If you are a regular visitor to our blog, you might have noticed that The Scholarly Tales is a blog hosted by Humanities Commons (HC). We, at Artes research, actively promote the use of innovative, non-profit and community-led platforms such as HC and work to bring them to the attention of our readers and researchers. In this blogpost we will take you through the different aspects of the Humanities Commons platform and explain what it can offer you.

Humanities Commons labels itself as a “network for people working in the humanities,” but apart from enabling academic networking, HC also encompasses an Open Access repository, a webhosting structure, and a platform for collaborative work. Humanities Commons is dedicated to openness, which is evident in the fact that the platform is open to anyone, regardless of field, language, institutional affiliation, or form of employment. It is completely Open Access, Open Source and non-profit, in contrast to other academic networking platforms such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, which do have commercial objectives and often have an aggressive advertisement strategy. At Humanities Commons you can rest assured that any content or information you contribute to the platform will never be used for commercial ends.

Humanities Commons as a scholarly network

The first step to begin using Humanities Commons is to create an account. Registration is easy: you can either link your profile with existing accounts from other applications such as Google or Twitter or you can make a completely new HC account. When you have officially joined the Commons, you can start building your profile. All your activity on HC will be linked here: your groups, your shared work, your websites, etc. The next step is to find colleagues and discover new like-minded researchers by browsing through and joining different groups or by creating your own group. Joining groups allows you to easily interact and collaborate with scholars who share common interests. If you create your own group, it is useful to know that you have the option to make the group either public, private, or hidden. All groups allow each member access to group discussion boards with e-mail notifications, shared calendar, file sharing, and collaborative documents.

HC stimulates communication between its members by making connections. Some ways you can do this include following other users to keep up-to-date with their work or by starting a private chat or using the @tag . Interacting in this more personal way is great for asking questions, getting feedback from colleagues on your work, and promoting events and publications.

Humanities Commons as an Open Access repository

The repository of HC is called the Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE. CORE offers users the possibility of archiving a copy of their work and sharing it with the world in Open Access. The content can be accessed and downloaded by anyone, even if they have not registered for an account.

You can upload a variety of materials to CORE – whether it’s a published paper, a syllabus, a blog post, an interview, a work in progress, a data set, or even audio or video files (there are some guidelines on file types and file size). Every type of research output can have an impact, so all different types of materials are accepted.

Works deposited to CORE are covered by the Humanities Commons Terms of Service, which offers protection against misuse. You can, however, publish your work under a Creative Commons (CC) license of your choosing. This will allow reuse of your work in accordance with the stipulations of the chosen CC license.

Every item you upload is given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that serves as a permanent identifier. DOIs provide persistent, citable metadata for scholarly and creative works, including gray literature such as blog posts, syllabi, data sets, presentations, and video and audio files.

The repository offers numerous methods of discoverability. All materials uploaded to CORE are indexed by Google, Google Scholar, SHARE, Altmetric, and BASE-OA. Since you can notify the members of any of your Humanities Commons groups when you have uploaded new material to CORE, you can easily bring your work to the attention of a relevant potential readership.

Lastly, CORE also provides long-term storage of your work since the files deposited in CORE are stored in the Columbia University Libraries’ long-term digital preservation storage system.

Humanities commons as a webhost

When you have registered with Humanities Commons, you can also start a blog or a site through their platform to boost your online presence, get feedback, or simply share information. Because of their emphasis on openness, sites on the Commons are by default open to anyone but, if necessary, you can restrict access.

Humanities Commons allows two types of sites: group sites and personal sites. Group sites are created by the administrator of a group who then determines the role of each of the other members.

Sites are built with WordPress, a popular Content Management System (CMS) that many are already familiar with. HC offers templates and plugins to personalize your site. The guides and extensive FAQ section navigate you through the different steps of creating your own online presence with ease. However, if you would encounter any difficulties or have any questions about starting your own WordPress website or blog, do get in touch with us! We would be happy to share some tips and tricks!

Humanities Commons is a user-friendly platform with a high emphasis on openness. Contrary to other scholarly networking sites, it is not focused on making profit through the exploitation of user data. The primary goal of Humanities Commons is to offer a space for researchers to connect and to share and archive scholarly work. It is a great alternative to other scholarly networking sites and is also a perfect way to support Open Access ideals while disseminating your research and building your online scholarly presence.

A previous post shed some much needed light on the complex world of OA terminology. It certainly helps to be familiar with these names, although we cannot claim that all possible questions can be answered with one post. What about Black OA, Rogue OA, Radical OA and Platinum OA? Can Bronze OA actually be called OA? And is Elsevier really talking about the same approach to Diamond OA as the early advocates for community-driven, APC-free OA do when they plan a Diamond OA Journals conference?

It is necessary to get familiar with this OA terminology. However, we should also be mindful of the risk that we spend so much time and energy on definitions that we lose sight of the essence – not unlike what happens with trying to define what a predatory journal is, which deflects attention from the real problems of scholarly publishing (version of this article openly archived here). Another approach would be to start the discussion from two simple distinctions.

The first is the difference between open archiving and open publishing.

• The actor with open archiving is the author. He or she publishes something, and then takes the additional actions of archiving an electronic version of that publication in a repository and making the archived version freely available to all. Quite regularly, the version which the author has archived and made available is not identical to the published version (e.g. an accepted version instead of the published version), and the archived version is not available at the same time as the published version (e.g. it is made openly available with a delay of 12 months). Open archiving thus offers the advantages of OA, at no cost to the author (who can always find a free repository to archive his or her text in), but requires an additional action by the author and exists as a system parallel to actual publishing.
• The actor with open publishing is the publisher. At the time of publication, the publisher immediately makes the final version of the text openly available. A publisher typically does not do this for free, and somebody needs to cover the publication costs. This can be done by charging the author, by charging an academic institution or a research funder, or by having the publication costs covered by a group of supporters, typically a consortium of university libraries.

