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 asking for your support for a new piece of infrastructure we have recently launched: hcommons.social, our Mastodon server.

Mastodon is an open source, decentralized social network developed by a non-profit that is gaining steam as an alternative to the increasingly unstable Twitter. For better or worse, Twitter has become an established part of the academic infrastructure, and while its issues have never been invisible, especially to those who are most harmed by them, recent events have pushed many to find a new space for their academic and social networks to live and grow.

We’ve long been in the infrastructure game, and see this new commitment as important to our work to ensure there are viable options for researchers, students and educators looking for an alternative to for-profit, extractive social media platforms.

Our experience also means we know that maintaining infrastructure is like the duck feet paddling hard under the surface of the water.

Recently, our Mastodon duck hasn’t been so subtle in its paddling as we find and fix the many kinks that have come with launching and seeing it grow so quickly. We’re thrilled that there has been such great uptake, and want to be sure we can continue to support this growth.

Clearly, though, with that commitment comes costs. And this Giving Tuesday, we’re asking for your help so we can continue to invest time and resources in growing hcommons.social.

Right now, our major costs are hosting and maintenance. The former we are currently covering with DigitalOcean credit and the latter is currently covered by volunteer labour. As a rule, we dislike not paying people for their time, so this is a big piece where we hope you as a community can support us to engage someone (or several someones) more regularly and adequately compensate them for their work. Right now, hosting is estimated at $150 per month and we’ve estimated support and maintenance at an additional $150 per month.

In addition, we are planning to establish a moderator community who can take on duties like responding to reported behaviour, approving new accounts and monitoring for spam. Once again, our goal is to be able to offer these moderators a small honorarium for their contributions. We’ve estimated this cost at $200 a month to start.

With these in mind, our goal for this Giving Tuesday campaign is to fund 6 months of hosting, maintenance and moderation for a total of $3000. Can we do it? There’s only one way to find out!!

If you’re as invested as we are in a future where communities build the product, instead of being the product, and in a position to contribute, we would be hugely grateful for your donation. And if you want to know anything more before making a commitment, please reach out to @hello@hcommons.social on Mastodon, or hello@hcommon.org (good old fashioned email).

Thank you for all your support,

The HCommons Team

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 server (here’s more on how Mastodon works), which is where we come in.

In response to community requests and our own recognition of the potential in this moment, we are launching hcommons.social, a Mastodon server open to all scholars (which we take to include: researchers, librarians, instructors, students, staff and anyone else with an active interest in research and education.) While we expect this space to lean Humanities-heavy, we leave it up to users whether it feels like the place they want to be. To start, there will be no limit on sign-ups, though we will review that policy over time as we learn more about the costs and overhead of managing the server.

We’ve moved quickly to get this up and running, and are doing so in the spirit of experimentation. We’ve never done this before. Many of the people who use it will probably not have either. So we’re going to have to figure things out together!

To start, we are putting in place:

  1. Server rules that prioritize harm reduction and will be enforced via…
  2. A clear moderation policy,

And if you’re new to Mastodon, a wonderful HC user has created an excellent guide to getting started.

As the server grows (or doesn’t), we will be reassessing what is needed and will want to hear what you need to get the most from the space. There are lots of outstanding questions around costs, level of interest, support needs and our capacity, but we’re of the opinion that we can best answer those by diving in with you all! We’re also lucky to be launching in a moment where more how-tos are being created than ever before, so we encourage you to draw on those as our expertise and support capacity are still developing.

In that spirit, and to help make this undertaking a little more sustainable for our team, we’re inviting anyone who might be interested in becoming a moderator to register their interest. It is early days figuring out what this looks like and what the needs are, but if you throw your hat in the ring we will reach out when we know more.

More than anything, we are excited to see what you all will do with this opportunity.

As a team, we are deeply invested in creating spaces where community interactions are the focus, not just a front for selling advertising, mining data and extracting value. Whatever anyone’s predictions, the acquisition of Twitter by a billionaire technocrat is just another chapter in a long history of platform commercialization and enclosure, which is inextricable from the trend of increasing harm to minoritised users and communities, predominantly Black, Brown, Disabled, Queer, and Trans people.

