Science and Research Committee on Oct. 31st, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to the 21st meeting of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of June 23, 2022. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, June 16, 2022, we are meeting on the study of research and scientific publication in French.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules for the witnesses and members. Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on the videoconference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself. Please mute your mic when you are not speaking. For interpretation, those participating through Zoom have the choice, at the bottom of their screen, between three channels: floor, English or French. Members attending in person in the room can use their headset after selecting the channel desired. A reminder that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

Members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. Members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

I would now like to welcome our witnesses.

Colleagues, it's my honour to announce our witnesses today. We're very glad they have joined us, especially tonight.

Many of you will have children, and it's a busy night. Happy Halloween, all.

From Consortium Érudit we welcome Tanja Niemann, Executive Director. From Université du Québec en Outaouais, we welcome Dr. Adel El Zaïm, Vice-President of Research, Creation, Partnership and Internationalisation.

You will have five minutes for your opening statement. At the four and a half minute mark, I will hold up this card. It will let you know that you have 30 seconds left. We aim to be fair, so you'll have 30 seconds.

With that, I would like to welcome Madame Niemann.

The floor is yours. Welcome. We're looking forward to hearing from you.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Madam Chair, I have a question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

I hear Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Good evening, Madam Chair.

Can you confirm that the tests have been successfully completed for all the witnesses?

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you, Mr. Blanchette-Joncas. I will ask our excellent clerk.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Keelan Buck]

Yes, Mr. Blanchette‑Joncas, I can confirm that all the tests were conducted today or last week, and they were all successful.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so much, Mr. Clerk.

Thank you, Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.

I also see a hand up from Mr. Lauzon.

Mr. Lauzon, do you have a question? Mr. Lauzon...?

I think, Mr. Clerk, we may have lost Mr. Lauzon.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

His hand was up from before, Madam Chair. It wasn't from now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Okay, thank you.

If we could start, then, we look forward to hearing from Madame Niemann.

The floor is yours.

[Tanja Niemann, Executive Director, Consortium Érudit]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Good evening, members of the committee. Thank you for having me. The team and the members of Consortium Érudit join me in saying that we are honoured to testify as part of this important study on research and publication in French. From the outset I would like to point out three things to the committee.

First, know that Canada has in Érudit a jewel in the digital delivery of knowledge in human and social sciences in French, as well as in English. The founding members, Université de Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal and Université Laval, have been investing in Consortium Érudit for nearly 25 years. Other major investments come from the Government of Quebec and then the Government of Canada through two agencies, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines. Through this public funding and a capacity to bring together players from the research community, including university libraries in Canada and abroad, Érudit has become a great ship with wind in its sails. It is a success story that needs to be acknowledged. The project was born in Quebec and today it is a great Canadian success.

If you are looking for a digital library, erudit.org has an exceptional offering, disseminating more than 140,000 articles and collaborating with more than 200 Canadian scientific journals in disciplines as diverse as criminology, geography, visual arts, history or health sciences. Erudit.org is a digital infrastructure combining cutting edge technology and human knowledge. In the vast majority of cases, the content is distributed at no cost to the reader and is therefore accessible to everyone: the universities, but also, and especially, the general public. We work on the discoverability of science in French and are committed to open source knowledge sharing. The Érudit platform is well used. Nearly 34 million documents are downloaded annually by 5.6 million users. Nearly two thirds of these consultations come from abroad, clearly demonstrating that the knowledge produced in Canada is researched internationally.

I am very grateful to all those who believe in Érudit, those who support us financially and as partner-collaborators. I am also thankful to the thousands of researchers who use Érudit's services daily.

Second, I would say that on the high seas, where Érudit navigates, there are immense challenges, waves and storms to negotiate. The biggest challenge right now is the ability to compete with titans, international corporate giants. The oligopoly of large publishers, an issue that has come before this committee, disseminates very little science in French because it is not profitable enough. In that context, without players like Érudit, science in French simply would not be disseminated or would be for only a small group willing to pay for it. With Érudit, Canada conserves scientific heritage in human and social sciences, maintains control over the results of research done within institutions and keeps this knowledge and data on local servers to use them independently without any commercial considerations. With Érudit, we also support a central function of so-called national and international journals, which is to provide a place of publication for the results of research into specifically Canadian problems, likely to directly affect our society.

