[INDOLOGY] Humanities Commons?

[Lubin, Tim]

Dear colleagues,

Electronic media and the Internet play central roles nowadays in scholarly life (as in much else).  There are disadvantages to this, as well as advantages.  One of the latter is the opportunities they provide for us to communicate our work to a wider audience, and to interact professionally (and personally) from great distances.  Some of these opportunities have come by way of for-profit initiatives like Academia.edu.  I have appreciated being able to keep abreast of the work of many colleagues, and to disseminate my own work to others, including many who would not otherwise have access to it because of the cost of academic publishing.

But in recent years, many people have pointed out how for-profit platforms can undermine the values and interests of scholars through features aimed at maximizing corporate income.  A few years ago, a scholar whom I know and respect, Sarah Bond, issued a call<https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/01/23/dear-scholars-delete-your-account-at-academia-edu/?sh=4dea19922d62> (in for-profit Forbes.com!) for scholars to cancel their Academia.edu accounts and to shift such activities to non-profit venues such as Humanities Commons (https://hcommons.org/) and Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/), as well as on university repositories.  She was echoed by many others<https://icietla.hypotheses.org/114>.  In response, I proceeded to make an account and set up my profile<https://hcommons.org/members/lubin/> on Humanities Commons (Zenodo was still 99% hard sciences), but I abstained from immediately dropping my Academia.edu account, since it continued to serve my needs without irritating me too much, and I wanted to see how the non-profit option worked out.

That was five years ago.  During that time, the number of Indologists and other South Asianists using Academia.edu has only grown, while Humanities Commons remains a very lonely place, with only a tiny handful of participants in our field.  The site still seems very promising to me.  It is free and provides a similar platform for uploading research for easy accessibility – actually, with much better bibliographic data recording and searchability.  But no one seems interested in using it.  More and more scholarship, especially in Europe, is appearing in open-access forms, but much does not.

I continue, once a year, to check back to see what is happening there.  I still hope it will prosper, but only if many of you give it a try.  So I urge you to do so.

Best wishes,
Tim

Timothy Lubin
Jessie Ball duPont Professor of Religion, and Adjunct Professor of Law
Head of the Law, Justice, and Society Program
204 Tucker Hall
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, Virginia 24450
https://lubin.academic.wlu.edu/<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flubin.academic.wlu.edu%2F&data=04%7C01%7CLubinT%40wlu.edu%7C118620c8eb3b4049237308d886c1df18%7Cd1a80622a99943e58eb67873905e939e%7C1%7C0%7C637407514521888642%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=KGZJIHllkEOJZN9s48rB6YkrExmYG1owecyuPn%2FuR%2Bg%3D&reserved=0>
https://hcommons.org/members/lubin/
http://wlu.academia.edu/TimothyLubin<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwlu.academia.edu%2FTimothyLubin&data=04%7C01%7CLubinT%40wlu.edu%7C118620c8eb3b4049237308d886c1df18%7Cd1a80622a99943e58eb67873905e939e%7C1%7C0%7C637407514521888642%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=etrMzh0RHx8819v5PH6KeTgeHQpeNVqeSUP62IDVn9c%3D&reserved=0>
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