Érudit | eDesiderata

Tabbed

Overview

Érudit is a publishing platform for scholarly and cultural journals, books, proceedings, theses, documents, and data developed by a nonprofit Canadian publishing consortium founded in 1998. Archival runs of journal publications published prior to a moving wall of current content are available through open access, while the remainder is available through subscription.

Provider:

Érudit Consortium

Posted:

Apr 6, 2012 4:37pm

Updated:

Jan 30, 2023 1:28pm

Source

CRL reviews are based on independent research. Information is researched by CRL staff and other specialists at CRL libraries. See CRL Review for additional source notes.

Details

Collection Content

Subject Areas:

Arts and Humanities

Health and Life Sciences

Science, Engineering and Technology

Social Sciences

Resource Types:

Dissertations

Electronic books

Electronic journals

Major Languages:

French

English

- Denotes data sourced directly from publisher

Content Details:


Geographic coverage	Canada (60%), Europe, Americas, Africa, Asia
Chronological coverage	some journals from 1930s; majority from the 1950s/1960s
Content types	journals, ebooks, reports, data sets
Source formats	digital
Total titles	c. 175 (plus 3,000 reports)
Total pages	142,815 articles
Digital collection launch date	1998
Update frequency	weekly
Collection ongoing	Y
Completion date	NA
Available supplements	NA

Specifications

Metadata:


MARC records available	Y
Creator of MARC records	NA
Structural metadata exposed anywhere?	Y
Subject authorities used	NA
Name authorities used	NA

Technical Platform:


Browser compatibility	Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Explorer &+
Authentication options	IP address recognition
Archiving solution – master files	NA
Archiving solution – derivative files	NA
Availability in web discovery tools	Y
Open URL target	Y
Federated searching, z39.50	Y
Local host option	N
Usage statistics	Y

Interface Tools:


Full text displayed	Y
Page images	Y
Color images	Y (80% of the cultural collection)
Search full text	Y
Advanced search	Y
Search within results	Y
Limit results by dates and/or document types	Y
Display highlighted search terms	Y
Display snippet -- search term in context	N
Relevance sorting	Y
Save searches	N
Download PDF	Y
Download HTML	Y
Print page	Y
Print full document	Y
Export citations	Y
Annotation tools	N
Cross-product searching	NA
ILL	N
Restrictions on use	N

Terms and Provider Details

Terms:


	Options
Subscription option	Y
Purchase option	N
Multiple year payments option	NA
Hosting charges	N
List of purchasers available	N
Sample license available	N
MARC records purchase fee	N
Price tier basis	NA

Provider:

Érudit Consortium

Website:

http://www.erudit.org

Main Address:

Pavillon 3744 Jean-Brillant Street, Bureau 6500, BRDV-CEN-R

C.P. 6128, succ. Centre-ville

Montreal, QC H3C 3J7

Canada

CRL Review

Collection Content:

The original partnership was formed by the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and Université du Quebec a Montréal. Currently 150 publishers participate, including many research institutes. The organizers note a broad goal: “Focusing on the dissemination of French-language Canadian journals in the humanities and social sciences, Érudit also includes journals in the natural sciences, as well as bilingual and English titles.”

Journals are a strong component of the content offered, totaling 111 mostly scholarly and some cultural titles including a broad subject range: humanities and social sciences (89 titles); law and political science (10); economics and management (5); and life sciences (13). The journals are peer reviewed. The majority of the articles published (60%) are from Canadian sources. The access model, combining subscription materials with open access content, is very interesting. The moving wall maintains a two-year subscription basis for scholarly journals and three-year restricted access for cultural magazines.

There is a small (just over twenty) collection of ebooks from various Canadian university presses and learned societies. The subjects of the ebooks, while primarily in the social sciences, include natural science topics such as proceedings of a biotechnology conference. The ebooks are presented in various formats according to what has been provided by the participating publishers. Formats include PDF, HTML, Microsoft ereader, and Open eBook, but not all formats are available for each title.

Érudit also provides a “Documents and Data Repository” to host reports, preprints, and raw data. There are currently just over 3,000 documents on file.

Delivery:

The interface is available in three languages: French, English, and Spanish. The basic search function is quite straightforward, but also offers several flexible features. Results can be sorted by relevance or format of the item. Search results can be filtered by several facets including date, language, and type of publication. Unlimited downloading is allowed, which is an advantage.

One potentially confusing effect is the wide subject range, which can yield scholarly content in the social sciences or biotechnology as well as cultural commentary. It would be useful to limit searches to particular subject areas in addition to publication types. By contrast, the CAIRN portal of French publications has specific subject collection divisions, or “bouquets”. (CAIRN also offers more journals: 256 versus the current 111 titles from Érudit).

Discoverability is supported in several ways, such as permanent urls for all articles and MARC records for the ebooks. The document repository is based on the popular DSpace platform and uses Open Archives Initiative protocol for metadata dissemination; Érudit now also provides metadata to Primo and Primo Central web scale discovery tools.

Terms:

Bundled subscriptions are available with discounts for consortiums. Érudit supports an open model with more than 90% of the content currently available without restriction. Nearly 75% of subscription revenue is passed back to the journal publishers.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

This user-friendly platform built on open standards should continue to be very accessible and viable as it expands content, even though the content is only moderate currently. The commitment to integrating open access content, apparently with seamless integration, is well suited to its targeted scholarly and cultural community audiences. At the same time, this collection on its own does not seem to form a comprehensive destination for scholarly content. Holdings are spread rather thin across an unusual combination of humanities, social science, and technical subjects. In fact, Érudit's greatest strength seems to be as a standards-based platform prepared to host a variety of digital publishing. By enabling discovery of metadata in web scale tools and open archives harvesting, the resource could provide valuable supplementary content primarily in the French language.

Reviewers:

Center for Research Libraries

Virginia Kerr - Digital Program Manager

Sources

Sources for this review include information publicly posted or obtained directly from the publisher; data collected by CRL staff and specialists at CRL libraries; and examination of the digital collection when possible. Other sources are noted where cited. CRL continues to gather additional information on this resource and to solicit critical assessment.

CRL Offers & Status

Status	Current	Description
CRL Flagged	no	Potential interest to CRL community
Offer Pending	no	Currently a candidate for CRL offer
Active Offer	yes	Currently offered for purchase or new subscription
Trial Access	no	Available for trial
Renewal Offer	no	Currently offered for renewal
Expired Offer	no	Past offers
Inactive / Declined	no	No longer under consideration by CRL
Reviewed by CRL	yes	Evaluation available by CRL and community
Special Access	no	Member-only access available for a limited time