Grant and Funding Programs Offered by Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN)

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) is a national, member-driven consortium bringing together 88 Canadian universities, research institutions, and major libraries to expand access to global scholarship and Canada’s documentary heritage. CRKN’s core activities centre on negotiating large-scale content licenses, advancing open access publishing models, and preserving digital heritage through its Canadiana program and Trustworthy Digital Repository.

By aggregating demand and resources, CRKN reduces costs for member institutions and channels financial support to external partners such as publishers, non-commercial scholarly journals, and heritage organizations. Through the Partnership for Open Access with Érudit, CRKN administers ongoing financial support for diamond and community-led journals, helping them operate without charging fees to authors or readers. It also structures transformative and read-and-publish agreements that repurpose subscription spending to cover open access publishing, effectively funding authors’ ability to publish open access at no cost to them.

CRKN’s Licensing & Open Access program coordinates over fifty national licenses and open access initiatives on behalf of its members. Beneficiaries include academic and public research libraries, researchers, students, and the broader public who gain affordable or free access to scholarly content. Non-commercial scholarly journals benefit from direct financial support streams and improved sustainability through collectively funded models.

The Canadiana program provides online access to tens of millions of pages of digitized books, newspapers, government documents, and archival materials documenting Canada’s history. CRKN collaborates with heritage institutions and operates preservation infrastructure to keep these materials accessible over the long term, while also offering digitization services to members and other non-commercial organizations to grow the collections.

Through its Persistent Identifiers program, CRKN administers Canada-wide consortia for ORCID iDs and DataCite DOIs, helping institutions register persistent identifiers and integrate them into research workflows. This work supports Canadian funders, universities, government departments, and publishers by improving discoverability, interoperability, and tracking of research outputs and contributors.

CRKN’s work is guided by a board of directors, member committees such as the Content Strategy Committee and Preservation and Access Committee, and advisory groups focused on persistent identifiers. Its licensing principles emphasize sustainable scholarly communications, equity of access, open access scholarship, and transparency of fees and negotiations. While detailed, program-level eligibility and application procedures are often managed through member institutions and partner platforms, CRKN consistently positions its programs as collective mechanisms to redistribute costs and provide financial and in-kind support for open, accessible scholarly and heritage resources across Canada.