Knowledge Commons, managed by Michigan State University, was awarded a multi-year contract from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host and make publicly available NEH-funded research through the KCWorks online repository.
The NEH is an independent federal agency that helps support national humanities research, education, preservation, and public programming. It awards around $150 million annually in support of roughly 850 projects and initiatives.
This partnership with Knowledge Commons will help increase public access to humanities research from scholars at higher education institutions and organizations across the United States. It also will fulfill the NEH’s commitment to making federally funded research freely and publicly available as mandated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
“Public access has always been central to the NEH’s mission,” said Brett Bobley, chief information officer of the NEH and director of the Office of Digital Humanities. “The American public is helping to fund a significant amount of important research across all the disciplines, including the humanities, and I think it’s critical that as citizens we be able to have access to the results of that research.”
Knowledge Commons is an open-access and community-governed platform hosting more than 55,000 user accounts and 30,000 academic works in its library-grade repository, KCWorks, with 6.6 million downloads since launching in 2016. It is sponsored and hosted by the MESH Research Lab run by the MSU College of Arts and Letters and MSU Libraries.
“This NEH contract indicates that the Knowledge Commons is a key piece of national-level scholarly infrastructure, and we hope that this partnership will help us gather the support from academic institutions that we need to keep the project going. It’s a vote of confidence from a key funding agency in the humanities,” said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of Knowledge Commons and interim associate dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters.
In addition to the NEH, Knowledge Commons provides services to several academic organizations including the Modern Language Association, the Association of University Presses, and the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. There is also a separate area of the Knowledge Commons network, MSU Commons, that’s open exclusively to the MSU community.
“It’s important for MSU to recognize that the university is hosting a key piece of national-level scholarly infrastructure,” Fitzpatrick said. “MSU is providing a service that is not just for the institution but is really for the public in the broadest possible sense.”
This year, the NEH and Knowledge Commons will develop workflows, build and connect APIs (application programming interfaces) and organize information for optimal viewing and searching. When completed, this work will enable NEH grant awardees to seamlessly upload their research articles through the NEH grant portal and then those publications and data will be pulled into the KCWorks repository for storage and public access.
“We want the people in the United States and around the world to be able to find these articles,” said Bobley. “By putting NEH research amongst existing humanities work in the Knowledge Commons, I think it will be much more discoverable, much more likely for people to see and be able to find articles that are relevant to what they’re doing.”
A portal to the NEH also will be added to the Knowledge Commons platform, allowing NEH-funded research and humanities work to be more easily discovered and downloaded alongside the other materials within Knowledge Commons and KCWorks.
“Access to faculty scholarship is vitally important at MSU and in the College of Arts and Letters. Being able to provide outlets like Knowledge Commons for our faculty to share their work and research broadly is part of our collective mission in higher education,” said Yen-Hwei Lin, interim dean of the MSU College of Arts and Letters. “Likewise, this partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities expands MSU’s role by hosting and supporting access to nationally funded research from scholars across the United States.”
This story originally appeared on the College of Arts and Letters website.
