Canada is positioned as a leader in diamond open access with a strong foundation, investment in open infrastructure, unique funding models, wide-spread adoption of Open Journal Systems (OJS), and a focus on what really matters to Canadian scholarly knowledge creators, mobilizers, and publishers.
Canada has a longstanding, internationally recognized leadership role in scholarly communications. One vital part of this history is the country’s contribution to the diamond open access movement, built on the work of grassroots scholarly communities rather than commercial enterprises.
Across the country, journals have been founded, edited, and sustained by faculty, students, librarians, developers, information workers, and scholarly societies working within universities and research centres. This community-driven model has thrived precisely because it is rooted in institutions whose mission is to advance and share knowledge, allowing publishing to remain aligned with scholarly values rather than shaped by profit-driven motives.
At the national level, this distributed labour is supported by organizations whose mandates advance the public good. Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), both housed in Canadian universities, anchor the country’s non-commercial publishing infrastructure. Together, through Coalition Publica, PKP’s open-source publishing software and Érudit’s centralized dissemination platform create an integrated, scholar-focused ecosystem.
This partnership, funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), as well as backing from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), allows us to treat publishing tools not simply as technical utilities (although the technical, free and open source foundations are critical), but as essential components of Canada’s scholarly communications infrastructure, purpose-built to serve research communities (for more on this evolving relationship, see our interview with Tanja Niemann and Kevin Stranack).
A Strong Foundation: Research, Library Publishing, National Infrastructures, and Communities of Practice
These strong national foundations are evident in the influential work of early open access champions such as Leslie Chan, Jean-Claude Guédon, and Stevan Harnad, as well as in the outstanding scholarly communications research emerging from labs led by Juan Pablo Alperin, Stefanie Haustein, and Vincent Larivière.
Canada’s commitment to scholarly communications research is similarly reflected in the dedicated Research and Innovation Team of Canada’s dissemination platform, Érudit, whose mandate foregrounds sustained inquiry into questions pertinent to our field. It is further reflected in the research leadership of Canada’s academic library community, who have illuminated the distinctive characteristics of Canadian journals, and in the ongoing support provided through Coalition Publica’s scholarship program.
Canada’s academic libraries have also long championed journal publishing within their academic communities, giving rise to a decentralized, distributed, community-oriented ecosystem. More than half (54%) of all active Canadian journals are managed within universities, and a large proportion of these are hosted directly by libraries, particularly in high-publishing provinces such as Alberta and British Columbia (van Bellen & Céspedes, 2025, p. 103).
Central to this ecosystem are two national infrastructures: Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Their partnership in Coalition Publica, initiated in 2017, has helped to transform their technical services into a national infrastructure and an essential component of Canada’s scholarly communications ecosystem. Together, they sustain digital publishing, shape national OA policy, and sustain Canada’s distributed, scholar-led journal environment, through education, advocacy, and coordination.
In addition to national infrastructure, Canada benefits from strong communities of practice that help sustain its scholar-led publishing ecosystem. One prominent example is the widely used Scholarly Communications in Canada Mattermost workspace (a free and open-source alternative to Slack), proudly hosted by PKP as part of Coalition Publica.
The workspace was founded by three leaders in the library publishing community: Sonya Betz, Head of Open Publishing and Digitization Services at the University of Alberta, Leah Vanderjagt, Head of Digital Repositories at the University of Alberta, and Jeanette Hatherill, Senior Coordinator for Coalition Publica.
This vibrant channel functions as a grassroots, peer-support network where practitioners share successes, troubleshoot challenges, exchange expertise, and collectively strengthen the country’s community-owned scholarly communication infrastructure.
Several other national organizations have also played key roles in nourishing this publishing landscape. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) supports and strengthens Canada’s scholarly communications community of practice, notably through committees such as the Library Publishing Community Engagement Team. These foster collaboration, professional development, and shared leadership across the country’s library-led publishing initiatives.
Similarly, the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ), established in 1990, is a not-for-profit, member-driven organization dedicated to strengthening Canada’s journal community. It advances this mandate through sustained advocacy efforts, “To represent, develop and support the academic community of Canadian learned journals in disseminating original research and scholarly information, and to promote intellectual culture in Canada and internationally.” (CALJ About page).