The second is the difference between a for-profit and a non-profit approach to scholarly publishing.

• In a for-profit approach, the goal is to realize incoming funds which are higher than the actual publication costs. The profit which is thus realized is not reinvested fully in the scholarly community but used to reward shareholders in the publishing business. Scholarly publishing has great potential for being a profit-bearing enterprise, because most of the skilled workers in the production chain (i.e. the researchers) offer the fruits of their labor (producing manuscripts, performing peer review, editorial work) for free, because there is a stable market of customers (i.e. university libraries), and because prestige is such a big factor in academic publishing (so that publishers who have attained a good reputation can realize very high mark-ups).
• The non-profit approach rejects the premise that profit should be made on the dissemination of research results. At its core is the conviction that scholarly knowledge is a common good and thus should be shared by all. It resents the fact that a small group (i.e. shareholders of a publishing company) would profit from investments with public money (both in employing researchers and by subsidizing university libraries) and therefore maintains that if incoming funds are higher than publication costs, they should be reinvested in the scholarly community.

When navigating your way through the Open Access publishing landscape you will quickly learn that a color system is used to distinguish between the different types of business models for OA publishing. But what does each color stand for and what does it allow in terms of publicly sharing your work? In this blog post I will give a quick recap of the most commonly used “color categories”. This information is based on the definitions you will find on the KU Leuven pages about Open Access.

Green Open Access

Green OA, or self-archiving, means that you publish your work behind a paywall but at the same time you archive a digital copy of your publication in a free online repository where everyone can access it. Many different repositories exist, such as Zenodo, CORE by Humanities Commons, and of course our institutional repository Lirias. Which document version you can publicly share and when you are allowed to share it varies greatly per publisher. A useful website for checking publisher’s archiving policies is Sherpa Romeo. Luckily, you are always allowed (thanks to Belgian OA legislation) to make the accepted version of a journal article available in OA, if necessary after an embargo period. So, instead of publishing directly in OA with the publisher, Green OA allows for parallel publishing and is always free of charge for authors.

Gold Open Access

Gold OA entails that the publisher makes the published version of your work immediately and freely available to the public. For journals, there are two different types: full OA (all the articles are published in immediate OA) or hybrid OA (see below). The reader does not have to pay for access, meaning that publishers have to find alternative financial resources. As a result, most often the author will need to pay a publishing fee (commonly called Article Processing Charge (APC) and Book Processing Charge (BPC)). The fees that are charged for publishing your article or book can vary greatly depending on the for-profit or non-profit nature of the publisher.

1. For-profit Gold OA: in a for-profit business model the fees charged for publishing are higher than the actual cost of publishing. Simply put this means that a publisher will make money on your scientific output so I would advise you to think twice before selecting this option.
2. Non-profit Gold OA: luckily there is an alternative to for-profit Gold OA, in a non-profit model the authors pay publishing fees which are calculated to represent the true cost of publishing. The costs are determined according to standards of sustainability rather than profitability. For example, in order to be cost-efficient an APC of €1.000 should suffice to publish an OA article.[1] A strict version of non-profit Gold OA is Fair OA, which strives for a full, immediate and transparent implementation of OA. Fair OA offers the well-known advantages of OA while at the same time avoiding a costly for-profit business model for scholarly publishing. Furthermore, Fair OA returns control over the publication process to the scholarly community.

Diamond Open Access

Diamond OA will make your work immediately available in OA and readers do not have to pay to access it. However, instead of charging the publishing fees to the authors (or institutions for which they work), the publishing infrastructure is subsidized by a third party (e.g. a funding agency or a consortium of university libraries). Consequently, they can offer their publication services free of charge to both readers (no subscription cost) and authors (no publishing fees). This is a great example of a non-profit business model which is at the same time most often also community-led, meaning that the scholarly community itself is in control of the publishing system. The KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA sponsors various Diamond OA initiatives.

Bronze Open Access

In the Bronze OA model the journal is officially subscription-only and no author fee is charged for OA publishing. However, the publisher can choose, for a brief period, to release a publication free to read on their website but without an open license like Creative Commons (perhaps for marketing purposes or in response to health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic). Bronze OA is therefore not truly OA since the publisher can close off free access at any time, whereas genuinely OA publications have an open license that ensures the publication to be permanently and freely accessible with clear agreements about sharing and reuse. Thus, Bronze OA is not considered as a valid way to publish in OA and it’s not applicable in order to fulfill research funders requirements on OA publishing.

Hybrid Open Access

A Hybrid OA journal, opposed to a Full OA journal, is a subscription-based journal that offers authors the option to publish their individual article in OA by payment of an author fee. The articles that are published in OA are freely available to the readers, but the journal as such is still published behind a paywall. This model is called “double dipping” as the journal makes a double profit: on the one hand, the author pays a fee to get his/her article published in OA, and on the other hand, the library/reader pays a subscription fee to have access to the other articles in that same journal.

Do not hesitate to contact me if you need some advice in selecting an OA publishing route.

[1] Martin Paul Eve, “How Much Does It Cost to Run a Small Scholarly Publisher?”, 13 February 2017, https://eve.gd/2017/02/13/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-a-small-scholarly-publisher/; “Faq – Fair Open Access” https://www.fairopenaccess.org/faq/; Martin Paul Eve, Saskia C.J. De Vries and Johan Rooryck, “The Transition to Open Access The State of the Market, Offsetting Deals, and a Demonstrated Model for Fair Open Access with the Open Library of Humanities”, in Expanding Perspectives on Open Science: Communities, Cultures and Diversity in Concepts and Practices (2017), 127-128.