As the Project Manager on Humanities Commons I am involved in the day-to-day operations of the platform as well as communicating with our members. For this fifth birthday I wanted to take a deep dive into what the community has created here. I’m hoping that in future we’ll continue to keep creating these kinds of visualizations so that we can all appreciate just how vibrant this community has become.
Membership Growth
Our first full year, 2017-2018 saw our largest increase in membership, at 35%. In 2020 we saw our second largest increase at 32%, likely driven by the pandemic and users searching for collaboration tools as we moved much of our work online. By early Spring we should be around 30,000 members, and as the Commons expands to serve STEM and Social Science users the opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration will be even greater.
Languages on the Commons
This is a global community. Around 20% of our members come from countries outside North America and Europe. We currently support 43 languages within CORE and 33 of those languages are represented in CORE deposits. We anticipate that list will grow over the next five years. [Note: If yours is not listed please let us know at hello[at]hcommons.org.]
Top Ten Item Types Deposited to CORE
The Commons has 46 item types in CORE ranging from audio to white paper. The top ten reflect a wide range of deposits from formal papers and open access books to course materials and syllabi. We welcome gray literature and other materials that should be preserved, but that might not find a home in other disciplinary repositories. We expect, too, that as scholarship and the forms of that scholarship change our item types will expand as well.
Top Ten Downloads by Item Type
While looking at the top ten item types uploaded to CORE we thought it would be interesting to see what’s being downloaded. While the top two item types remain the same in both visualizations, syllabus jumps to third, and dissertation and “other” make an appearance.
What resides in “other”? Everything from sheet music to example social media campaigns. We’re so excited to see the variety of items people are sharing.
Creative Commons Licenses Used on CORE
As an open access repository, all of the work uploaded to CORE is tagged with a Creative Commons license. While the vast majority of CORE deposits are licensed with the default “All Rights Reserved” some authors have chosen varying licenses. “Attribution-NoDerivatives” and “All Rights Granted” make up less than 1% each of the licenses on CORE deposits.
What other things are you curious about? What other visualizations can you think of that we might explore? Leave them in the comments.