Knowledge Commons (KC) is a collaboration platform for scholars, students, and independent researchers with 56,000+ users worldwide. KC provides an open-access (OA) repository, Knowledge Commons Works (KCWorks), which provides a means of publication for all. This panel, featuring a set of talks from the KCWorks team, will discuss the process of developing a next-gen OA repository and revamped platform that aids individuals, scholars, and teams engaged in collaborative research to collaborate, share their work, and have their work discovered by others. is a platform that supports teaming and collaboration across disciplines and across continents. Our members are graduate and undergraduate students, early career researchers, senior researchers, and independent researchers and scholars. They come from art, history, literary studies, medicine, biology, machine learning, business, and musicology to name a few. By providing free tools such as a profile/digital CV, groups for collaboration, free WordPress-based websites based at hcommons.org, and a fully featured open-access repository we support groups from all over the world and all disciplines. Members can meet like-minded scholars and researchers from around the world at various stages of their careers, and collaborate in real-time.

KCWorks was designed with scholars in mind. One of these design choices was Collections: curated sets of deposits that can be created by users, groups, or organizations. For example, team science researchers may choose to create a collection, allow submissions, and invite others to cross-collaborate with materials from anywhere in the world. Submissions are curated by the collection administrators (typically those who start the collection) who may accept or reject submissions. Additionally, while team science projects may publish their work in traditional venues, ancillary materials from the project (ex: collaboration plans, process/evaluation documentation) can be made publicly available and receive DOIs through the collection and even showcased on a free WordPress website with no cost to the team.

Understanding that our community is diverse
Our diverse community of users is one of our greatest strengths. This panel features three talks that highlight (1) how we have worked with users to create KCWorks and (2) the future of OA repositories for team science work. In designing and building KC, we worked to center accessibility as well user wants and needs, and balanced that with the flexibility to support scholars with traditional, new, and emerging types of work. We created a comprehensive set of documents that could be easily read and understood by all of our users. We also engaged in a series of workshops, presentations, and hands-on sessions to help walk users through the updated form, the importance of metadata for findability, and documentation on the issues of copyright, permissions, and licensing. Panel talks include:

“Creating User-Centered Documentation and Programming to Launch an Open-Access Repository” (Larissa Babak, 10 min)
“Empowering Publishing – and Reach – for All” (Bonnie Russell, MLIS, 10 min)
“Relevant User Experience Research Strategies for Repositories” (Stephanie E. Vasko, 10 min)