The contemporary scholarly communication environment is characterized by the growth in mandates and infrastructure for open access publication and open approaches to the research lifecycle, with a consequent explosion in the number of online platforms seeking to provide infrastructure for open scholarship. These include corporate academic social networks and scholar-governed infrastructure created as a reaction against those networks, as well as the recent major transformation of the social media landscape in the wake of changes at Twitter (now X), previously a major outlet for scholarly engagement with the public. Analysts of this environment have pointed out that most platform initiatives focus on narrow use cases rather than building up solutions through a holistic understanding of scholar workflows. This exploratory study uses focus group interviews to draw out responses to one academically governed platform, the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, in the context of humanities scholars’ existing work. It explores humanities scholars’ needs and behaviors related to sharing scholarly information with each other and broader audiences, particularly on the Internet. Feedback from participants sheds light on opportunities and challenges for academy-governed infrastructure for “open social scholarship.” Themes identified include technical fatigue and burnout in the current multi-platform environment, sustainability, and desires to reach and engage the right academic and non-academic audiences when appropriate.

Connection, a curated volume from Open Scholarship Press, brings together diverse voices exploring how connection shapes knowledge, community, and scholarly practice. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the collection examines the ways people, ideas, and technologies intersect to foster more open, collaborative, and inclusive forms of scholarship.

The enormous growth of digital knowledge commons and academic social networking sites in the last fifteen years or so has enabled millions of researchers to connect and share their work with others online. But during this same period, the remarkable transformation of digital infrastructure has also raised many questions about the nature and trajectory of scholarly communication and practice.

This annotated bibliography gathers and synthesizes scholarship on the digital spaces, tools, and technologies that have increasingly facilitated open communication among researchers, organizations, and the public in the last few decades. In particular, it examines the possibilities and problems associated with “digital knowledge commons” or “digital research commons”—that is, digital spaces for publishing, sharing, and accessing information.

This annotated bibliography gathers and synthesizes scholarship on the digital spaces, tools, and technologies that have increasingly facilitated open communication among researchers, organizations, and the public in the last few decades. In particular, it examines the possibilities and problems associated with “digital knowledge commons” or “digital research commons”—that is, digital spaces for publishing, sharing, and accessing information. Examples of digital knowledge commons include Wikipedia as well as academic social networking sites such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, which have now enabled millions of researchers to share information and connect with others online. Indeed, this latter form of knowledge commons has helped researchers share their work within and beyond their existing academic networks using sharing features that are familiar to users of Facebook, Twitter, and other popular commercial social networking sites. Although many of the works compiled in this bibliography compellingly outline the problems associated with academic social networking sites, and with social media more generally, the cumulative and overwhelming message of this body of work is nevertheless clear: it is difficult to overstate the impact of such platforms—and the rapidly changing technologies that enable them—on the present shape and future possibilities of academic research. As Peter Suber (2006), Caroline Winter et al. (2020), and other authors represented below suggest, to realign the modern academic enterprise in relation to digital knowledge commons and to the open, social scholarly practices that these spaces can foster is to begin to forge meaningful new connections between scholars, librarians, administrators, stakeholders, and the various publics they serve.

Digital research infrastructure in Canada is evolving at a quickening pace. How does this large-scale system and its constituent parts also interact with emerging technologies from other sectors? In this paper we introduce the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons as a nascent piece of Canadian digital research infrastructure, provide an update on the project’s current status as of 2022, and think through the possibilities of engaging with popular recent technologies—namely, blockchain and Web3.

Today, academia’s relationship with notions of care remains fraught: individual scholars, scholarly communities, and the larger institutions that support them have all profited from the affordances of digital technologies and platforms while also having to contend with the concomitant social challenges of digital scholarship. George Veletsianos, for instance, declares that “academia’s uncomfortable relationship with care is evident in many of its foundational processes” (Social Media 80). To be a scholar in the twenty-first century is—as in preceding centuries—to be a networked scholar.undefined But digital scholarship has introduced entirely new possibilities and problems, requiring academic communities to consider what fostering care looks like, in theory and practice, as the technologies mediating networks of researchers and research data continue to evolve.

This paper introduces the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an open online space where Canadian HSS researchers and stakeholders can gather to share information and resources, make connections, and build community. Situated at the intersection of the fields of digital scholarship, open access, digital humanities, and social knowledge creation, the Canadian HSS Commons is being developed as part of a research program investigating how a not-for-profit, community-partnership research commons could benefit the HSS community in Canada. This paper considers an intellectual foundation for conceptualizing the commons, its potential benefits, and its role in the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem; it explores how the Canadian HSS Commons’ open, community-based platform complements existing research infrastructure serving the Canadian HSS research community.

This video provides an overview of the history of digital knowledge commons, as well as some of the challenges facing today's digital knowledge commons and academic social networking sites. These challenges include the enclosure or commercialization of commons; the exploitation of researchers and research data; and the exclusion of certain people from digital spaces. It concludes with a brief discussion of how not-for-profit digital knowledge commons such as the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons are working to address these challenges.

This step-by-step guide was created as part of the Building Digital Communities in the Humanities and Social Sciences event (https://inke.ca/building2/) that took place at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences from May 27-28, 2023. The guides shared at this event are intended to help new and existing users of the Canadian HSS Commons use the site to host society events, publish and share their work, migrate and share existing research materials, support the work of society journals, create collaborative groups and projects, and more.