Category: Billets

How do DARIAH research outputs meet the EOSC? – a case study 

In our EOSC blog post series, we do our best to debunk the big acronym and to bring recent developments happening in the many angles of the big infrastructure and the social layers around it closer to arts and humanities scholars’ desks.
In the following posts, we are going to show examples for such pathways, also because we believe that this is the most concrete, tangible way to provide you with a compass to the EOSC and help you assess how you can make the best use of it. 

Closing the evaluation gap? Social Sciences and Humanities and the reform of research assessment

In this post, Ioana Galleron, professor of Digital humanities in the University Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle and former chair of ENRESSH shares insights on why scholars’ informed judgement from specific disciplinary fields should be in the heart of the ongoing reform, where are the biggest mismatches currently in the SSH domain and how the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment should and could integrate such bottom-up perspectives.

Reflections on research assessment #2: Emanuel Kulczycki on ”Essential research is published in all languages”

Is social sciences and humanities scholarship well served by the current and nascent academic reward mechanisms? And if not, where our options and power lie to change this for the better? Recognized as crucial for the future well-being and flourishing of humanistic scholarship, such questions have been repeatedly raised and discussed on DARIAH Open both in opinion pieces, in declaring commitments or policy reflections. In support of the ongoing European research assessment reform, we are extending this ongoing thread of discussion and inviting expert perspectives from the social sciences and humanities fields to further explore the issues and opportunities our research domain faces in the brave new world of research assessment. We hope in this way to spark a discussion in the arts and humanities on what we can hope to gain, and what opportunities we have to move forward.

Research Group and policy advisor to the Ministry of Education and Science in Poland shares insights on the essential multilingual nature of Social Sciences and Humanities research and argues that for the reform to be successful, rehabilitating the notion of multilingualism and appropriately rewarding contributions in all languages is an absolute precondition.

 Reflections on research assessment #1: Samuel Moore on ”Research assessment in the university without condition”

Is social sciences and humanities scholarship well served by the current and nascent academic reward mechanisms? And if not, where our options and power lie to change this for the better? Recognized as crucial for the future well-being and flourishing of humanistic scholarship, such questions have been repeatedly raised and discussed on DARIAH Open both in opinion pieces, in declaring commitments or policy reflections. In support of the ongoing European research assessment reform, we are extending this ongoing thread of discussion and invite expert perspectives from the social sciences and humanities fields to further explore the issues and opportunities our research domain face in the brave new world of research assessment. We hope in this way to spark a discussion in the arts and humanities on what we can hope to gain, and what opportunities we have to move forward.
In the first post of the series, Dr. Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Library, and Research Associate at Homerton College, Cambridge invites us to take a step back from the actual performance indicators and revisit the research assessment discourse in the contrasting lights of the realities of the academic job market versus the unconditionality imperative of humanistic scholarship. His thoughts deeply resonate with the #IchBinHanna movement and other initiatives who, above any other kinds of reforms, call for improving the labor conditions in academia.

Joining forces to realign research assessment to research realities: a Europe-wide Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment is now published 

The existing tools of academic rewards and recognition criteria, such as citation counts, h-indexes, and the weight of publisher prestige have ceased to accurately reflect what we most value in, and need from, research. On the 20th of July, the European Commission, Science Europe, the European University Association (EUA) has reached a milestone in bringing a critical mess of 380 organizations (universities, funders, academies and learned societies, research centers, ministries, etc.) together from across and beyond Europe to form a coalition and carry out this timely reform. The first result of the joint effort, the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, sets shared goals and priorities for this critical mass of stakeholders on how to reform assessment practices for researchers, research projects and research performing organizations. DARIAH has been contributing to the initiative from the beginning by voicing shared needs and epistemic specificities of the arts and humanities domain and emphasizing  the need for discipline-tuned infrastructural enablers to such a process. As we welcome this new initiative and its implications over the coming months, we will be exploring further the issues social sciences and humanities face in the brave new world of research assessment. We hope in this way to launch a discussion in the arts and humanities about what we can hope to gain, and what opportunities we have to move forward in this new world. 

Talking peer review series #2: Experiences in Optimizing Peer-Reviewing – A success story in five acts, three years, and two astonishing voting rounds

Peer review is a central scholarly practice, a practice that carries an enormous weight in terms of gatekeeping; shaping disciplines, publication patterns and power relations. It governs the (re)distribution of resources such as research grants, promotions, tenure and even larger institutional budgets. As such, it is crucial to deeply understand how it works in situated evaluation practices, and to continually rethink it to strive for its best, and least imperfect (or reasonably imperfect) instances. This new series on the blog, Talking Peer Review, is a means to do just that. You will find here reflections, reports, opinion pieces and, to bring in some metascience, reviews of the current state of the art in the arts and humanities disciplines. In this episode Anne Baillot, Professor in German Studies at Le Mans Université shares her and her team’s experiences on bringing open peer review to the annual conference of the German-speaking Digital Humanities association – in 5 acts. Her insights do not only shed light on some of the dramatic aspects of peer review and showcase why it is difficult to change ingrained, established practices; but also reveal how an empathetic, deeply sensible approach can foster meaningful dialogues across members of a scholarly association and can eventually lead to the redefinition of such practices along increased transparency and equity.

