Research
We organize our activities into three development priorities:
Publishing services and support for Canadian SSH journals
Shared technological development for publishing software and platforms
Research activities investigating the scholarly publishing ecosystem
Priorities
Coalition Publica is a unique resource in Canada for research on scholarship as a social object, through the combined effect of the publications it supports, the usage data it collects, and the scholarly communities gathered around its content and services.
Analysis of the research ecosystem contributes to a better understanding of how science is done, but also to improving the ways in which it is supported, communicated, and evaluated. The essential aim of Coalition Publica's research activities is to enable and support projects dealing with scholarly publishing as an object of study.
Related Initiatives
Textual data
Coalition Publica supports and disseminates articles published by over 300 Canadian scholarly journals, as well as the retrospective digitization of many of these journals' archives. These documents, accompanied by rich bibliographic metadata, constitute a considerable collection that forms the basis of Coalition Publica's textual data repository. This includes other collections of digitized texts entrusted to Coalition Publica by leading documentary institutions (RDCR, BAC-LAC, BAnQ).
Bibliometric data
Within Coalition Publica, Érudit disseminates over a quarter of active Canadian scholarly journals, and nearly a third of those in the social sciences and humanities. As a result, the Érudit platform generates and manages a large quantity and variety of data, describing this content both at journal and article level, as well as in terms of its usage. PKP's Beacon project also documents the adoption and use of Open Journal Systems (OJS) by over 44,000 journals worldwide. The data generated by the Coalition Publica team is an important resource for documenting the scholarly publishing ecosystem in Canada and beyond.
Knowledge mobilization
Coalition Publica organizes a wide range of knowledge mobilization activities such as publications, webinars, and scientific or community events. These activities focus on key topics for digital publishing and open access dissemination. They are aimed primarily at journal editorial teams, Coalition Publica's main user community, but also at librarians and administrators at universities and funding agencies.
Analyses and publications
Coalition Publica contributes to analyses of issues relating to the scholarly publishing ecosystem, through studies conducted by members of its team or associated researchers. Topics covered include knowledge production and circulation, the scope and dissemination of research publications, and research evaluation practices. Coalition Publica plays a central role in the emergence of the disciplinary field of meta-research in Canada.
Research Scholarships
With funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Pan-Canadian Knowledge Access Initiative, Coalition Publica has established a scholarship program for young researchers at Canadian post-secondary institutions. This program aims to support projects or research that address the scholarly communication system and research dissemination, or that apply digital humanities methods to the corpora developed by Coalition Publica. Scholarships are awarded annually for one year of study. Consult the lists of the 2023 scholarship winners.
Associated Researchers
Researchers associated with Coalition Publica under the Pan-Canadian Knowledge Access Initiative grant.
Juan Pablo Alperin, Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University; Associate Director of Research, Public Knowledge Project; Co-Director, ScholCommLab. Research Interests: Career progression, impact factor, researcher evaluation processes.
Stefanie Haustein, Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa; Co-Director. ScholCommLab. Research interests: Alternative metrics, open access, user-centered design techniques, UX design and personas, storytelling.
Vincent Larivière, Full Professor, Université de Montréal; Canada Research Chair on Transformations in Scholarly Communication; Scientific Director, Érudit. Research interests: Research evaluation, bibliometrics, scholarly publication and academic status, open science.
Florence Millerand, Professor, Department of Social and Public Communication, Université du Québec à Montréal; Co-Director, Computer-Mediated Communication Laboratory (LabCMO). Research interests: Scientific information infrastructures, technology adoption, technology and society.
Jean-Philippe Warren, Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University; Director, Concordia Chair in Quebec Studies. Research interests: sociology, history of ideas, journals.
John Willinsky, Khosla Family Professor of Education Emeritus, Stanford University; Founder of the Public Knowledge Project. Research interests: copyright, open access.