A humanities research journal championed by a Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) instructor has been awarded $120,000 in federal funding to support its operations for the next three years.
Dr. Lindsey Seatter, a KPU English instructor and founding editor of the Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH) journal, says the funding will help sustain the peer-reviewed open access publication — and allow it to grow.
“It feels really rewarding to receive this grant. Not only does it mean we can ensure the productivity of the journal over the next three years, but we can also consider scaling up in ways that we just haven’t been able to before,” says Seatter, who serves as the journal’s editor-in-chief.
IDEAH is a Canadian online journal that publishes work in fields such as media studies, scholarly communication, digital public humanities, textual studies and digital pedagogy. It is among the winners of the recently-announced 2025 Aid to Scholarly Journals (ASJ) competition of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
IDEAH promotes an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Submissions are encouraged from authors across institutional faculties as well as from individuals working in academic-aligned roles and independent scholars.
“We’re working with folks who are literary scholars, media studies scholars, people in project management and pedagogy and all sorts of things, so it’s bringing people together that might not actually publish in the same venue very often,” says Seatter. “I also am very proud that the journal not only publishes works by tenured academics, but also graduate students and undergraduate students working with professors, and academic-aligned individuals like librarians or people working in information technology.”
The ASJ grants aim to increase the readership of scholarly journals and navigate the changing landscape of digital publishing by supporting research that is open access and without reader or author fees.
In IDEAH, all articles published are available free to the public immediately upon publication. Seatter sees that as an important democratization of knowledge.
“There is maybe no time in history where it’s more important to have access to reliable information. And when we are taking research that is well done, that is verifiable, that has good, solid scholarship, thoughtfulness and critical thinking behind it, and then we put it behind a paywall, that feels antithetical to what we want to do as citizens of the world.
“We want to share information with each other openly, and we want to share information that is true and honest and thoughtful and careful. Having items be open access means we are able to generate and disseminate knowledge among everybody that holds those values at the centre. So in an age of misinformation and disinformation, to have good scholarship that's open access is incredibly useful for us, not just in the university, but really the world at large.”
Past editions of the IDEAH journal are available on the PubPub publishing platform. Future issues, including the June 2026 edition, will be available through digital platform Érudit.