Third, and by way of conclusion, I would say that on the high seas, where Érudit is currently navigating with those who lead these Canadian academic journals, the sea is quite agitated. We are living in a time of turbulence and change. There are both great opportunities and great risks. I would say that we need to reclaim scholarly publishing and that requires stable and predictable funding, as well as funding programs that favour the non-commercial model, open science, valorization and the recognition of researchers who ensure leadership for journals and the supervision, writing, evaluation and review of articles. Enhancing knowledge generation in French to its rightful place as a public good is of national interest to us. We need a concerted effort by all players to get through this storm.

Recent political announcements on open science and open access, such as Plan S or the new White House policy, are encouraging to me.

Will we finally take these opportunities to build the most open and diverse system there can be?

Thank you for your attention.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Madame Niemann, we are grateful that you're here, and thank you for your testimony.

Now we'll go to Professor El Zaïm for five minutes, please.

[Dr. Adel El Zaïm, Vice-President, Research, Creation, Partnership and Internationalisation, Université du Québec en Outaouais]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Members of the committee, let me thank your for your excellent work, which will have an impact on the Canada of the future. On behalf of the Université du Québec en Outaouais, I assure you of our full collaboration for the future of science and research in Canada.

As you know, for decades we have been questioning the place of language and the place of French in scientific research and publications. Colleagues who spoke before me provided you with excellent ideas and shared a lot of data with you.

As for me, I would invite you to think more about what motivates a francophone researcher to conduct and disseminate their research in English. I will also make some recommendations.

To understand the problems, I would like to make the distinction between the following two steps: conceptualizing and conducting the research, then disseminating the results of the research.

In the first step, the researcher outlines their plan and drafts research questions, hypotheses and methodology. They also have to read their grant applications and submit them for review in order to receive funding before undertaking the work. This is the step where the language of education and the language of the discipline come into play, as well as the language of the collaborators and the language in which proposals and research reports are drafted.

A discipline developed in English cannot be required and expanded in French if it is not completely translated, taught and disseminated in that language. Canada has been a pioneer when it comes to new terminology and disseminating science and discovery in both languages.

My first recommendation is that Canada commit to translating new science and the results of research done here in the country's two official languages.

My second recommendation is that these translations and terminologies be disseminated globally free of charge, especially within the francophonie in Canada and abroad.

In a country like ours, we expect academics to be bilingual, even multi-lingual, but that is not always the case. During his appearance at the committee, the vice-president of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada assured members that project proposals in French are treated appropriately, suggesting that jury members are able to read and evaluate applications in French. I tend to believe him. It is more a question of the definition of bilingualism and the degree of mastery of the French language required for reading, understanding and debating in French.

When it comes to language, economy of effort is well established. People switch languages to communicate more easily and to make others more comfortable. This applies in developing and evaluating research projects.

At this stage, I would like to make two other recommendations.

The first is that project proposal evaluators master the language the proposal is drafted in and be able to publicly debate it.

The second is that Canada, through research councils, develop measures to help anglophone scientists master French.

The publication and dissemination of results comes with its own linguistic mechanisms and requirements. The questions we should be asking are the following: is the publication geared to students, collaborators, the community or policymakers? Which publisher, platform or journal is publishing the results and what is the degree of their influence? What are the roles of indexing and the influence of indicators such as the impact of journals?

Unfortunately, most international journals and databases give little importance to languages other than English. Researchers wanting to increase their influence and the number of times they are cited will use English, thereby fuelling the vicious circle.

I have two more recommendations.

The first is that Canada ally with other countries to increase the number of journals and books in French and to ensure they are disseminated and suitably indexed on platforms such as Érudit, for example.

The second is that Canada influence producers of major databases and give an equal place to French publications, where they exist.

Scientific research is increasingly international thanks to globalization and the resurgence of global problems confronting researchers and decision makers. However, these same problems have local specificities that are imperative to study and disseminate in the local language.

Many countries learned that the hard way since the research published in English or a foreign language was not understood by their own citizens and decision makers.

