with Martin Paul Eve
We are pleased to announce that Knowledge Commons has recently received a $20,000 donation from Digital Scholar to support our platform! Digital Scholar has been an incredibly generous partner for many years now, with funds donated since 2019 totaling $192,500. Their support was crucial for us in meeting our challenge match from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for which we needed to raise $1.5 million over the course of four years from non-federal sources. The donations from Digital Scholar during those years helped make our match possible. We offer our sincere thanks to Digital Scholar for their generous donations and continued support. It truly makes a difference to us.
As I noted recently in an interview for a case study at Invest in Open, there is a continuing misconception that because Knowledge Commons offers a free service to end users, it must somehow be free to produce, maintain and run. Clearly that is not the case! We have a dedicated staff whose salaries rely on the income we can raise.
If you would like to support us today as an institution, you can help us continue to sustain the Commons into the future. Libraries, universities, and educational foundations can join as supporting or sustaining members who help to govern the Commons, shape its future and financially ensure that our operations can continue. As an individual, you can join our Champions Program where you will receive a profile badge, some KC merchandise, and other benefits for your involvement.
The current era of budget cuts has created an ongoing challenge for funding vital scholarly infrastructure platforms, like the Directory of Open Access Journals, OAPEN, Janeway, Open Journal Systems, Zotero, Thoth and, of course, Knowledge Commons. These platforms all offer open services that people can access without charge, but they all also have costs that must be met, and an insufficient number of people and institutions are currently willing to foot the bill for such open infrastructure. For some of these platforms the situation is rapidly becoming existential. Yet there is a problematic question that is often asked of the teams that build and support those platforms, by those whose investment they are seeking: are they currently sustainable? The basic answer is that they will be, but only if you invest in them.
While grant funders such as the Mellon Foundation or Arcadia and organizations such as Digital Scholar are forward-looking, contributing enormously to the development and sustainability of these infrastructures, the procurement systems at universities are weighted against smaller, nascent infrastructures. Of course, Knowledge Commons is hardly a newborn, but compared to the behemoths in the scholarly publishing world who take billions of dollars in revenue every year from academic libraries, it is extremely difficult for us to achieve the far lower levels of fundraising necessary to keep our team running. This disparity only serves to lessen bibliodiversity and to ensure that the larger, more monopolistic players in the space continue to dominate. Institutions have told us time and time again that they want to escape the current model, in which a small number of players make obscene profits. However, this commitment now needs to be made manifest by institutions. They need to vote with their feet and their money, rather than with rhetoric.
Creating a more diverse, community-oriented landscape for scholarly communication is part of what Janneke Adema and Sam Moore have called “scaling small,” and it’s a key reason why we operate as a “commons,” understanding our community not just as platform users but as members of a coalition. As Adema and Moore describe it, “scaling small” involves establishing horizontal alliances between otherwise independent projects, creating networked islands of open-access knowledge production that can still meet the demands of institutions but that work in harmony together. Such interconnection stands in contrast to the few very large players today, who operate through extracting resources from institutional budgets and locking content into their ecosystems.
And so we have a proposal. Institutions, if you want to see a more diverse scholarly communication landscape that can resist enclosure: please email me to join and show your support! We’re not expensive and your contribution will really make a difference. Individuals who use the Commons: please become Champions! Show that you care about what we’re doing. The cost is not enormous but your contribution will make a real difference to us. And finally, if you are an academic library considering changing your institutional repository, or starting one, we are very close to the full launch of KC Works for Institutions, through which our enterprise-grade repository can be made available to you and your university. Please reach out to talk about this with us today.
Finally, thank you again to our friends at Digital Scholar, both for supporting us and for being such a shining example of what community-minded, independent scholarly infrastructure can be.