Clearing the Garden: ScholarlyHub as a New Non-Profit Digital Commons

Open scholarly communications are being suffocated by for-profit and large-scale academic publishers on the one hand and undermined by commercial academic social networks on the other. A possible part of the solution to both is ScholarlyHub, a new initiative to create a non-profit digital commons. ScholarlyHub proposes to serve as a social ‘front end’ of the open access movement and offer an aggregating space for diverse initiatives in the world of scholarly communications, from mentoring and pre-print services and data storage, to peer review and publication. This article explains the pressing need to ‘clear the garden’ in order to enable research to flourish in its natural environment and details the progress of ScholarlyHub to date, looking ahead with optimism to a more collaborative and open future.