This history is not so different from the legacy of publisher gatekeeping, platform monopolisation and data extraction that we at Humanities Commons are combating through the provision of open, values-driven, academy-owned infrastructure for digital scholarly work. 

In other words, we are always on the lookout for opportunities to create spaces of radical possibility. We hope you all have fun exploring this one.

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 Networks at H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online reached out to Ellen Litwicki and Aurélie Godet – both scholars of festive studies – to ask them to act as lead-editors for this new open access publication. H-Net had been established nearly 25 years before and had since blossomed into a well-established platform where scholars shared resources and ideas and published tens of thousands of freely available book reviews, making it well situated to publish an open access journal.

At the same time Patrick  reached out to Ellen and Aurélie, he also initiated the process of starting a new H-Net network, H-Celebration, to host the journal. Patrick also recruited me as managing editor and Réa de Matas, who currently is a member of H-Net’s Council, to become an editor for H-Celebration and develop the graphics and logos for the journal. In the background, Yelena Kalinsky, H-Net’s Associate Director of Research and Publications at the time, already worked their magic, supporting us as production manager—and with everything else. Basia Nowak and Charlotte Weber, the copyeditors for H-Net Reviews, soon joined the team with their copyediting expertise.

Back then, we received journal submissions via email, which we then had to upload and organize on a private H-Net network on the H-Net Commons. While this system worked well enough in the beginning, it quickly became confusing as we separated submissions, author bios, and peer reviews to ensure the double-blind peer review process. Luckily, Yelena was already working on another solution: using the Open Journal Systems.

Since the inaugural issue, a lot has changed. We now use Open Journal Systems – a management software for open access academic journals—a huge relief! A few months ago, Emily Joan Elliott took over for Yelena. After issue 4, Ellen will leave us and Isabel Machado, our guest editor for issue 3, has already begun to take over Ellen’s responsibilities, working with us on issue 5.

From the beginning, there was no question that the Journal of Festive Studies would be an online, open access publication that allowed authors to maintain the rights to their work through a Creative Commons license. We value that this approach would give everyone free access to research that isn’t hidden behind a paywall.

Together, the journal editors, the editorial board, and our contributors both find and bring joy by virtue of the field they study and knowing that others can freely access this scholarship. We are proud of the role we play in expanding the fields of both open access scholarship and festive studies. We hope others will join us in that work.

Cora Gaebel is the managing editor for the Journal of Festive Studies, a cultural anthropologist, a world traveler, and a life cycle celebrant.

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 States, and a new funder for us. The FAIROS RCN grant program was launched this year by the NSF in order to invest in Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable Open Science (FAIROS) by supporting the formation and development of Research Coordination Networks (RCN) dedicated to those principles.

We have teamed up with a group of amazing folks at Michigan State University who are working across science, technology, engineering, math, and more traditional NSF fields, all of whom are focused on discipline-based education research (DBER) as well as other engaged education research methodologies (the +). Our goal for this project is to bring them together with their national and international collaborators in STEM education to create DBER+ Commons, which will use — and crucially, expand — the affordances of the HCommons network and promote FAIR and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) practices, principles, and guidelines in undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate, and postdoctoral science education research activities.

We are thrilled about the collaboration this grant will allow us to develop, as well as the network advancements it will allow us to build. We’ll share more as the work progresses!

New and Updated Support and Sustaining Sites

We’ve made major updates to two of our own sites: Commons Support and Sustaining the Commons. Not only is there new content, but both sites were redesigned using the block-based theme Blockbase, and the full site editing tools in WordPress 5.9. While full site editing (FSE) is in beta it’s a powerful way to customize the look and feel of your website without needing use custom code. (Find more on FSE capabilities on our post WordPress 5.9 and Full Site Editing.)

Commons Support

We’ve updated and consolidated the Commons support pages. We’ve flattened the structure of the menus and added a contact form so that you can easily contact support. Guides and FAQs walk you through the most common tasks, the search allows you to easily find what you need, and we’ve minimized the number of clicks necessary to get there.

