40 Canadian academic libraries offer journal publishing and hosting services to their campuses and beyond. As part of Coalition Publica, library publishers actively participate in working groups, contribute to governance, and collaborate on creating open access resources for Canada’s scholarly journal community.

By collaborating on shared projects and services, we’re collectively strengthening Canada’s capacity to support open, community-led publishing in the social sciences and humanities and advancing research, teaching, and learning across the country.

Join Coalition Publica

Already hosting OJS?

Coalition Publica can work alongside you to increase the visibility of your social science and humanities journals, enhance their impact, and access funding by joining the erudit.org platform via their annual call for applications. We can also help connect you with journals on your campus that may benefit from your support. Already, over 30 Canadian university libraries partner with us, hosting nearly 150 journals actively participating in Coalition Publica.

Journals that join Coalition Publica keep their current OJS setup and gain:
  • Wider dissemination, greater visibility, and higher impact
  • Financial support through the Partnership for Open Access
  • Long-term preservation with Portico and Scholars Portal
  • Expert advice on creating quality metadata to increase visibility
  • Inclusion in our textual data corpus, furthering social sciences and humanities research

Considering adopting OJS?

If you’re considering establishing a publishing program for your institution’s journals, or adopting OJS for your existing service, Coalition Publica is here as a resource. OJS, a free and open source editorial workflow and publishing platform, provides all the essential features needed for open-access journal management and is in use by tens of thousands of journals worldwide.
Coalition Publica can:
  • Work with you via PKP Publishing Services to understand your unique needs and set you up with an appropriate hosting solution;
  • Provide guidance and information to help you establish a successful OJS hosting environment;
  • Connect you with a vibrant library publishing community and resources to support the professionalization of your services.

Participate in our activities

Coalition Publica works closely with library publishing partners across the country to host community events, co-create educational resources, convene working groups to move forward shared priorities and to connect the community to professional development opportunities. Join us and contribute to this vital work!
Some examples of collaboration:

Funding a
 more open future

POA
Libraries are essential to the funding support we provide to journals through Coalition Publica. Since 2014, Érudit has worked with libraries, particularly the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, and other stakeholders to develop the Partnership for Open Access (POA), a collective model that provides sustainable funding to journals disseminated on the erudit.org platform.


Thanks to contributions from over 90 libraries worldwide, this initiative has already helped more than 40 journals transition to immediate open access. Today, Coalition Publica is building on this success, working toward a future where all journals on erudit.org are freely and immediately accessible under the diamond open access model.

Community as infrastructure

Since the early days of digital publishing, libraries have helped shape scholarly publishing in Canada, especially through early adoption of open source tools like OJS. We collaborate with the community built around this infrastructure to support the transition of Canadian journals to diamond open access. Together, we promote best practices in digital publishing, metadata, and interoperability to help Canadian journals thrive, transforming community expertise into the infrastructure needed for an open, sustainable and equitable future.


Key areas of collaboration include:

  • Helping journals apply to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
  • Improving metadata quality for increased interoperability
  • Flipping subscription journals and supporting those already in diamond open access
  • Supporting the adoption and implementation of persistent identifiers

From our library partners

"Coalition Publica is making a difference for diamond OA journal publishing across Canada. The professional support our journals receive, including metadata enhancement and optimization, has removed administrative burden off our editorial teams. The funding received through the Partnership for Open Access, allow them to publish high-quality research without charging authors or putting content behind paywalls. The partnership between OJS and Érudit's platform has boosted our journals' visibility. This embodies what diamond open access should be about, making knowledge freely available to everyone. Coalition Publica shows how collaborative infrastructure can support Canada's academic publishing community by creating a sustainable ecosystem where scholarly communication can thrive."
Mark Swartz
Scholarly Publishing Librarian,
Queen's University
Visit Queen's University website
"As a librarian who works with researchers and journal editors, I’ve seen firsthand how Coalition Publica is contributing to the scholarly publishing ecosystem in Canada. Their support for diamond open access empowers journals to share research freely, without financial barriers for authors or readers. By providing essential infrastructure and advocacy, they’re helping to build a more equitable, sustainable, and accessible future for Canadian scholarship."
Stephanie Savage
Scholarly Communications and
Copyright Services Librarian,
The University of British ColumbiaVisit the University of British Columbia website
“As a librarian, I'm very proud to be a member of Coalition Publica community. Canadian digital scholarly publishing draws its richness from the great diversity of its stakeholders, be they institutions or individuals. By bringing together two major players, Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project, and by striving to unite various partners at a national scale (publishers, journals, libraries), Coalition Publica has created a space for exchange and interaction between publishing professionals, librarians and researchers, while strengthening and consolidating the technological infrastructure essential to ensuring a sustainable transition to open access, and the sharing and reuse of Canadian scholarly publishing content."
Pierre Lasou
Librarian – Scholarly Communications,
Université Laval
Visit the Université Laval library website
"The University of Alberta Library strongly supports Coalition Publica’s bold vision to create national publishing infrastructure for Canadian open access journals. In a geopolitical environment where misinformation abounds, the work of the Coalition in promoting and amplifying the voices of Canadian researchers through independent non-commercial journals is more important than ever. The University of Alberta benefits from the support, technology, and services the Coalition provides to journals, while readers around the world are enriched through free and unfettered access to research produced by our scholars. We welcome the future Coalition Publica is creating for Canada, and for Canadian scholarly journal publishing."
Dale Askey
Vice-Provost & Chief Librarian,
University of Alberta
Visit the University of Alberta website

Resources

Our resources section is developed with our community partners.
Have a resource to recommend?

How to Embed Fonts in a PDF File

This guide explains how to embed fonts in a PDF file, allowing readers to view it with the desired layout regardless of their connection location or the screen they are using (mobile, tablet, computer, etc.), even when offline.

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Preparing Quality Metadata in OJS: A Guide for Coalition Publica Journals

This guide is intended to help Coalition Publica journals to prepare their issues and articles in Public Knowledge Project (PKP)’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) software for production and dissemination on erudit.org and to improve the online discoverability of their OJS journal.

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PKP’s 25th anniversary Annual Report (2022-2023)

The year 2023 marked the 25th anniversaries of PKP and Érudit, the two partner organisations that together form Coalition Publica. As two national infrastructures, the occasion was an important milestone in the history of scholarly communication in Canada

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Creating a Canadian Library Publishing Community to Support Diamond Open Access

This poster illustrates how Coalition Publica and the LPC CCDWG are cooperating to organize the Canadian community of library publishers to support Diamond OA publishing in a national, bilingual context.

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