Canadian HSS Commons

The Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons is an in-development, national-scale, multilingual network for HSS researchers and stakeholders to share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools.
Participants at the annual INKE winter gathering in Victoria, 2020. Photo by Lynne Siemens
This initiative builds on conversations and consultations over the past several years with Partnership members—in particular the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, CANARIE, Digital Research Alliance of Canada (previously Compute Canada), University of Victoria Systems, the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Knowledge Commons / Humanities Commons, and others, including:

The Canadian HSS Commons includes:

  • subject repository for open access publications that assigns digital object identifiers (DOIs) upon upload and follows FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interactive, Reusable) guidelines for research data management
  • multilingual interface in English, French, Spanish, Bangla, Portuguese, Ukrainian, and Simplified Chinese (more languages coming soon!)
  • individual user profiles and federated login/identity authorization, including via ORCID
  • blogging capabilities
  • subject interest groups
  • member interactions (e.g., profile building, messaging)

As a not-for-for profit, open access, and Canada-specific version of a humanities and social sciences scholarly communication and interaction platform, the Canadian HSS Commons will offer an alternative to commercial repositories like academia.edu or ResearchGate. 

For more information on the historical and theoretical context for this initiative, please see further reading materials on the Canadian HSS Commons website: https://hsscommons.ca/blog/2021/07/further-reading.