Full Site Editing

We’ve used the full site editing tools to create two different header looks, one a larger banner style on the home page, and another scaled down version for interior pages.

We’ve made use of reusable blocks to add back buttons to guide pages, and to reuse the Getting Started, Groups, and Sites link sets on the Guides page. On the individual FAQ pages, we’ve incorporated the back button into the page template, allowing us to easily add new content to the FAQ without having to add navigation by hand.

If you’re thinking of building a new site, the full site editing capabilities give you a lot more flexibility in creating a fully customized site. This new functionality allows users to have much more control over their website’s look and feel.

Sustaining the Commons

We originally built this site in order to inform the Commons community about our then-upcoming migration from the MLA to MSU, as well as to share a bit about the sustainability plan we were implementing.

The new Sustaining site is meant to be a home for anything you might want to know about Commons operations. You can find out more there about our governance model, our financial reports, our development and (soon!) community engagement plans, and more. Sustaining is a key means through which the Commons team is showing our work and maintaining our commitments to openness, transparency, equity, and values-enacted governance.

We’ve deployed new contact forms both in Sustaining and in Support; please use them to let us know if you have thoughts or questions. We’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Humanities Commons Groups Month Week 4!

Welcome to week four of the Humanities Commons Group Month! We’re dedicating this time with you to explore groups features, network, and build online community. Each week features a quick challenge (only 5-10 minutes required of your time) to help you familiarize yourself with groups and develop your online presence. As you complete each challenge, share your progress with the larger HC community by tweeting your work to us at @humcommons and using our hashtag, #HCGroups. That way, we can answer questions, direct folks to your work, and keep the conversation going.

If you’ve already missed the first three weeks, never fear! All of our challenges are explained in this blog, so just look back to earlier blog posts to see what you missed.

Week 4 Challenge

Make a new CORE deposit that gets shared to your group(s). Let folks know in the group discussion or via social media!

This challenge lasts from Friday, March 22nd, until Thursday, March 28th. To complete our fourth challenge, first navigate to the Humanities Commons CORE Repository by clicking the Core Repository tab. Once there, click the free button marked Upload Your Work. This will take you to the New CORE Deposit application page. Complete the application by providing all needed information. Near the middle of the form, you will be offered the opportunity to select up to five groups of which you are a member. Your upload will be deposited into the CORE section of the groups you select and members of the groups you list will be notified of your upload.

Once you’ve uploaded the deposit, share your upload with the group by starting a new discussion post in one of your groups (see Challenge 3 for tips on group discussion posts) or sharing it on social media. If you go to your upload’s page, you should see an option to share it on your Facebook or Twitter account. Don’t forget to also share your upload with us via Twitter using our hashtag so we can let our followers know all about your wonderful work!

Week 4 Group Admin Challenge

Advertise your group! Share it via e-mail, social media, in-person conversations, etc.

Take a few minutes this week to spread the word about your group. Maybe create some challenges of your own for members to complete or post a new discussion question and invite your social media followers or colleagues to join in the group activity. Don’t forget to also share your group with us via Twitter using our hashtag so we can help you to spread the word!

Week 3 Solutions

Get stuck last week? Or missed the challenges announcement? Not to worry, you can still complete them this week! Here they are (you can also find them on the blog post dedicated to Week 3), with instructions.

Week 3 Challenge

Post a new discussion post. Let at least three people know about it.

This challenge will last from March 15th to the 21st. To complete our third challenge, first navigate to the Groups area of Humanities Commons by clicking the Groups tab. Find a group you’re already a part of or join a new one and click onto that group’s page. Once there, click on the Discussion tab of the group’s navigation bar (just below the group’s header image). After you’ve reached the Discussion page, click on the green button labeled Create New Topic and type your new post into the text box.  There are many options you can choose to customize this discussion post. For example, you can select to be notified of any follow-up replies by email, or you can choose to post the same comment to multiple groups by using the checklist at the bottom of the page.