We are not there in Canada. However, we need involvement and a serious commitment from our institutions to ensure that all Canadians can develop—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Excuse me, Professor El Zaïm.

[Dr. Adel El Zaïm]

—and learn—

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Can you hear me? I'm sorry to interrupt.

I know that our committee will be very glad to hear from you. Thank you for being here to testify.

With that, we will now go to our members, who are keen to ask you questions. Tonight we will begin with Mr. Tochor.

Before I turn the floor over, I want to welcome member of Parliament Arya to our committee. Also, I would like to take a moment to thank our clerk, our analysts, our interpreters and everyone who supports this committee. We're very grateful to you.

With that, I will turn it over to Mr. Tochor for six minutes, please.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much to our witnesses for their presentations tonight. I appreciate Tanja being here in person.

I have some questions about the work you guys are doing. I apologize for not fully fleshing out the research before coming here tonight.

Can you tell me a little bit more? You're not a journal. You're not a review. You're a database of reports. Is that correct?

[Tanja Niemann]

Yes, that is correct.

We are a platform and a disseminator. We are not a publisher. We work with more than 200 journals that are independent editorial entities and have a production and dissemination contract with Érudit.

We bring together content produced independently on our campuses by researchers who are directors at these journals. For example, we have some in criminology, sociology and history, from campuses at the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta, the University of Manitoba, Simon Fraser University, Dalhousie University and here and there across the country.

We intervene at the end of the editorial process, when all the editorial work is done and the article is ready. We receive these articles and we structure the content to make it legible by machine. We index all this in databases. We take care of a preservation strategy and send all this data on the Web, in databases of catalogues and libraries around the world to increase the chance that these articles are discovered, read, and found when searched with a key word.

What is more, we also ensure that everything is found on Google and is discoverable by Google.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

To follow up on that question, what would stop you from publishing more, be it every piece of work, every piece of research done in French, or if there is, perhaps, some kind of research that is done related to the field of French? I guess my question is this: What are the limiting factors to having more things in that database?

[Tanja Niemann]

Thank you.

Thank you for the question.

We work in human and social sciences.

Érudit was founded in Quebec with a view to preserving a place of publication for French journals in order to prevent commercial publishers from buying them up and ultimately not publishing them because they deal with topics that are more local, regional or Canadian and the company publishes international journals only. The idea was to preserve this publication capacity for journals that deal with local topics.

What is more, Érudit does not limit itself to French; many journals of this kind come from English Canada. At its core, Érudit hosts francophone content because its members are Quebec universities that founded it, but now it is a national platform that hosts content in both languages. For now, the content is mostly in French, but a lot of English content has been added over the past few years through very productive and fruitful collaborations with university libraries and other anglophone journals.

The thing that is preventing us from growing more quickly is not our limited capacity. This project is funded by research funding and often we even have to press for the creation of funding programs to which we are eligible. It is a complicated financial arrangement based on different sources of funding. We are a non-profit organization so we depend on support from the universities. We develop many partnerships and that is very demanding. For now, we maximize the resources we have and the funding we get from contributors.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

In the last six years, have the monies received from federal programming increased, decreased or stayed flat?

[Tanja Niemann]

It has increased because we really worked very hard on that. We tried to make good progress and show it to the funding agencies.

We were successful in the grant applications. Every year, during the last three or four years, I did a major grant application with my team to work on the success and to get more grant money.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Quickly, you said that two-thirds of the people who are downloading articles are overseas. Where in the world, roughly, would the majority of those two-thirds be? It is French-speaking countries, I'm assuming.

[Tanja Niemann]

Yes. It's not only French-speaking, though.

After Canada, it's France. Then it's the U.S. Then it's countries like Germany, where we have heavy research countries. Then it's other countries from the Francophonie—mainly Belgium, Cameroon, Algeria and so on.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

I think we're out of time here. Thank you so much for the presentation.

By the way, Madam Chair, the Conservatives are going to take the first round on all the panels, but the additional panel rounds will go to the Bloc.

[The Chair, Liberal, Kirsty Duncan]

Thank you so much, Mr. Tochor. You're always so gracious.

With that, we will go to Ms. Bradford for six minutes.

The floor is yours.