Continuing our “5 Questions with…” series, Erudit interviewed Loïc Andrien, Co-Editor-in-Chief for  AEQUITAS: Journal of human development, disability, and social change, a bilingual journal that focuses on the development and the dissemination of knowledge on the personal and environmental determinants of the social participation of people with disabilities. It is published by the Réseau international sur le Processus de production du handicap (RIPPH).

The interview focused on the journal’s flip to open access in 2023. AEQUITAS is one of seven journals to have made this choice this same year, and seven more flipped in 2024.

AEQUITAS has had a paper version since 1989 and has been disseminated on Érudit since 2020. Until its transition to open access in January 2023, the journal was only available through a subscription to its paper version, and on erudit.org behind a 12-month moving wall.

Transitioning to open access was the logical next step in a process of strengthening our identity as a scholarly journal, which had started several years before. Already recognized in the field of disability for numerous years, AEQUITAS has a very diverse readership: researchers; academics; professionals in the fields of disability, human development, rehabilitation and support for people with different abilities; local, regional, provincial and national policymakers; and people who are themselves living with disabilities. Moving to open access therefore meant strengthening our visibility and our reach. This granted students and young researchers free access to articles that could support their research and studies in the fields of disability studies, social sciences and the humanities.

The decision to flip to open access was taken fairly easily by the AEQUITAS editorial committee itself. We had several meetings with the teams at Érudit, and the move to open access became a regular topic of discussion. Even if that transition represented a leap into the unknown for some, we were all convinced of the benefits of open access. We had studied in detail the evolution of the journal’s economic model, and we went forward.

As we were making the decision to flip to open access, we also decided to go further. We wanted to quickly make the journal’s archives available. The richness of our journal is tied to its history, and so we knew that the transition to open access could not be limited to future issues.

Before 2020, our organization was self-managing the publication of the journal and the sale of its issues directly to customers. We had to reorganize our editorial process. We reviewed our internal processes, the roles of the various committees and, especially, the follow-up, editing and layout tasks.

Once we had set up our dissemination through Érudit, we applied for funding at the end of 2021 from the SSHRC and the FRQSC. We wanted to support our transition to open access and obtain the means that would guarantee the development of our journal.  Open access would have been possible even without these grants, but they gave us a great deal of reassurance, demonstrating that our journal could gain in popularity by confirming its status as a scholarly journal.

First off, the number of views to our journal’s page on Érudit has increased considerably. As an example, while we were under embargo in 2021, our page was viewed around 7,000 times. Currently, for the period covering January to September 2024, we have had over 27,000 views. We never imagined we’d reach these figures so quickly.

The other positive point for us was the capacity to centralize in one place all the information about our journal. The Érudit site made it easier for us to manage that information, and to make sure it was kept up to date. We then removed the pages we deemed useless from our website to redirect even more views to the platform. It also simplified our communications strategy, and our posts on social media now have more added value and more impact.

Finally, the last positive impact, and not the least, we want to highlight relates to the open access funding provided by the Partnership for Open Access, which now exceeds the subscription revenue we were receiving when we had access restrictions. The increase in our visibility allowed us to absorb the shortfall from the end of the paid subscriptions and to start considering new development strategies. For example, we are currently producing a podcast series that highlights the articles published in the journal.

For journals already disseminated on Érudit, we can only recommend that they engage more closely with the platform. We have only ever found an attentive ear and good advice from the team at Érudit when doing so. Next, they should not hesitate to communicate with other journals that have already gone through the process. Of course, every situation is different, each journal has its history, its way of doing things. Every project has to be developed in a unique way.

In my opinion, the most important thing to remember before transitioning to open access is to be aware of the different open access models that exist and the philosophies that underpin them. For AEQUITAS, we worked as an editorial committee on the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science of 2021. We also reviewed the research note Érudit published in 2021 titled “Open-Access Principles and Policies.” That document is useful in that it describes the various models and paths to open access. That was very helpful for us. The diamond model just became a self-evident objective for us… Open access is not only a mode of dissemination, it is foremost a philosophy that impacts the entire operation of a journal.