Once you’re done typing in your message and selecting from the many options, click the green button labeled Submit. Congrats! Your discussion post should now be live! Share the post with three people by copying and pasting your post’s link to social media. Please also share your new post with us on Twitter so we can share it with our followers!

Week 3 Group Admin Challenge

Show or hide a menu item for members. For example, if your group doesn’t use one of the group features, you can remove it from the menu to decrease clutter!

To complete this challenge, first go to your group’s page. Select Manage from the group’s navigation bar; then, click on the Settings button. Scroll down to see the option to hide or show menu items. Don’t forget to click Save Changes after you’re happy with your selection, or else it won’t be saved.

screenshot of the group admin settings page where one can hide menu items or change the default landing page.

If you ever change your mind about whether you’d like the menu item to be visible or hidden, you can always return to this page and change it back. Read more about these new options for groups in our recent blog post.

 

Scholars, It’s Time to Take Control of Your Online Communities

-Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities at Michigan State University, Project Director for Humanities Commons

A couple of years ago, I got a bit fed up with the ways that certain for-profit networks were purporting to provide scholars with opportunities to share their work openly with one another, and I decided that it was time to mouth off about it a bit: about the fact that their “.edu” address was deceiving many into believing that they were an academy-driven initiative, about the ways their uncertain business model endangered the future of the work being shared there, about the damage that network was doing to genuine open access.

Not long after, Sarah E. Bond issued a direct call to action: “It is time to delete your Academia.edu account.”

And many scholars did, taking their work to networks like Humanities Commons. And they told their friends and colleagues to do so as well. Since that time, Humanities Commons has come to serve more than 16,500 scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world. Those members are building their professional profiles, depositing and sharing work via the repository, and creating a wide range of websites to support their portfolios, their classes, and their other projects.

But where we’ve been less successful has been in attracting groups of scholars to engage in active discussion and collaboration. The Commons has a robust groups structure, permitting communities of a range of types and sizes — from private committees to public subfields, and everything inbetween — to host threaded discussions, to share files, and more besides. But that feature of the network remains somewhat underutilized, despite the extent to which many scholars today want to be able to communicate and collaborate with one another online.

The heart of the issue, I’m pretty sure, is that those scholars already have communities that seem to be functioning pretty well for them, a ton of them on Facebook. And the problem is, as I noted in my original Academia-not-edu post, is the gravity that such existing groups exert, especially when, as with Facebook, everybody is already there. (Or so it often seems, at least. People who are not on Facebook might be quick to tell you how annoying it is when we assume that everyone can be reached that way.)

If it’s hard to convince individual scholars to change their ways of working and take up more equitable, open, and transparent systems, it’s all but impossible to convince groups of scholars to do so.

And yet: it’s time.

Part of the argument I made for abandoning Academia.edu in favor of non-profit, scholar-governed alternatives, alternatives that were not out to surveil or data-mine their users, was based on my assessment that “everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with Academia.edu, at least just up under the surface, and so perhaps we should think twice before committing our professional lives to it.” The inverse is even more true: everything that’s wrong with Academia.edu is wrong with Facebook, and then some.

I’ll leave it to Siva Vaidhyanathan to delve into the details, but it should be apparent from recent headlines that Facebook is at the root of a tremendous amount of personal unhappiness, violent conflict, and political turmoil today. The company has routinely sold its users’ data to advertisers, to companies, and to highly damaging political agents like Cambridge Analytica. Facebook engages in deep surveillance of users and their activity both on the network and elsewhere on the internet, an activity that is not just being exploited by corporations but also by governments. Given that Facebook’s entire business model depends on selling us — our presence, our information, our clicks — to other entities, every interaction we engage in there supports that model, whether we like it or not.

Most of us know this already, and yet we use the network anyway, even if begrudgingly. Our distant family members and friends are there, and we don’t know how we’ll keep up with them otherwise. And our scholarly communities, too: there are active discussion groups on Facebook that we’d miss if we left. So we watch our privacy settings and try to be careful with what we share — and yet no amount of such prophylaxis can really protect us from malfeasance. Assuming that our ostensibly private groups are actually private is setting ourselves up for abuse.

