Knowledge Commons

I first came across the Knowledge Commons at some point last week. They offer “an academy-owned and governed project, designed to serve the needs of scholars, writers, researchers, and students as they engage in teaching and research projects that benefit the larger community”.

What’s more, “unlike other social and academic networks online, the Commons is open access, open source, and nonprofit. It is focused on providing a space to discuss, share, and store cutting-edge research and innovative pedagogy—not on generating profits from users’ intellectual and personal data”.

According to their website,

The Commons launched in December 2016 as a pilot project of the office of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association. Its development was made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the pilot was designed to explore whether four partner societies — the MLA; the Association for Jewish Studies; the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and the College Art Association — could benefit from shared infrastructure for member-to-member communication, collaboration, and public engagement. Since that pilot, additional organizations have joined the network, including the Association of University Presses and the Society of Architectural Historians.

In May 2024, they changed the name of the website and project from Humanities Commons to Knowledge Commons “in order to better recognize its disciplinary inclusivity”.