Knowledge Commons (KC) is delighted to announce that our repository, KCWorks has been selected as the designated public-access repository of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The partnership between KC and the NEH will fulfill the agency’s commitment to making federally funded research freely available without delay as mandated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the 2022 Nelson Memorandum.

The KCWorks team will collaborate with the NEH on a one-year build process, in which we will connect KCWorks with eGMS, the NEH’s grants management system, enabling NEH grantees and staff members to upload papers resulting from funded research projects, attach key metadata, and remotely deposit them to KCWorks. Additionally, we will build a portal for the NEH on Knowledge Commons, allowing all papers resulting from NEH funding to be browsed and downloaded; those papers will also be fully integrated into KCWorks and will be discoverable alongside the repository’s related materials.

Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer for the NEH, notes, “Public access has always been central to NEH’s mission. NEH’s enabling legislation affirms that ‘the humanities belong to all the people of the United States,’ and that ‘public funds provided by the Federal Government must ultimately serve public purposes.’ We are excited to work with Knowledge Commons to build our designated repository to provide teachers, scholars, students, and the general public free access to peer-reviewed articles written by NEH-funded researchers.”

Knowledge Commons (formerly known as Humanities Commons) was launched in 2016 to provide an open-access, open-source, community-governed platform on which scholars across the humanities and around the world can create rich professional profiles, participate in discussion groups, create WordPress websites, and deposit and share their work in a fully integrated library-grade repository. Knowledge Commons hosts more than 55,000 user accounts and provides services to several key organizational and institutional partners, including the Modern Language Association, the Association of University Presses, and HASTAC.

KCWorks, the Commons’ next-generation repository, launched in open beta in October 2024. KCWorks hosts more than 30,000 open-access works, each of which is automatically connected with the creator’s Knowledge Commons profile. Deposits may additionally be submitted for inclusion in a wide range of collections. These social features have led to active public use of the repository’s materials, evidenced by the more than 6.6 million downloads received since 2016. KCWorks provides robust APIs allowing the repository to integrate with a range of other systems in the open-access scholarly communication landscape.

“Knowledge Commons is dedicated to cultivating open spaces in which researchers, instructors, students, practitioners, and other knowledge creators can collaborate, communicate, and share their work with the world,” said project director Kathleen Fitzpatrick. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the NEH to make the exciting and important work they fund freely and publicly accessible.”

For more information, please email hello@hcommons.org.