Open Access Week 2024 with OJS

2024 marks the ten year anniversary of two of Scholars Portal’s publishing services: Open Journals Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP). We host OJS instances for 14 OCUL schools with a total of 210 journals and over 61,000 articles. OJS journals make up a very important part of our Open Access collection on the Scholars Portal Journals platform and to the Canadian scholarly record more broadly. Journal editors, librarians, and library publishing staff across the country invest significant time, energy, and care into publishing these journals to provide Open Access to critical scholarly research, and we’re very happy to do our part in hosting them at Scholars Portal.

If you’re curious to learn more about what is involved in supporting OJS at OCUL institutions, check out the Spotlight feature from our January 2024 newsletter, submitted by Emily Carlisle-Johnston and Kristin Hoffmann from Western Libraries.

Explore a handful of the incredible OJS journals available on Scholars Portal Journals below!

Kino: the Western Undergraduate Film Studies Journal (Western Libraries): KINO is a student-run publication that serves to exhibit the best of film theory and critique as written by undergraduate students at The University of Western Ontario. KINO is Western University’s oldest film publication, having been produced by members of the Western Undergraduate Film Society (WUFS) for over a decade. Over the course of its history, the publication has looked to promote student work through the print of an annual zine that selects the most significant papers written by students during the academic year. In conjunction with the pivot that WUFS has taken towards student-produced materials, KINO has expanded. The publication now highlights a broader body of work from Western’s foremost filmmakers and film critics, including pre-production materials such as scripts and storyboards, the continuation of class-related papers, as well as independent disquisitions related to anything on the silver screen. The publication offers the student body an opportunity to promote their textual work in relation to all things film, and encourages any student interested in publishing their materials, essays, or class papers to reach out and submit.

International Journal of Indigenous Health (Waakebiness-Bryce Institute for Indigenous Health): The International Journal of Indigenous Health (IJIH) was established to advance knowledge and understanding to improve Indigenous health. The Journal seeks to bring knowledge from diverse intellectual traditions together with a focus on culturally diverse Indigenous voices, methodologies and epistemology. The Journal is peer-reviewed, online, open-access and shares innovative health research across disciplines, Indigenous communities, and countries. Building on its trusted reputation for sharing community-relevant and high-quality knowledge, the IJIH welcomes submissions within the IJIH mandate from researchers and practitioners in Indigenous health around the world.

Brock Education Journal (Faculty of Education, Brock University): The main purpose of the journal is to foster practitioner inquiry (in schools, universities and beyond) and promote a deeper understanding of the experiences of teachers, teacher educators and learners. This open-access journal is a forum for educators and scholars to disseminate their work and make a substantial contribution to the field in Canada and around the world. The journal welcomes papers concerned with the research and practice of teaching and learning at all levels: elementary and secondary schools; teacher education and teacher development; higher education and adult education; and education in the community or workplace.

Blue Jay (Nature Saskatchewan): Blue Jay, Nature Saskatchewan’s renowned journal of conservation and nature, celebrates over sixty years of continuous publication. In Blue Jay you will read about backyard observations, careful and detailed observations of natural events, as well as the results of scientific research. Blue Jay also features poetry and artwork. Blue Jay is a longstanding naturalist publication that allows both scientists and amateurs, to share their research findings and observations of the natural history of Saskatchewan and the Prairie Provinces.

Nouvelle Revue Synergies Canada (University of Guelph): La Nouvelle Revue Synergies Canada (NRSC) a été créée en 2013 à l’école des langues et littératures de l’Université de Guelph. Elle continue le projet de la revue Synergies Canada (2009-2012) en publiant des études universitaires qui touchent à la littérature, la culture, la linguistique et la didactique des langues et cultures et le prolonge en acceptant des articles en anglais, français, espagnol, italien, allemand et portugais. Alliant les avantages du numérique en réseau avec les exigences scientifiques des revues imprimées, la Nouvelle Revue Synergies Canada veut répondre aux attentes et aux besoins des professeurs et étudiants en facilitant la diffusion de la recherche.

Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (University of Ottawa): Since 1988, the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) has been a prisoner written, academically oriented and peer reviewed, non-profit journal, based on the tradition of the penal press. It brings the knowledge produced by prison writers together with academic arguments to enlighten public discourse about the current state of carceral institutions. This is particularly important because with few exceptions, definitions of deviance and constructions of those participating in these defined acts are incompletely created by social scientists, media representatives, politicians and those in the legal community. These analyses most often promote self-serving interests, omit the voices of those most affected, and facilitate repressive and reactionary penal policies and practices. As a result, the JPP attempts to acknowledge the accounts, experiences, and criticisms of the criminalized by providing an educational forum that allows women and men to participate in the development of research that concerns them directly. In an age where `crime` has become lucrative and exploitable, the JPP exists as an important alternate source of information that competes with popularly held stereotypes and misconceptions about those who are currently, or those who have in the past, faced the deprivation of liberty.

Journal for Activist Science and Technology Education (University of Toronto): Underpinning JASTE is a progressive and more radical vision of science and technology education that responds more imaginatively, systematically and purposefully to local and global cultural and environmental imbalances and injustices. The journal gathers together articles in a diversity of formats and styles (including empirical reports, essays, poetry, illustrations) which look beyond how science and technology education are theorised and performed today (in diverse ranges of formal and informal settings) and embrace necessary social, ecological and pedagogical visions for the future. Articles are invited from a variety of different theoretical and empirical perspectives, with an emphasis on disclosing ways science and technology education becomes implicated in sustaining imbalances and injustices and how it can support action, resistance, defiance and renewal.

Critical Social Work (University of Windsor): Critical Social Work offers the opportunity for constructive dialogue in the interest of achieving social justice. We recognize the historical nature of both human capability and social justice. With such recognition, we do not attempt a definitive definition of either. In part the goal of Critical Social Work is to assist us collectively in recognizing the current potentials for social justice as well as the future possibilities. Further, we recognize that a contemporary definition of social justice must deal with the issues of legal, moral, and economic obligation of both the individual and the collective.

Witness: The Canadian Journal of Critical Nursing Discourse (York University School of Nursing): Witness is a Canadian online open access scholarly nursing journal. Together, contributors and readers form a collective of nurses whose practice, research, teaching, and way of being are rooted in social justice. We invite critical nursing discourse rooted in Social Justice, Advocacy, Power, Justice, Intersectionality, and Critical Social Theory.

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (University of Alberta Learning Services): EBLIP is a peer reviewed, open access journal published quarterly by the University of Alberta Learning Services. The purpose of the journal is to provide a forum for librarians and other information professionals to discover research that may contribute to decision making in professional practice. EBLIP publishes original research and commentary on the topic of evidence based library and information practice, as well as reviews of previously published research (evidence summaries) on a wide number of topics.