Open Infrastructure and the Threat of “Vanishing” Journals: Leveraging Open Knowledge Commons, Open Source Software, and DIY Solutions to Preserve Humanities and Social Sciences Research

By Graham Jensen1, Sajib Ghosh1, Archie To1, Ray Siemens1

University of Victoria

Academic journals, institutional repositories, and emerging digital technologies have played a crucial role in providing access to scholarship. However, free and unfettered access to research is not a given—nor are the digital infrastructures…

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Version 1.0 - published on 23 Apr 2026 doi: 10.3998/jep.7860 - cite this

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Academic journals, institutional repositories, and emerging digital technologies have played a crucial role in providing access to scholarship. However, free and unfettered access to research is not a given—nor are the digital infrastructures through which open research is published and made accessible immune to commercial enclosure or obsolescence. The threat of “vanishing” digital publications also remains a very real threat, and open-access and humanities and social sciences (HSS) journals are particularly at risk of disappearing. In this paper, we aim to address the related issues of access to, and preservation of, HSS research by examining our own experiments with open methods and tools for the (re)publication of open-access scholarship via open infrastructure. As part of this process of self-examination, we focus on one infrastructural initiative that is equipped to support this work: the Canadian-based HSS Commons. In the process, we also invite consideration of how low-budget, DIY-style innovation and experimentation in the realm of digital research software constitute valid, crucial forms of humanistic intervention and activity. To do so, we discuss a project that emerged from the HSS Commons’ collaborative partnership with Iter Canada: a large-scale migration of open-access back issues from scholarly journals or book series operated by Iter. In conclusion, we reflect on the larger significance, potential wider application, and limitations of such interventions. Indeed, while there are many possible benefits to the workflow we developed—which resulted in the publication of over 6,000 publications in the HSS Commons repository, and which we hope will serve as a model for other groups or journals interested in backing up and increasing the discoverability of their own research—our work on this project also highlighted the many methodological, infrastructural, and institutional challenges that still face those who may be interested in pursuing open scholarship of this kind.

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Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

Tags

  1. digital research infrastructure
  2. DIY
  3. hss commons
  4. humanities and social sciences open access
  5. knowledge commons
  6. open infrastructure
  7. OpenRefine
  8. preservation
  9. vanishing journals

Notes

Originally published at the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Jensen, G., Ghosh, S., To, A., & Siemens, R. (2026). Open Infrastructure and the Threat of “Vanishing” Journals: Leveraging Open Knowledge Commons, Open Source Software, and DIY Solutions to Preserve Humanities and Social Sciences Research. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7860

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Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL)

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