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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.
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Collection Content
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.
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
Appendix
Title List
List of journals contained in Érudit
(108.97 KB)
2018 Érudit Journal Title List
(135.51 KB)
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