Canada’s publishing landscape is also reflected in a diversity of student-led journals. The 10th iteration of the Canada Student Journal Forum (SJF) took place in 2025, bringing together post secondary students from across Canada who are actively engaged in journal publishing. Founded by the University of Toronto Libraries, and now national in scope, the SJF has long benefited from the support of PKP staff, who have chaired and served on its organizing committee. Through PKP’s collaboration with Coalition Publica, the organization has also been a proud sponsor of the SJF.
Engaging junior scholars in the full publishing lifecycle is a critical investment in the future of scholarly communication, one that Canada’s vibrant community of practice and Coalition Publica actively sustains. Through initiatives like the SJF, and Coalition Publica’s student editor grants, emerging researchers gain hands-on experience, develop editorial and technical skills, and deepen their understanding of open, community-led publishing models.
Together these pieces form a uniquely Canadian scholarly publishing landscape, one that is decentralized yet deeply interconnected, grassroots yet institutionally supported, and sustained not by commercial interests but by the collective stewardship of libraries, research centres, and national infrastructures.
PKP’s Roots and Canada’s Investment in Public Infrastructure
PKP is an organization serving the globe, but its foundations remain unmistakably Canadian. Across the country, universities and research libraries not only adopt OJS at scale, they also lead its governance, contribute to its development, and provide essential financial support.
Organizations such as Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), the University of Alberta, and the University of British Columbia have long invested, both in-kind and financially, in community-owned infrastructure that reflects scholarly rather than commercial priorities. For years, PKP was housed within the library at Simon Fraser University (SFU), and in 2022 found a new home within SFU’s Core Facilities Program.
Open Journal Systems (OJS) Enables Diamond Open Access
Canada is the birthplace of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and remains a thoroughly committed adopter of Open Journal Systems (OJS) with 415 journals using the platform, as captured by Beacon Data. The Beacon is an integrated function (which users can opt-out of) that offers a snapshot of OJS usage by journals in Canada and across the globe. Canada exemplifies the global pattern in which OJS is overwhelmingly the platform of choice for journals publishing under the diamond open access model: free to publish and free to read.
Érudit research advisors Simon van Bellen and Lucía Céspedes further document the contours of this ecosystem in their article, “Diamond Open Access and Open Infrastructure Have Shaped the Canadian Scholarly Journal Landscape Since the Start of the Digital Era.” They report that 61% (571) of Canada’s 943 active journals follow the diamond OA model (van Bellen & Céspedes, 2025, p. 102). For journals founded since 2015, diamond adoption rises to an even more striking 84% (p. 102). In contrast, older society-run titles are more likely to continue operating under subscription models (p. 102).
Van Bellen and Céspedes identify three defining traits of the Canadian journal landscape:
- The exceptionally high prevalence of diamond open access,
- The predominance of social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines, and
- The relative absence of commercial publishers (p. 104).
They also underscore that Canada’s strong library publishing sector is critically enabled by OJS, which allows universities and research centres to retain control over scholarly communication infrastructure rather than outsourcing it to commercial entities (p. 103). At the same time, they find that a notable consequence of this university-based, library-hosted model is the growing dominance of English as the primary language of journal submissions within Canada’s scholarly publishing (p. 102), despite a robust bilingual research environment.
OJS Adoption in Canada
The story of OJS begins in the Canadian west, in British Columbia, where PKP was established in 1998 by John Willinsky with support from the UBC Pacific Press Partnership, and extends all the way to Newfoundland in the east. Canadian journals’ adoption of the OJS platform began after the platform was first presented to the academic community on May 18, 2002 at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Not long afterward Simon Fraser University Library and the University of Alberta library started hosting journals on OJS, as they grew into long-term institutional supporters of open scholarly infrastructure. Among the early Canadian adopters of OJS is Postcolonial Text, founded by Ranjini Mendis in 2004 at what is now Kwantlen Polytechnic University, which went on to later be published in Paris. Another early adopter was the well-established Canadian Journal of Communication, in 2003, although it has since migrated off the platform and is now published by the University of Toronto Press. It was not unusual for journals to employ OJS in making the transition from print to online before moving on to other platforms and publishers. Today, OJS is in use in every Canadian province as well as in the Yukon Territory.
