Synergies: On the Production of a Sustainable, Open, e-Publication Infrastructure for the Academy

poster / demo / art installation
Authorship
  1. 1. Michael Eberle-Sinatra

    Université de Montréal

Work text
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Synergies: On the Production of a Sustainable, Open, e-Publication Infrastructure for the Academy
Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, michael.eberle.sinatra@umontreal.ca Université de Montréal,
This poster will present an overview of Synergies: The Canadian Information Network for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, a project funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation to the order of $13 millions in their 2007 program ‘Knowledge Management Resources for the Human and Social Sciences’. The poster will also offer a progress report on the technical challenges for harvesting and displaying various kind of information and data from across the 22 universities involved in this large scale infrastructure project as the project enters its last year of funding. It will be accompanied by a live demonstration of the web-based search interface launched in the spring of 2010.

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 not only brings that research into the mainstream of worldwide research discourse but also it legitimizes online publication in social sciences and humanities. The acceptance of this medium opens 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 network-oriented. 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 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 website 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, e-publication 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 ntegrates 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 is introduced within the broader context of scholarly communications. The Ontario region is 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.)

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Conference Info

Complete

ADHO - 2011
"Big Tent Digital Humanities"

Hosted at Stanford University

Stanford, California, United States

June 19, 2011 - June 22, 2011

151 works by 361 authors indexed

XML available from https://github.com/elliewix/DHAnalysis (still needs to be added)

Conference website: https://dh2011.stanford.edu/

Series: ADHO (6)

Organizers: ADHO

Tags
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  • Language: English
  • Topics: None