On top of which, working in proprietary spaces like Facebook does ongoing damage to the scholarly record; we cannot control, preserve, or migrate the archives of our discussions as desired.

It’s extremely difficult to move an entire group of people, I know, but I hope that some of you might be willing to try. There are other non-profit scholarly networks grounded in academic values available out there, of course, but if you’re in or adjacent to the humanities, I hope you’ll consider moving your discussions to Humanities Commons. And if you’re not in the humanities, maybe come join us anyhow? We want to open the network up to all fields in the near future, and your involvement would help us chart a path toward doing so.

Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Open Peer Review

A central goal for Humanities Commons has always been to provide humanities scholars with a platform for communicating, sharing work, and collaborating. Beyond simply facilitating these processes––a significant task in itself––we strive to innovate on them, pushing for scholarship that is more open and engaged with communities. Often, this means rethinking the assumptions and practices that produce our work.

It was this desire to reimagine scholarly practice that led us to host a Twitter chat last month titled “Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Open Peer Review.” Twitter chats are synchronous social media events where moderators guide discussion of a topic using a particular hashtag. At the set time, everyone logs in to Twitter and follows the hashtag, answering questions and responding to each other’s thoughts as they’re shared through tweets. The goal of this Twitter chat was to generate community discussion of emerging peer review structures that are open, meaning the authors and reviewers of a work know who each other are and communicate about the work, usually with the facilitation of an editor or editorial team. While what this exactly looks like varies from publication to publication, most journals and organizations using open peer review put the author and the reviewers in contact with each other using a digital platform, allowing reviews to make comments and the author to respond to them in the process of revising the work for publication.

As the handful of questions and tweets below reveal, the discussion of open peer review covered many aspects of scholarly communication and how review contributes to clear and effective scholarship. Open peer review is a significant departure from traditional peer review, often described as double-blind or single-blind peer review (ableist terms that Cheryl Ball points out could be replaced with “double anonymous” and “anonymous”). Whereas double anonymous or anonymous peer review can often seem opaque, exclusionary, and even arbitrary, especially to early career scholars, open peer review makes the review process about a conversation that focuses on improving the work. As several participants argued, particular values and guidelines should shape that conversation with an emphasis on community and mentorship.

The tweets below are just a small sample of the Twitter chat. To view the rest of the chat, as well as check out more resources about open peer review, search for the chat’s hashtag, #OPReview, on Twitter.

  • Q1: What does open peer review look like in your experience? Which practices and tools are involved? #OPReview #Q1

 

  • Q2: Which values should guide open peer review? How should these values be enacted and communicated? #OPReview #Q2

 

  • Q3: How does open peer review affect the quality of reviews? Of the final publication? #OPReview #Q3

 

  • Q4: What are the limitations of open peer review? What are the barriers to more journals and scholarly communities adopting it? #OPReview #Q4

 

  • Q5: What are the future potentials of open peer review? How could it be improved in the future? #OPReview #Q5

 

The Twitter chat generated lively conversation about the values of scholarship, and collectively imagined what it would look like to publish our work as the result of open, transparent, and ongoing conversations between scholars. Of course open peer review isn’t a cure-all, and there are a number of institutional considerations (tenure, power, and workload, to name only a few) that limit what peer review can be and do. Still, open peer review can be one tool for research and scholarship that is more accessible and inclusive. This Twitter chat is not the last word on open peer review–far from it. Rather, it’s a point in an ongoing conversation that we can and must have together as we work to build the institutions and research practices that can sustain our communities.

Thanks to Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Cody Mejeur for moderating the chat. Kathleen is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Her most recent book, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (John Hopkins University Press, 2019), argues for a mode of scholarly engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition. She is also project director of Humanities Commons. Cody is a PhD candidate in English at Michigan State University specializing in new media, narrative theory, queer and feminist studies, and digital humanities. They have published on games and education, representation in games, and the narrative construction of reality. They are currently graduate lab lead for the Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition lab at MSU and work with the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, founded by Adrienne Shaw at Temple University.