Overview

Welcome to the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons!

Thanks for visiting! The Canadian HSS Commons is an in-development, national-scale, bilingual (French and English) network for Canadian HSS researchers and stakeholders to share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools.

The Canadian HSS Commons is designed with both humanities and social sciences research communities in mind. It is also uniquely positioned to respond to the legal, academic, and institutional contexts most relevant to Canadian HSS researchers.

This project is an initiative of the INKE Partnership. We’re grateful to our many partners, including Compute Canada, CANARIE, UVic Systems, the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the US-based Humanities Commons, with additional support from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), Edith Cowan University, Érudit, Iter, the Public Knowledge Project, and UVic Libraries.

Key features:

• Canadian servers and digital research infrastructure
• Prototype built on HUBzero (open source; codebase available on GitHub)
• Individual user profiles, with single sign-on through ORCID or the Canadian Access Federation
• Subject repository for open-access publications that assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) upon upload and follows FAIR guidelines for research data management
• Project development environment that integrates with GitHub, Google Drive, and Dropbox
• Research-sharing, communication, and management tools:
  • E.g., interest groups, collections, blogs, discussion forums, member-to-member messaging, Q&As, site-wide calendar, and more (read more below!)

Key benefits to Canadian HSS researchers, teams, associations, and institutional partners:

• Establish a professional online presence via public profiles, blog posts, publications, and more
• Increase research impact and visibility, with full access to page views and other metrics
• Share publications and research projects with the wider HSS community and beyond; create themed collections of research or pedagogical materials
• Bring together like-minded people with shared interests; develop, manage, and promote collaborative research projects; form special-interest groups relevant to specific academics/organizations
• Communicate directly with HSS researchers and other stakeholders invested in academic work; facilitate discussions in an online forum while retaining control over permissions, privacy controls, and self-governance features such as content-flagging
• Promote and coordinate events (e.g., society meetings, conferences, webinars, workshops)
• Enhance visibility, increase access, support disciplines, and view and integrate metrics and alt-metrics in an HSS platform that is responsive to evolving Tri-Agency (CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC) requirements and recommendations regarding funding, long-term research data management, and open access

Future directions

• Further integrate and align with distributed Canadian institutional repositories and research data organizations via the New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, and others
• On-board Canadian HSS societies in partnership with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
• Increased integration and interoperability with ORCID to enable pre-population/syncing of researcher profiles
• Repurpose the Canadian HSS Commons instance, scaling across disciplines nation-wide
• Set up Australian/other international instance(s) in collaboration with existing partners, including the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS)

We welcome your participation and feedback as we continue to develop and improve the Canadian HSS Commons. If you have any questions that can’t be answered on the FAQ or the Community Forum, please feel free to drop us a line at hsscommons@uvic.ca (you can also report a problem here).