To encourage the adoption of Open Access models and address the financial barriers that can keep authors from making their work open access, the Federation offers supplemental OA grants through its Scholarly Book Awards, specifically for books and chapters. These grants aim to assist with the costs associated with publishing in OA formats, helping researchers share their work more broadly.
In recognition of Open Access Week 2026, we are excited to highlight the work of some of our recipients. Explore some of the revelations and ideas that open access to HSS scholarship makes possible.
Open Access books
Canadian democracy faced a fundamental question at the close of the Second World War, when officials proposed to banish 10,000 Japanese Canadians to Japan: Could citizens be expelled on the basis of race? Investigating the origins, administration, litigation, and aftermath of this attempt at gross injustice, we share the stories of Japanese Canadians who faced banishment and fought to resist it.
Children are often imagined as dependents who receive care, while migrant mothers are understood as the workers whose labour makes migration possible. Yet young people also play an important role through the work they do to sustain their families through separation, uncertainty, and change in the global care economy.
As economic and political uncertainties disrupt life in Canadian cities, policies, institutions, and places influence the lives of immigrants and temporary migrants, while newcomers also transform the cities in which they live. The conditions and supports available to international migrants play an important role in helping them thrive and contribute to shared community prosperity.
Every organization has a culture, even a law firm. Workplace culture significantly affects the members of an organization, and it is often the single most important factor in an organization’s success . . . or its failure.
Libraries and archives play an important role in linguistic minority communities, particularly in supporting the vitality of their collective memory.
Although they may appear unpredictable and spontaneous, social movements are driven by activist work, organizations, planning, and a long-term perspective. Their relationship with public policy is therefore not merely a matter of current circumstances, but also the result of certain institutional foundations that influence the way in which actors mobilize.
The first organized efforts at interfaith dialogue between French Catholics and Jews of Eastern European origin took place in Montreal in the early 1930s, nearly a century ago. They paved the way for remarkable progress in the postwar period that would not have been possible otherwise.
The French-Canadian elite supported the development of Francophone institutions that benefited the entire Francophone population, but it also tended to leave the neighborhood as it moved up the social ladder and to favor the “urban renewal” of the 1960s, because the elite had already settled in the new suburbs.
Why do the same laws work in some industries but not others? Drawing on intellectual property enforcement in China, Greyscale Legality shows how industry-specific mechanisms can reduce legal ambiguity, creating pockets of effective enforcement even where broader institutional support is limited.
In Knowledge Under Siege (2026) international luminaries from higher education chart a path interrogating and challenging the dangerous state of affairs facing universities, liberal democracies, and human rights.
The Debt of a Nation explores the history of Canada's public debt, and shows how debt financed colonialism implicates tax-payers in this Canadian economic model.
Literary Life After Death foregrounds a vast array of public commemorations of Canadian writers, including statues, murals, plaques, literary house museums, tourist sites, coins, stamps etc., as well as the names of streets and parks. Free public access offers essential knowledge to visitors to such sites, who can read my book on the same phone that they use to take pictures of places associated with their favourite writers. Open access makes it so much easier to expand understanding of our cultural and historical contexts.
What happens when geo-politics collides with ecosystem-politics in a large ocean area which reveals the need for multi-layered, flexible, and inclusive governance regimes to address modern environmental challenges.
In his work, Frank Stahnisch has documented and analyzed the cultural influences on the modern neurosciences in Central Europe as an interdisciplinary field, even before postwar American research centres made these traditions visible to Candian and US scientific communities. He has also shown how changing political conditions and racist sentiments affected the development of neurology and psychiatry, ultimately leading to the expulsion of many physicians and researchers under the Nazi regime and their migration to North America.
Open Access chapters
Comics can shift our attention from refugee faces to the places and spaces they inhabit, illustrating the historical and contemporary political forces that have produced the categories of 'refugee' and 'citizen' and inviting critical reflection on those positions.
The story of arsenic pollution at Yellowknife’s Giant Mine is a local one, but it is a powerful warning about the long-term environmental costs of resource development, an illustration of the connections between pollution and colonialism, and a testament to Indigenous resistance to extractive development on their lands. Without denying that resource extraction is a critical driver of employment and economic activity, the history of Giant Mine reveals the vast environmental costs that have often accompanied mining, and their very direct impacts on northern communities.
Women street artists in Mexico often depict real-life victims of gender-based violence, using familiar visual vocabulary to elicit empathy and compassion. Taglines addressing passersby foster conscientization and politicization, creating a virtuous circle as street art engages more women in the struggle.
We share one river of life, and our responsibilities to one another are the source and engagement of our freedom, shown in how we live, understand, and care through reciprocity, accountability, and the Good Mind. When we root ourselves in these relationships, we can live together with respect, peace, and friendship among peoples, and between people and the land.
Anishinaabe children and families resisted colonial education and maintained cultural continuity, challenging narratives that portray Indigenous peoples as passive recipients of colonialism. By making thousands of pages of archival records accessible alongside community knowledge and oral histories, open access helps ensure these histories are available to the communities whose stories they tell, as well as researchers, educators, and the broader public.
Randia’s Quiet Theatre reveals the politics of aging through ethnographic theatre-making with a Romani fortune teller, storyteller, and performer.
The famous Jesuit Relations from New France are not the unvarnished accounts of solitary priests for which they have often been taken. Instead, they are best understood as a collaborative, multi-vocal archive that was shaped in previously unappreciated ways by Indigenous people, women, lay settlers, editors in Paris, and even readers who eagerly awaited their appearance each year.