Throughout my first year as Chair of the Board of Directors, I have had the pleasure of witnessing exciting new initiatives and innovative collaborations come to life at CRKN. As the Canadian knowledge sector rebounds from the disruptions of the pandemic with an invigorating drive to enable world-leading research and innovation, CRKN has an increasingly vital role to play.

As a result of CRKN’s strong licensing negotiations, researchers at member institutions can access the journal articles and scholarly outputs that they need to strengthen their own research programs. And now, with new read and publish agreements, these researchers can also make their research available open access at no cost to the researcher, levelling the playing field and bringing our cutting-edge Canadian research to the global community. CRKN has also continued to invest in building a strong and vibrant Canadian publishing ecosystem, through partnerships with not-for-profit publishers to enable a strong open access future for Canadian publishing. As we begin to wrap up our current 2019-2024 strategic plan and prepare for the next, we are increasing our focus on open access advocacy, including sharing community-developed tools and building relationships with collaborators that represent the research community and its needs.

As part of our work to support researchers, CRKN has been leading the Canadian persistent identifier (PID) community. Working with our colleagues at institutions across Canada, we have begun developing a national PID strategy that will support the adoption and management of persistent identifiers in Canada. With PID strategies already developed in countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia, Canada has a clear opportunity to develop a set of principles and goals for PID use in Canada to reduce the administrative burden on researchers and enable an interconnected open access future.

CRKN also placed an increased emphasis on persistent identifiers this year, as we respond to the need for a dedicated Canadian PID Strategy. A critical component of the research ecosystem, PIDs enhance discovery and interoperability across global infrastructures, leading to greater clarity and efficiency in research methods. Funding received from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada has spurred on development of this strategy while supporting the ORCID Canada and DataCite Canada consortia, and we look forward to developing this work further. 

Over the past year, CRKN’s heritage activities have coalesced around Digital Collections of the Future, the ambitious project to evolve Canadiana into distributed digital infrastructure that supports access to Canada’s rich and diverse cultural content. CRKN is delighted to be partnering with the University of Ottawa as the administrative lead institution for a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Innovation Fund proposal and has, over the past year, developed strong governance structures to support this project. By developing this critical infrastructure, CRKN will enable innovative and inclusive research that responds to our most urgent societal and technological challenges.

As I have seen throughout my first term as Chair, these immense projects could not have taken shape without the support of CRKN’s member community. Bringing together 85 libraries, research institutions, and non-profit organizations under the same vision is no small feat, and CRKN has done so expertly, thanks to its skilled Board, committees, task groups, and staff. This spirit of cooperation on such a wide range of activities is also a testament to the leadership of CRKN’s previous Chair, Dr. Annette Trimbee, who ably stewarded the organization through the last three years and set a precedent for excellence. By leveraging member library budgets collectively to support the needs of the research community and to transform scholarly communication, CRKN enables our institutions to truly accelerate Canadian research and innovation.

I look forward with eagerness to the achievements of the coming year at CRKN, and I am grateful for the opportunity to be a part of them.

Sincerely,

Daniel Jutras

Rector, Université de Montréal

Chair, CRKN Board of Directors

What a wonderful year of progress and partnership at CRKN! Once again, the hard work of our Board, committees, task groups, and staff have led to meaningful outcomes for our membership and the wider Canadian research ecosystem. I am pleased to report on some of our most significant achievements of the past year.

The Content Strategy Committee, alongside our staff Licensing Team, negotiated a cost-neutral transformative agreement with Wiley that is expected to result in over 4,000 new Canadian authored articles to be published open access. We also focused our efforts on Canadian partnerships for open access, working with Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) to offer a transformative agreement removing barriers to publishing in five CSP journals, and with University of Toronto Press for access to the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy through the innovative Subscribe to Open model. Finally, we renewed our long-standing partnership with Érudit for an additional two years, preparing for the launch of a long-term partnership agreement planned for 2025.

CRKN staff worked closely with the Preservation and Access Committee and stakeholders to add new user features to Canadiana and to expand the collections with two significant additions of member content – the McGill University Library Map collection, containing over 22,000 Canadian maps, and the University of Regina Student Publication collection. These projects, along with ongoing infrastructure development, are preparing us for our long-term goal of evolving Canadiana into world-leading infrastructure that brings together Canadian cultural and historical data into a single network to enable innovative research. We are working to support this development through an application to the Innovation Fund of the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

Underpinning much of our work, both in content licensing and in heritage infrastructure, is our support of persistent identifiers (PIDs). This year, we were fortunate to receive funding once again through the Digital Research Alliance of Canada to support the ORCID Canada and DataCite Canada consortia, and the development of a national PID strategy. We were also very pleased to welcome the Fonds de recherche du Québec to ORCID Canada this year as our newest consortium member and representative of government interest in PIDs and open scholarship.

As always, I thank our Board and committees for their dedicated oversight and guidance of CRKN’s activities, which has made it the growing and vital organization it is today. My gratitude extends also to our staff, who provide the energy and insight that drive our objectives and who do the hard work of enacting our goals on behalf of our members. Finally, to the membership: thank you for your trust in CRKN, your willingness to support bold action, and your spirit of innovation and collaboration. It is an honour and a pleasure to serve such world-class institutions. As we begin another year of working together, I continue to be inspired by our shared achievements.

Sincerely,

Clare Appavoo

Executive Director