Synergies: The Canadian Information Network for Research in the Social Sciences and the Humanities

Funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovations,
“Synergies: The Canadian Information Network for
Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities” will 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 (SSH) 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 SSH scholarship.
Canadian SSH 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 SSH research to
the internet, Synergieswill not only bring that research into the
mainstream of worldwide research discourse but also it will
legitimize online publication in SSH. 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.
Canadian researchers in the SSH require two research
communication services that can be provided within one
structure. The first is an accessible online Canadian research
record. The second is access to an online publication service
that will place their work on record and will ensure widespread
and flexible access. Synergies provides both these functions.
Built on the foundation of Érudit, a Quebec-based research
publication service provider in existence since 1998, Open
Journal Systems, which is a tested online journal publishing
software suite, and the technical expertise developed by its
three other partners, Synergies will integrate work being done
within its five-party consortium to create a decentralized
national platform for SSH research communication. Synergies
is designed to eventually encompass a range of
formats—including published articles, pre-publication papers,
data sets, presentations, electronic monographs—to provide a
rich scholarly record, the backbone of which is existing and
yet to be created peer-review journals. Synergies will bring
Canadian SSH research into mainstream of worldwide research
discourse using a cost-effective public/not-for-profit partnership
to maximize knowledge dissemination.
The members of the Synergies consortium are the University
of New Brunswick, Université de Montréal (lead institution),
University of Toronto, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser
University. Each brings appropriate but different expertise to
the project. At its first level, Synergies consists of this
five-university consortium that will provide a fully accessible,
searchable, decentralized and inclusive national SSH database
of structured primary and secondary SSH texts. This distributed
environment is technically complex to implement, and it also
represents a major political and social collaboration which
attests to the project’s transformative dimension for Canadian
SSH research and researchers. Synergies will be a primary
aggregator of research that, in providing publishing services,
will allow journals editors (and other producers) to structure
subscriptions and maintain revenue control. At a second level,
Synergies will reach out to 16 regional partner universities who
will benefit from and contribute to extend Synergies
functionality. At a third level, in a producer-to-consumer
relationship with university libraries and organizations such as
the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), Synergies
will make possible national accessibility. Using this relationship
as a model, Synergies will be positioned to facilitate similar
relationships for journals with buyer consortia around the world.
Synergies is not only a pan-Canadian technical infrastructure
but also a mobilizing and enabling resource for the entire
scholarly community of Canadian SSH researchers. In
embracing the whole of the social sciences and humanities,
Synergies will foster cross-disciplinary, problem- and
issue-oriented queries while also allowing queries that can be
time-framed, discipline-based, media or methodologically
specific, theoretically constrained or geo-referenced.
Synergies will also 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 a 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.
In summary, Synergies is the vehicle by which Canadian SSH
research communication can be modernized. It embraces
emerging research practice by utilizing existing texts, enriching,
expanding, and greatly easing access to scholarly data and to
audiences. It organizes a fragmented research record, ensuring
and enhancing access to existing data sets. It facilitates access
via aggregation of journals and an ability to facilitate
agreements between Canadian SSH journals and other
producers' and buyers' consortia such as CRKN. It lays a
foundation for expanding the research record to encompass all
scholarly inquiry in order to achieve maximum accessibility
and circulation. Synergies represents a project in parallel with
other national projects and disciplinary databases emerging in
other countries, for example, Project Muse, Euclid, JStor, and
HighWire in the United States, and in France, Persée and
Adonis.