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.

Partners

Steering Committee

Technical Committee

Researchers

Canadian researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities 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 (OJS), 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 Social Sciences and Humanities 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 Social Sciences and Humanities 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 Social Sciences and Humanities database of structured primary and secondary Social Sciences and Humanities 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 Social Sciences and Humanities 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, 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.

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