Open, Digital Scholarship:  Issues, Initiatives, and Research Commons in the Humanities and Social Sciences

1. Abstract

In the spirit of the public humanities, initiatives are emerging that foster the open sharing, re-purposing, and development of scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools. One example is the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an in-development prototype for a national-scale, online research commons that features:

• subject repository for open access publications with digital object identifiers (DOIs) upon upload and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interactive, Reusable) guidelines for data management
• project development environment integrated with Google Drive, Github, or Dropbox
• individual user profiles with federated login/identity authorization, including ORCID
• blogging capabilities
• subject interest groups and member interactions (e.g., profile building, messaging)

The workshop includes:

• talks by key players in the Canadian digital research infrastructure world;
• a theoretical overview of the commons in research development and community building;
• instruction in how to set up a profile, upload publications, form a special interest group, and begin a digital scholarship project in the prototype Canadian HSS Commons.

This initiative builds on consultations among Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership members—in particular the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, Compute Canada, and the Federation for the HSS—and has roots in similar initiatives such as Humanities Commons, a partner in this work.

This platform is intended to serve the unique needs of the Canadian HSS community. Based on early-stage consultations we anticipate that it will draw a significant number of DH practitioners. This prototype is built on HUBZero—an open source content management system available for deployment within other international contexts as well.