The Trouble With Big Data: insights from Jennifer Edmond, Jörg Lehmann, Mike Priddy and Nicola Horsley 

In this episode of our Open Scholar stars series, I am talking with a whole group: Jennifer Edmond (Trinity College Dublin), Jörg Lehmann (University of Tübingen), Mike Priddy (Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), and Nicola Horsley (Leeds Beckett University) on occasion of the publication of their Open Access book, The Trouble With Big Data: How Datafication Displaces Cultural Practices. We discuss inherent disciplinary and cultural biases in doing data-driven research,  digitization agendas,  data and power, data metaphors, apen access book publishing and more. Enjoy! 

Talking peer review series #1: On kindness in scholarly evaluation practices – a guest post

Peer review is a central scholarly practice, a practice that carries an enormous weight in terms of gatekeeping; shaping disciplines, publication patterns and power relations. It governs the (re)distribution of resources such as research grants, promotions, tenure and even larger institutional budgets. As such, it is crucial to deeply understand how it works in situated evaluation practices, and to continually rethink it to strive for its best, and least imperfect (or reasonably imperfect) instances. This new series on the blog, Talking Peer Review, is a means to do just that. You will find here reflections, reports, opinion pieces and, to bring in some metascience, reviews of the current state of the art in the arts and humanities disciplines. In the first episode, Anne Baillot, Professor in German Studies at Le Mans Université shares insights about the value of kindness in peer review and possibilities to bring more transparency to the process Enjoy! 

Developing Identifiers for Heritage Collections: Q&A with Rebecca Grant (F1000) and Frances Madden (British Library), authors of the Open Educational Resource

Persistent Identifiers (DOIs, handles, ORCID IDs, Wikidata IDs etc.) became essential resources in our increasingly noisy digital workplaces. Beyond enabling linking instead of losing our resources, PIDs usually come with secure storing, versioning and long-term archiving solutions too. Although assigning PIDs to our scholarly outputs became a no-brainer on the level of project and data management guidelines, in reality, the selection and implementation of PID systems are anything but straightforward – especially in working conditions where the use of Zenodo or other research data repositories is simply not the best solution. In this post, we are talking with Frances Madden (British Library) and Rebecca Grant (F1000) on occasion of releasing a new Open Educational Resource which provides guidance on developing and using PIDs in the context of heritage collections. 

Bringing arts and humanities perspectives to the redefinition of ” what counts” in research(er) evaluation

Research assessment has been recognized as the Achilles heel of firmly grounding Open Science practices in research realities for a long while now. A wide range of innovative, born-digital scholarship are still invisible from formal research administration and assessment. Entering 2022, we see strong European-level policy drive and momentum to change this for the better. In this post, we showcase 4 ways in which DARIAH supports this important endeavor in areas that naturally fall close to DARIAH’s mission.

Born-digital journals built on top of scholarly powerhouses: 10+ 1 things you wanted to know about overlay journals

In this post, we are going to take a look at a significant Open Access innovation: overlay journal publishing. We will see what is the value in them and how epistemic cultures shape their uptake in the arts and humanities disciplines. For easier readability, the post is, somewhat arbitrarily, structured along the frequently asked questions that I collected from the DARIAH Open Science helpdesk, workshops and conversations on the topic.

Reimagining the past and future of academic books: interview with Janneke Adema, author of Living Books

At DARIAH, recognizing and even celebrating the complexities of humanistic and artistic research practices has always been a heart of our interest. This includes connecting DARIAHns with fair Open Access players and showcasing, discussing innovations that are pushing the boundaries of what we can conceive as the scholarly monograph in the 21st century. The conversation below with Janneke Adema, author of Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities had started out as a twitter exchange that later we continued in the margins of the book. In this post, you can read its remediated, recontextualized version where the questions are not directly anchored in the introduction chapter of the book. We discuss how blogging helped her to rethink book publishing (of her own and of others); the fetishization of print books and how it relates to Zoom background, dynamic forms of publishing and many more. Enjoy!

3 ways in which DARIAH contributes to the EOSC

In the third episode of our EOSC blog series, we touch upon the many ways in which DARIAH contributes to the EOSC. We discuss, what does it mean to contribute to the EOSC federation as a distributed infrastructure and what are the challenges and opportunities we see for DARIAH members.

Open Scholar Stars Series: Interview with Patrik Svensson

In the next episode of our Open Scholar stars series, I am talking with Patrik Svensson, Professor in the Humanities and Information Technology, Umeå University, former Director of HUMlab (2000-2014), and, not least, Chair of the DARIAH Scientific Board. We chat about Digital Humanities and DARIAH, his experiences with Open Access publishing and his new role at the Open Research Europe platform, translating epistemic cultures to infrastructure needs, our COVID afterlife, and many more!

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