Decades of Public Investment and Unique Funding Models
Canada’s leadership in open access is also the result of sustained public investment and experimentation with non-commercial, resdistributive funding models. The federally administered Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has provided funding to scholarly journals since 1979, and beginning in 2028, this support will only be available to journals publishing under the diamond OA model.
Québec’s provincial research funding agency, Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ), has supported journal publishing since at least 1981. In 2021, the FRQ took a significant step by joining cOAlition S and adopting the principles of Plan S, including a requirement for full and immediate open access to the research it funds. The FRQ is going even further in demonstrating its commitment to diamond open access by mandating that, by 2028, all research it funds be published under this model.
In 2024, with financial support from the FRQ, the Université de Montréal, and Université Laval, Réseau Circé was established to “mobilizes the community of French-language scholarly publishing, in order to provide concerted support to Quebec scientific journals in the transition to an immediate open access model, which does not impose fees for publication or reading: the diamond model (Mission Page).”
Another important source of support for non-commercial journals in Canada is the Partnership for Open Access, a pillar of Coalition Publica. Established in 2015 between Érudit and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), this partnership redistributes collective funding from libraries internationally to independent journals hosted on the Érudit platform, further reinforcing Canada’s community-owned, scholar-led publishing ecosystem (van Bellen & Céspedes, p. 97).
In December 2023, Canada’s Tri-Agency Research Councils, national funders of research comprising of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), initiated a review of their open access policy (van Bellen & Céspedes, p. 107; also access the Tri-Agency Policy Summary).
While the policy review is currently on pause, Canada’s thriving diamond open access ecosystem, built on universities, research centres, and scholar-led infrastructure, welcomes this renewed focus. Stakeholders see it as an opportunity to reinforce and align national policy with the country’s well-established, community-driven approach to scholarly publishing, that keeps public money within the public, scholarly ecosystem (for example, see Coalition Publica’s response and recommendations).
Bibliodiversity
Van Bellen and Céspedes highlight how Canada represents a “highly diversified landscape across […] provinces, OA types, supporting organizations and languages. These journals support bibliodiversity in terms of their age, the diversity of the authors who publish in them, the research subjects they present, their publishing organizations and the languages used” (p. 104).
Canada can be seen as a microcosm of bibliodiversity buttressed by an independent, non-commercial research ecosystem that allows scholars to publish work of national and regional significance, including subjects that might otherwise be overlooked by commercial publishers. This breadth and depth of scholarly expression is a defining feature of what OJS enables for the scholarly community in Canada and globally.
To conclude, the 2022 study by Khanna, Ball, Alperin, and Willinsky explores the (modest but meaningful) decolonial praxis enabled by OJS worldwide. They document how open, community-run infrastructure expands global participation in scholarly knowledge production and publishing, including diversity of language and content. This heterogeneity is emblematic of some of the best things about Canada: far from perfect or fully resolved, yet pluriversal, resourceful, and committed to experimenting with models that serve a wide and varied community.
Works Cited
Van Bellen, S., & Céspedes, L. (2025). Diamond open access and open infrastructures have shaped the Canadian scholarly journal landscape since the start of the digital era. The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 48(1): 96-111. https://doi.org/10.5206/cjils-rcsib.v48i1.22207
Khanna, S., Ball, J., Alperin, J. P., & Willinsky, J. (2022). Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process. Quantitative Science Studies, 3(4): 912-930. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228
Jump to other sections of the newsletter:
📌 Sustaining open infrastructure together: A warm thanks to TIB
📌 Advancing open publishing: Feature highlights from three years of CRAFT-OA
📌 Inside 3.5 with UX / UI Designer Devika Goel: Part 2
📌 PKP update on its open infrastructure accessibility work
📌 Inclusive global publishing: PKP Documentation and Multilingualism Specialist Emma Uhl
📌Coalition Publica’s Tanja Niemann and Kevin Stranack on Canada’s diamond open access future
