Synergies: An Overview and Progress Report

This poster will offer an overview of the CFI-funded
project Synergies: The Canadian Information Network
for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities,
and offer a progress report on the developments that
took place in the first year of its four-year funding cycle,
to be accompanied by a live demonstration of the alpha
version of the web-based search interface.
Synergies is a four-year project intended to be a national
distributed platform with a wide range of tools to support
the creation, distribution, access and archiving of
digital objects such as journal articles. It will enable the
distribution and use of social sciences and humanities
research, as well as to create a resource and platform for
pure and applied research. In short, Synergies will be a
research tool and a dissemination tool that will greatly
enhance the potential and impact of Social Sciences and
Humanities scholarship.
Canadian social sciences and humanities research published
in Canadian journals and elsewhere, especially
in English, is largely confined to print. The dynamics
of print mean that this research is machine-opaque and
hence invisible on the internet, where many students
and scholars begin and sometimes end their background
research. In bringing Canadian social sciences and humanities
research to the internet, Synergies will not
only bring that research into the mainstream of worldwide
research discourse but also it will legitimize online
publication in social sciences and humanities. The acceptance
of this medium will open the manner in which
knowledge can be represented. On one plane, researchers
will be able to take advantage of an enriched media
palette—color, image, sound, moving images, multimedia.
On a second plane, researchers will be able to take
advantage of interactivity. And on a third plane, those
who query existing research will be able to broaden their
vision by means of navigational interfaces, multilingual
interrogation and automatic translation, metadata and
intelligent search engines, and textual analysis. On still
another plane scholars will be able to expand new areas
of knowledge such as bibliometrics and technometrics,
new media analysis, scholarly communicational analysis
and publishing studies. This poster will introduce the
main goals of the Synergies project and the impact it will
have on the production and dissemination of Canadian
research.
Scholarly research and communication are undergoing
an evolutionary transformation. Research environments,
scholarly communication, knowledge sharing and services
are moving to the digital and becoming networkoriented.
This evolution raises many new questions
about models of knowledge sharing. Emerging research
environments, data providers, publishers, and libraries
will need to develop and deploy a wide variety of new
resource models to address these new realities. These resource
models will lower the barriers to access and exploitation
of research and information resources, serve
the needs of individuals and both general and specialized
communities, and integrate new models of publication,
annotation, communication and knowledge sharing.
Synergies will provide a needed infrastructure for the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
(SSHRC) to follow through its in-principle commitment
to open access and facilitate its implementation by extending
the current venues and means for online publishing
in Canada. With Synergies in place the funding
of journals based on dissemination effectiveness rather
than sales levels will become both feasible for journals
and possible as an evaluative criterion for SSHRC funding.
The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and
Social Sciences, with a membership of over 30,000, has
also recently adopted a position in favor of open access
and indicate the role that Synergies can play.
Alongside a new web interface and tools for accessing
information produced in Canada (with the alpha version
to be demonstrated alongside the poster), Synergies will
be a digital publishing platform for scholarly publications,
with its first goal being to offer digital publishing
services prepared to international standards with the
lowest cost possible for the editorial production side.
This project will thus work as a sustainable, open, epublication
infrastructure for the academy.
In sum, this poster will contain an overview of the project,
and progress reports on its five regional components.
Synergies is the result of a collaboration among five core
universities which have been working together for several
years. With each partner bringing its own expertise
to the initiative, a genuine collaboration resulted in an
infrastructure which was conceived from the start as
truly scalable and extendable. Each regional node will
integrate the input of current and future regional partners
in the development of Synergies, thus continuing to extend
its pan-Canadian dimension. For instance, the PKP
project will be introduced within the broader context of scholarly communications. The Ontario region will be
presented as a case study, with particular emphasis on
project integration with Scholars Portal, a digital library.
(The other three regions will also be included in this
progress report to the Digital Humanities community.)