Press release
Montréal (Québec), January 23, 2015 – The Érudit dissemination and research platform has received $1.4 million from the Canada Foundation of Innovation in order to strengthen the services it provides to Canadian universities, accelerate its technological development, and support the development of digital research in social sciences and the arts.
“Érudit was launched at Université de Montréal, where research in social sciences and the arts are a driving force,” said Guy Breton, the university’s rector. “Building from the base of a few scientific journals published on our campus, the project has now developed a national and even international reach. It is meeting an increasing demand for knowledge transfer by offering accessible services that adapted to researchers’ realities. The investment that the Canada Foundation for Innovation has announced today is recognition of the quality of the service and support for its further development.”
The funding has been provided within the framework of the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s (CFI) Major Science Initiatives Fund, which supports and strengthens cutting-edge national research infrastructure. Érudit is amongst the nine pieces of infrastructure considered to be the highest performing in the country, and it is the only one that has been selected in the fields of social sciences and the arts.
Érudit gives Canada’s research global visibility, and the CFI funding is recognition of the unique and indispensable role the organisation plays for researchers. In fact, in 2014, more than 21 million Érudit documents have been consulted and downloaded, and more than 70% of these consultations came from outside Canada. Such broad consultation is enhanced by Érudit’s policy toward open access to scholarly publications, which has made 95% of the documents published on the platform freely accessible to all.
“When the country’s researchers have access to state-of-the-art tools and facilities, they can ask bold questions, find remarkable answers and apply them in new and often unexpected ways. Their discoveries and innovations further Canada’s reputation as a nation known for its research excellence.” says Gilles Patry, president and CEO of the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Thanks to on-going investment by its founding universities, and in particular the essential support of Université de Montréal, Érudit has become a key tool for communication and knowledge transfer.
“Érudit’s strength is its ability to federate the many stakeholders in Canadian scientific publishing in order to create a large corpus of document whilst establishing partnerships both within Canada and abroad in order to ensure the best possible visibility for the published content,” explained Dominique Bérubé, Associate Vice-Rector of Research, Creation and Innovation at Université de Montréal.
The CFI’s funding will help Érudit expand its network of partners and develop its technical infrastructure, and it will enable the consolidation of its support of the research projects that rely on its body of documents.
About Érudit
Érudit, which is the largest electronic disseminator of French-language and bilingual Canadian research results, is a non-profit organization and interuniversity consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal.