Members of the ETCL team, Dan Tracy (Associated Researcher and former Visiting Scholar) and Graham Jensen (Assistant Director; Digital Humanities Research Lead) recently co-published an article titled “Humanities scholars’ needs for open social scholarship platforms as online scholarly information sharing infrastructure.”
In this article, Dan and Graham examine the challenges and opportunities of open social scholarship, focusing on the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an academically governed platform, against the landscape of technical solutions scholars already have for sharing information about their research and scholarship. The article addresses humanities scholars’ needs and behaviors related to sharing scholarly information online, highlighting issues such as technical fatigue, sustainability, and effective engagement with both academic and non-academic audiences. By looking at the broader contexts of scholarly sharing tools used by scholars, the study finds that the proliferation of many, often narrowly tailored, existing platforms contributes to all three of these issues and limits effective community formation in any given technical solution. Feedback from participants provides insight into how academy-governed infrastructure can better support open scholarship.