Category: Uncategorized

• Accessibility 101: Getting Started on your Commons Site

  As you go to create a Commons site for showcasing your research or blogging your academic journey, it’s important to consider how you are presenting your information so that it reaches the largest possible audience. As a crucial part of that audience, people with disabilities often get excluded from the online conversation when websites are […]

• What Is A Repository For?

  If you haven’t heard, in 2024 Humanities Commons will be launching a completely reimagined open-access repository. It’s currently under heavy construction. So we’ve been asking ourselves: Why does the Commons have a repository in the first place? At our heart we are a social network, a hub for scholarly exchange. Most of us don’t think […]

• Interoperability and the Commons

  The Commons behaves like a network of sites: Humanities Commons, MLA Commons, MSU Commons, SAH Commons, ARLIS/NA Commons, HASTAC Commons, and about 3,000 WordPress sites operated by our users. All of these sites are in reality a single WordPress instance with a single filesystem and a single database. As I discussed previously in “A Federated […]

• Building the Commons Update: July 2023

  In the first half of the year, our focus has been on improving our backend infrastructure and building strong foundations for future development. As we move into the second half of 2023, we will continue to improve our backend but you should start to see more user-facing improvements as a result of that work. Later […]

• Building the Commons Update: May 2023

  Over the past month The Commons hasn’t had any significant user-facing updates, but we have many some behind-the-scenes improvements and we have been making steady progress on many projects. To better communicate all of these projects, we have created a public roadmap on the Building blog. If want an overview of all the things we’re […]

• Building the Commons Update: April 2023

  Here’s another update on what the Commons development team has been up to in the last month! Recent Developments This month we didn’t deploy any new functionality. However, we did make a couple of small changes to the site that I think are illustrative for understanding the nature of development work on the Commons and […]

• Support Independent Scholarly Communication Infrastructure This Giving Tuesday

  Want the TL;DR? We’re seeking donations to support our Mastodon server! If you believe this is a worthwhile cause and are in a position to help, we would be hugely grateful for your donation. Academic communities need infrastructure, just as our local communities do. And infrastructure requires investment, which is why this Giving Tuesday we’re […]

• Humanities Commons Launches Mastodon Server Open to Scholars

  Anyone using or observing Twitter will be well aware of the recent purchase of the company, which throws the future of the platform into, at best, uncertainty, and at worst, turmoil. In response, many scholars have been considering a move to Mastodon, a non-profit, federated alternative social network. Being federated, Mastodon requires access to a […]

• A Bumpy Start to the Joys of Open Access: A Festive Perspective

  Today, as we continue to celebrate International Open Access Week and reflect on finding joy in OA work, we’ve got a guest post from our friends at H-Net and the Journal of Festive Studies. More than six years ago, the open access joy of The Journal of Festive Studies began. Patrick Cox, the then-Vice-President for […]

• NSF Grant for New STEM-focused Commons

  The Commons team is delighted to have been awarded one of the inaugural FAIROS RCN grants from the NSF, in order to establish DBER+ Commons. That’s a big pile of acronyms, so here’s a breakdown: the NSF is of course the National Science Foundation, one of the most important federal funding bodies in the United […]