Highlights from the ‘How to make the most of your publications in the humanities?’ workshop

Would you like to get an impression of the workshop? Below you can find highlights form each session and the links to the presentations.

How FOSTER advances Open Science. (Helene Brinken, FOSTER)

Setting the scene:  as a warm up, Helene introduced some basic concepts of Open Science and showed how they are covered by FOSTER Plus free online courses, train the trainer events and in the Open Science Training Handbook. You can take a look and cherry-pick from FOSTER’s resources here

Bridging Open Scholarship with Arts and Humanities research practices. (Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, DARIAH-EU)

The DARIAH context and our mission of supporting the transition towards Open Scholarship in the humanities on the one hand and gaining visibility and recognition of humanities’ contributions to the Open Scholarship on the other. Also,  bit of OpenMethods.

“[…] don’t be afraid to publish openly, but don’t be ashamed when you encounter structural factors that impede you. Like all actors, we’re caught in a web of structure and agency.” – an important message from our blog competition winner, James L. Smith.

Open Scholarly Monographs, from Technology to Usage. (Pierre Mounier, OPERAS)

Pierre’s conclusion: the book is not dead but Open Access monographs need to be integrated into the digital scholarly ecosystem to guarantee their citability, discoverability, quality assurance and general well-being in the 21st century academia and beyond.  This is what the HIRMEOS project is all about. An especially interesting part of the project is a peerreview certification framework developed in collaboration with DOAB: it gives clear information about what has been done in terms of quality assessment of Open Access books.

Open Access for Books – Closing the Loop. (Philipp Hess, Knowledge Unlatched)

Heavily fragmented market segment, many small players, multiple languages, market intransparency, funding issues – Phillipp confronted us with some of the major challenges we all (authors, libraries and publishers, policy-makers) have to address in order to develop a clear understanding on Open Access monographs and to push forward their better integration with Europe’s strong Open Access agenda.

Scholarly Makerspaces – A new Perspective on Library Services for Arts and Humanities Researchers. (Ben Kaden, Michael Kleineberg, Humboldt University Berlin)

Open Access does not stop at  publications – it also has to do with access to tools and skills needed for doing research in a digital environment. Ben and Michael introduced the Future e-Research Support in the Humanities project and showed us the potentials in libraries as scholarly makerspaces to enable digital forms of work in research and teaching with appropriate, easy to access infrastructure and services, including DH tools, their curation and support services for a range of different communities of interest.

Opening up the Peer Review Process. (Edit Görögh, OpenUP, University of Göttingen)

A statement that cannot be over-emphasized: fairness and transparency of the research evaluation system is crucial to the sustainability of knowledge creation. Edit gave us neat overview of open peer review tools and services that help deconstruct the black box of peer review and showed the many sheds and ways in which it can be open.

Legally published: Copyright Issues and Open Licensing in the Humanities. (Walter Scholger, Austrian Center for Digital Humanities, University of Graz, Vanessa Hannesschläger, Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Austrian Academy of Sciences.

In their session, Walter and Vanessa, chairs of the DARIAH Ethics & Legality in the Digital Arts and Humanities Working Group  provided a basic introduction to legal terms and issues regarding copyright and publication, and explained how open licenses work and how they can help in making our work more visible and accessible. They also showcased some of the most prominent open licensing tools aimed at scholars with no legal background.

The vivid discussion and feedback from the audience clearly showed the strong need for advocacy when it comes to licensing. Key takeaways: adding SA (Share Alike) or ND (no derivatives) to your Creative Commons license statement can be a a real limitation. Maybe even more importantly,  in a European continental law context, where you are not allowed to waive your moral rights, CC0 has potential for infringement. Use CC-BY instead, and, just like via citations, always give credit to the creators of the source to be credited too as a content creator.

Future Proof and FAIR Research Data: Open Data Management Best Practices & First Steps. (Ulrike Wuttke, Fachhochschule Potsdam)

This session gently introduced the participants to the basics in research data management, data services and the FAIR principles in a humanities context,just to see how all these at first possibly fairly abstract new concepts help do more effective research if they are well- translated into community practices.

While keeping a constant dialogue with each other, participants had a productive exchange about their own data, their own implications and the best possible ways to make them future proof. You can read further details and insights on Ulrike’s blog.

Do-it-yourself Self-archiving (Laurent Romary (DARIAH-EU and Naomi Truan (Freie Universität Berlin))

Am I ready to put my publications (and data) online? Which version of my paper should I upload in a repository? Does Open Access equal Article Processing Charges? How can I disambiguate myself from authors with similar name in the digital scholarly communication ecosystem? [spoiler: if you ever had doubts about the power of disambiguation, check Laurent Romary, the singer], Where should I go and deposit? – in the last parallel hands-on session Laurent guided us through some of the most pressing issues in achieving a sustainable self-archiving routine that is based on informed  decisions. Thinking aloud together, we addressed dreams, fears and practicalities to take further steps in making the most from our publications. Interestingly, attendees tended to show more positive attitudes towards data sharing then towards sharing preprints.

To see how it all works through a personal success story, in the second half of the session, we switched to a perspective of an early-career researcher: Naomi, who defended her PhD in the meantime, revealed us how she came all the way to be an open scholar. Her open research dissemination advice: do it in your own rhythm and find what works for you, so that you can stand for it.

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