March 17, 2006

Federation elects new vice-president

OTTAWA – Jean-Claude Guédon, professor of comparative literature at the Université de Montréal, is the newest executive member of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Canada’s strongest voice for researchers, students and practitioners in the humanities and social sciences. Guédon was elected Vice-President, Research Dissemination effective immediately until November 2008.

“We are extremely pleased to have access to the expertise that Professor Guédon is bringing to the table,” said Federation president Donald Fisher. “He is an internationally-renowned expert on Open Access which is one of the most important issues facing the humanities and social sciences community today.”

Dr Guédon has been involved with the Federation for many years. He is a former co-chair of the Society for Digital Humanities and currently sits as their representative on the General Assembly. In addition, Dr Guédon is a member of the working groups on Copyright and Open Access.

For more than 15 years Dr Guédon has been observing the effects of digitization and computer networks on culture and research. In 1991, with the help of various colleagues, he launched the first Canadian electronic scholarly journal, Surfaces. He has served on a variety of boards, most recently the Canadian Library Consortium for Site Licenses and is currently a member of the Sub Board of the Information Programme of the Open Society Institute. He also sits on the Board of eIFL.net, a non-governmental organization helping about 4000 academic libraries from fifty countries to gain better access to scholarly literature, as well as the Québec CREPUQ sub committee on new technologies and its working group on intellectual property. Dr Guédon is currently researching the globalization of scholarly communications as well as the implications of digitizing culture.

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences represents 68 learned societies, 72 universities and colleges, and over 30,000 researchers, practitioners and students. The Federation works to communicate the value of research and scholarship in the human sciences. It is the permanent secretariat of the annual "Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences,” which draws together more than 6,000 delegates from across Canada and abroad. The Federation also manages the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program which provides subsidies for the publication of approximately 150 scholarly books each year. Over its 64 year history, this program has supported more than 5,000 works by Canadian scholars, including Antonine Maillet, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Northrop Frye, Sylvia Ostry, and Harold Adams Innis.

For further information, please contact:
Jody Ciufo, Associate Executive Director
(613) 2386112 ext. 306
www.fedcan.ca