S Y N E R G I E S
Canadian Foundation for Innovation
External Committee Evaluation – 09 15 2003

S Y N E R G I E S
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Integration of all types of scholarly documents
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Research and dissemination
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Highly developed interfaces
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Network strategy option

Dissertations and theses – journal articles – books – pre-prints – e-prints – conference proceedings – research reports – statistical data
Text, audio and graphical information
Research results will no longer be restricted to a type of document.
Synergies will be the first infrastructure worldwide to enable full-text searches of this wide range of document types.

Research infrastructure –
Synergies can organize data depending on its status as either a primary and/or secondary source. The network’s highly developed database and interfaces will offer a first-rate research infrastructure for SSH (Sociology of knowledge, bibliometrics, automatic translation, text analysis, etc.).
Dissemination and access –
Synergies gives access to past and present Canadian research data and outputs. It will also assure the long-term preservation of the content (XML). This will greatly benefit and highlight the Canadian social sciences and humanities heritage.

Researchers can program their own search interface according to their needs for primary and/or secondary sources of information
Text and graphical interfaces offer fast, "at a glance" visual results, including "topic maps" and "scatter diagrams"
Search criterias include: primary source, secondary source, author, date, geological locations, disciplines, quantitative or qualitative methodologies, language(s), keywords, title, bibliographic references, abstracts, etc.
English and
French
Interfaces and Documentation

Researcher A
Text analysis Researcher B
Bibliometrics
Books
Theses
Researcher C
Documentation on a given subject
Journals
Preprints
Sounds
Datasets
Researcher D
Automatic translation

1.
Regional network
• 5 regional nodes: UNB, UdeM, UofT, UofC, SFU
• 11 affiliated institutions – more to come
• Researchers – Librarians – Academic publishers –
E-Publishing experts – Administrators
2.
National network
• Inclusive approach: all Canadian universities are invited to participate (institutional repositories, etc.)
3.
International network
• Synergies has a global vision and does not limit itself to
Canada. The infrastructure will be interoperable on an international level.
• France, Belgium, MIT, Cornell University, etc.

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University of Calgary
University of New Brunswick
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Université de Montréal
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University of Toronto
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• Synergies will be freely accessible worldwide for most of its collection, in agreement with authors and/or publishers.
• Researchers are in need for open access to information on equal terms. This includes students at all educational levels, researchers in remote geographical locations, as well as researchers not affiliated with a university.
• Synergies has the commitment to provide open access for society as a whole and prescribes to the democratization of research as well as a citizenship based on knowledge and
information.

70 letters of support from researchers, journal editors and chair holders
9 letters of support from organizations (national and international)
– Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council – Marc Renaud
– Fonds québécois pour la recherche sur la société et la culture – Louise Dandurand
– National Library and Archives of Canada – Roch Carrier and Ian Wilson
– Canadian Association of Research Libraries – Wiliam R. Maes
– Association for Canadian Studies – Robert Isreal
– Canadian Association of Learned Journals – Ronald Huebert
– National Research Council – Christian Couturier
– Ministère de la Jeunesse, de l’Éducation et de la Recherche (France) – Claude Jolly
– Conseil général des Hautes Écoles (Belgium) – Robert Bernard

Canada’s university community needs a credible and professional information system that guarantees the long-term preservation,
production and dissemination of research data and outputs.
If the SSH community wishes to, more than just catch up,
assume a leading role in research communication on an international level, it needs the Synergies infrastructure now!
The required technology exists and is affordable.
The community is ready and willing to create the
Synergies infrastructure with our already established team.