John has been studying the turgidly-named by quite interesting Study of the Feasibility of Open-Access Publishing for Journals Funded by SSHRC's Aid to Scholarly and Transfer Journals Programme (PDF warning), which I also took a look at myself, with a view to ensuring we're on the right path and taking the right decisions, and looking at the possibility of SSHRC funding for ScanCan in the future. We do seem to be on the right track, although there's a lot more we could do in terms of:

• Specification of licensing and copyright terms up-front for authors (probably implying the adoption of a Creative Commons licence). We already knew about this.
• Institutional archiving of the journal. We should talk to the library about this.
• Encouraging authors to self-archive their own papers in their own archives.
• Having the journal indexed in one or more public indexing services. This would involve identifying appropriate indexing services, registering with them, and providing an appropriate API or metadata source for them to use.
• Looking at the SSHRC grant application in detail (deadline June 30) to see if we can qualify for support. The requirement for four published issues in the last two years would seem to rule us out, but we might qualify under an alternative criterion which requires twelve published articles in the last two years. If we can get funding, we can set some folks to work digitizing the old issues.