In addition to our platform and growing collection of articles, Érudit is a digital infrastructure offering a wide range of services that support open scholarly publishing in Canada. But what does that mean, specifically?
Our series “The Team Behind Érudit” continues: this series introduces some of the members of our organization and the work they do on a daily basis. This month, please give a warm welcome to Simon van Bellen, our Senior Research Advisor!
What is a Senior Research Advisor?
My role is primarily to support the research conducted by our communities. To do so, I ensure that data is available, and I stay informed on emerging research trends. I also assist Érudit’s other teams with any questions related to (meta)data, content indexing, and the discoverability of journals. Finally, I help develop internal research projects with other members of the research team or by involving external researchers.
What does a typical work day look like for you?
In the morning, I might respond to an email from a researcher interested in accessing our data. Then I may meet with Véronique, our knowledge mobilization specialist, to discuss a popular science article we want to write together. This might be followed by a meeting with Érudit’s journal team to clarify the criteria that publications must meet in order to be included in the platform. In the afternoon, I may hold my weekly meeting with the research team to discuss current and upcoming projects. These days, I usually end my afternoons by consulting the OpenAlex database to advance a research project on the state of open access in Canada. I also regularly attend conferences and keep up with various science-related topics, such as research evaluation, AI development and multilingualism in publishing. In short, my tasks are quite varied.
I’m also a big coffee enthusiast, so I use my Aeropress coffee maker at least twice a day!
Which project that you have contributed to recently makes you particularly proud?
I was surprised by the interest generated by the directory of Canadian scholarly journals that I began compiling and later completed with other team members. This directory—which includes more than 1,000 journals and was built on the basis of other studies (hooray for open data!)—describes key characteristics of the journals: years of creation, open access availability, languages, types of licenses, disciplines, etc. Among other things, it has been used by librarians to better document journals relevant to their researchers.
What did you do before joining Érudit?
I completed a master’s degree in library and information science at the Université de Montréal in 2020. I also have a master’s degree in physical geography from Utrecht University (in the Netherlands, my home country) and a Ph.D. in environmental science from UQAM (2011). At the time, I was studying ecology and carbon dynamics in boreal peatlands, which is quite a far cry from my activities at Érudit! But I still use the statistics and data visualization skills I developed during my doctoral work in my research activities.
Before you leave us, can you recommend an article available on our platform that particularly impressed you?
I really like the article “La traduction en sciences humaines et sociales au Canada. Dynamiques générales et impacts du PAES” by Jean-Philippe Warren in Recherches sociographiques (2018). What I take away from this article is that the value of translating articles in the humanities and social sciences depends on several factors, including the level of integration of different (linguistic) research communities. Since issues surrounding translation and multilingualism are very pertinent at Érudit, this is a great example of an article we publish that can also inform our work as an organization.