Investing $25 Million in the social sciences and humanities

	Hon. Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry

It’s not everyday that social sciences and humanities research gets a $25 million shot in the arm. So it’s not surprising that a number of high profile individuals, including federal Minister of Industry Maxime Bernier, gathered at Morriset Library on February 8 for a landmark funding announcement for two major projects — one led by the University of Ottawa.

The funding announcement was made by Eliot Phillipson, President and CEO of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).  

With 19.1 million dollars in funding, the University of Ottawa project — Digital Content Infrastructure for the Human and Social Sciences — will provide researchers at 67 Canadian universities with electronic access to an extensive range of key content and intellectual property in the social sciences and humanities from around the world. Managed by the University of Ottawa on behalf of a partnership of universities known as the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, the project will build on the Canadian National Site Licensing Project, an earlier CFI-funded initiative.

The second project, led by the Université de Montréal will receive $5.8 million. Entitled The Canadian Information Network for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, this initiative will see the creation of a national network for the production, storage and access to digitized knowledge produced in Canada, including peer reviewed journal articles, datasets, theses, conference proceedings, scholarly books, and other ‘grey literature.’ Researchers from across the country and around the world will be able to access Canadian scholarly material, including 170 journals currently assisted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, using a common searching tool.