Authors : Graham Jensen, Sajib Ghosh, Archie To, Ray Siemens
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.
