This video walks you through how HSSCommons.ca can be used by the community for each journal that has already been shared on HSSCommons. It demonstrates how HSSCommons allows you to

• view statistics (number of views and downloads) for each publication,

• download publications,

• obtain citations,

• create open or private question-and-answer sessions,

• post anonymous or named reviews to facilitate post-publication peer review.

This video walks you through how HSSCommons.ca can be used by the community for each journal that has already been shared on HSSCommons. It demonstrates how HSSCommons allows you to

• view statistics (number of views and downloads) for each publication,

• download publications,

• obtain citations,

• create open or private question-and-answer sessions,

• post anonymous or named reviews to facilitate post-publication peer review.

The HSS Commons is a collaborative digital platform that supports open scholarship across the humanities and social sciences in Canada and internationally. It enables researchers to share work, connect with peers, and participate in a community dedicated to openness, accessibility, and knowledge exchange.

The Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons is an in-development academic social networking site that aims to connect and support the work of Humanities and Social Sciences researchers across Canada. We provide a space to share your work openly and the infrastructure to connect and collaborate with other researchers. The infographic below details our mission, key features, and how we strive to support different academic audiences.

Looking for more? The Canadian HSS Commons is dedicated to supporting the work of Humanities and Social Sciences researchers across Canada. The following sample list of materials further describes the purpose, impact, and future possibilities of the Canadian HSS Commons. You can also view this list as a collection.

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 HSS Commons is a collaborative digital platform that supports open scholarship across Canada and the broader international research community. This presentation highlights how the platform enables scholars to share work, build networks, and strengthen interdisciplinary engagement in the humanities and social sciences.

Building on foundational research about the historical and intellectual roots of the digital research commons (Winter et al. 2020), this work examines the Canadian HSS Commons from a DH perspective, focusing on how it will meet the needs of Canadian researchers working within the highly collaborative, methodologically diverse, and exploratory domain of the digital humanities. We take the self-reflexive stance of the digital humanities to critically examine the metaphor of the commons as applied to an open, virtual space and to intellectual resources. We conclude that acknowledging the present-day challenges involved in implementing this ideal––and resisting the social, economic, and institutional pressures that have historically threatened to transform such spaces into sites of exclusion rather than inclusion––will allow us to reimagine the commons as a virtual, open, collaborative space for creating and sharing information.

Building on foundational research about the historical and intellectual roots of the digital research commons (Winter et al. 2020), this paper examines the Canadian HSS Commons from a DH perspective, focusing on how it will meet the needs of Canadian researchers working within the highly collaborative, methodologically diverse, and exploratory domain of the digital humanities. We take the self-reflexive stance of the digital humanities to critically examine the metaphor of the commons as applied to an open, virtual space and to intellectual resources. We conclude that acknowledging the present-day challenges involved in implementing this ideal––and resisting the social, economic, and institutional pressures that have historically threatened to transform such spaces into sites of exclusion rather than inclusion––will allow us to reimagine the commons as a virtual, open, collaborative space for creating and sharing information.

A presentation about the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons and open source research software, delivered by Graham Jensen and Ray Siemens at the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities conference in September of 2024.

A slide deck from a presentation about knowledge mobilization tools in the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, presented by Caroline Winter at the 2023 AGM of the Environments of Change project (https://www.medieval-environment.com/).

A workshop about the not-for-profit, academic-run Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons (hsscommons.ca)–an in-development, national-scale, bilingual (French and English) network. The Canadian HSS Commons fosters an open environment for Canadian researchers to share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools. It includes a subject repository for open access publications that assigns digital object identifiers upon upload and follows FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) guidelines for data management; a project development environment that can integrate with Google Drive, Dropbox, or GitHub; individual user profiles, with federated login/identity authorization, including with ORCID; blogging capabilities; subject interest groups; tools to facilitate member interactions (e.g., profile building, and messaging); and more.

This step-by-step guide was created as part of the Building Digital Communities in the Humanities and Social Sciences event (https://inke.ca/building2/) that took place at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences from May 27-28, 2023. The guides shared at this event aim to help new and existing users of the Canadian HSS Commons use the site to publish and share their work, host society events, migrate and share existing research materials, support the work of society journals, create collaborative groups and projects, and more.

This step-by-step guide was created as part of the Building Digital Communities in the Humanities and Social Sciences event (https://inke.ca/building2/) that took place at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences from May 27-28, 2023. The guides shared at this event aim to help new and existing users of the Canadian HSS Commons use the site to publish and share their work, host society events, migrate and share existing research materials, support the work of society journals, create collaborative groups and projects, and more.

This step-by-step guide was created as part of the Building Digital Communities in the Humanities and Social Sciences event (https://inke.ca/building2/) that took place at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences from May 27-28, 2023. The guides shared at this event aim to help new and existing users of the Canadian HSS Commons use the site to publish and share their work, host society events, migrate and share existing research materials, support the work of society journals, create collaborative groups and projects, and more.

This step-by-step guide was created as part of the Building Digital Communities in the Humanities and Social Sciences event (https://inke.ca/building2/) that took place at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences from May 27-28, 2023. The guides shared at this event aim to help new and existing users of the Canadian HSS Commons use the site to publish and share their work, host society events, migrate and share existing research materials, support the work of society journals, create collaborative groups and projects, and more.

El Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons es una herramienta multilingüe para difundir resultados de investigación como bases de datos, reportes, entradas de blog y presentaciones. Al difundirlos en el sitio, se les asigna un identificador permanente para poder ser citados y reconocidos. Además, el HSS Commons permite establecer fácilmente una presencia digital a investigadores, grupos de investigación, revistas científicas y congresos gracias a las funcionalidades de grupos y proyectos colaborativos.