It has been observed that much of Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research is available in print only and hence cannot be accessed via the internet, which greatly diminishes its visibility and decreases its potential global impact.

The goal of the Synergies project is to directly address this issue.  By providing services and infrastructure to migrate SSH research to the digital realm, access to Canadian SSH research will be greatly increased.  “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.” http://www.synergiescanada.org/index_en.html

The Synergies project is not intended to be a large scale digitization project.  Rather, funded by a 14 million dollar Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant, these funds will go to building technical infrastructure with no provisions for digitization. The intent is to create a national network of institutions that will use software tools to encourage and help SSH researchers build the online publication of their scholarly output into their workflow.

This national infrastructure consists of 21 Canadian university partners divided into five regional nodes. York University participates in the Ontario node. (See Figure 1) Each partner institution is expected to contribute to the creation of a national infrastructure by implementing and supporting at least one of the following software packages: Open Journal Systems (OJS) DSpace Open Conference Systems (OCS) Érudit At York University, we are supporting Open Journal Systems, DSpace and Open Conference Systems. The goal is to use these software programs to collect and disseminate SSH research.

Open Journal Systems is an open source software package created by the Public Knowledge Project affiliated with Simon Fraser University. OJS facilitates the creation and hosting of electronic journals.  York’s implementation of OJS is called York Digital Journals, and has been very well received by York faculty members. Currently, 14 York-affiliated journals are hosted live on the site, while others are in various states of development. York Digital Journals can be viewed on the library website at http://www.library.yorku.ca/ojs. 

The Public Knowledge Project has also created Open Conference Systems, which is a software platform that manages both conference registration and conference proceedings. Although one conference was hosted last year, YUL has not officially launched its OCS services. YUL is currently in the process of upgrading OCS to its latest version which offers improved conference proceedings management.

Developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard, DSpace is an open source software platform used by educational, government, private, and commercial institutions. At York, we use DSpace software for our institutional repository. Titled YorkSpace, our institutional repository serves to manage, preserve, and disseminate the scholarly output of York University and its partners. Collecting scholarly output in YorkSpace provides increased visibility for York research which includes preferential ranking by Google.  Our 800 items in YorkSpace are accessed on average over 6000 times a month! In addition, YorkSpace is hosted in a secure computing environment and is committed to long term preservation. To view YorkSpace, visit http://www.library.yorku.ca/dspace/.

In lieu of hosting scholarly journals via OJS, the Quebec Synergies node will be using the Érudit infrastructure. A consortium of Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and Université du Québec à Montréal, Érudit is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to produce and disseminate both backfiles and current issues of scholarly journals since 1998. Érudit currently hosts 47 journals and can be viewed at this site: http://www.erudit.org/en/index.html . All the scholarly SSH data collected by the 21 institutions using the four approved software platforms (DSpace, OJS, OCS and Erudit) will be harvested by the Synergies project to create one massive portal for Canadian Social Science and Humanities research. (See Figure 2) Through the Synergies portal, researchers will be able to view scholarly data in colour with images, sound, moving images and multimedia. The portal will be equipped with many special features such as automatic translation, the ability to track detailed citations and usage statistics, and the ability to search across a wide variety of sources using intelligent navigation and searching capabilities.The portal will also facilitate the creation of communities around areas of research by providing an area for researchers where they can configure pages to suit their needs. In addition, the Synergies portal will enable partnerships with consortia and will elevate the visibility of Canadian SSH research on a global level.

Currently, the 21 Synergies partners are hard at work building the infrastructure for online publication services at their own institutions.  This network needs to be established to facilitate the transition of SSH research from the print to the digital domain.  Version 1 of the Synergies portal itself is anticipated to be launched at the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Congress at Concordia University in Montréal, Saturday, May 29 to Saturday, June 5, 2010.

-- Andrea Kosavic, Librarian, Bibliographic Services