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Tagged: Open Access

Billets / Evaluation framework / Initiatives

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.

Billets / Initiatives / Research Data

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! 

Billets / Evaluation framework / Initiatives

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! 

Billets / Initiatives / Open scholarly research

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. 

Billets / Evaluation framework

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.

Billets / Innovative publishing / Open scholarly research

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.

Billets / Initiatives

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!

Billets / Open scholarly research

What is in the EOSC for Arts and Humanities researchers?

EOSC (the European Open Science Cloud) is a big acronym, representing the bold vision of enabling all European researchers to deposit, access and analyze scholarly resources beyond borders and disciplines. Over the past years, it has become a central component of European science policy and, since its launch in October 2018, a reality as an infrastructure too. Still, due to the scale, the complexity and the multiple dimensions of the endeavor, it is not easy to gain an accurate overview and translate the offerings of the EOSC into one’s own institution or research setting. In this series of blog posts, we outline concrete ways in which scholarly and service provider communities around DARIAH can interact with the EOSC and the value it holds for them. We also summarize the many ways in which DARIAH already contributes to the EOSC. To kick start the series, in the first post we have a look at what the EOSC holds for researchers and, in particular, Arts and Humanities researchers.

Billets / Open scholarly research / Research Data

Connecting Arts and Humanities to the European open data commons: the OpenAIRE-DARIAH Research Community Gateway

The role of discovery platforms is becoming crucial as we produce an increasing amount of scholarly publications year by year. Not only they serve as a filtering interface (generous or not :-)) to mediate between ourselves, machines and the body of knowledge that is impossible to manually navigate (and stay on top of), but they also have a strong influence on knowledge representation in general. In this post, we take a look at how DARIAH helps connect Arts and Humanities research data and other content types to the OpenAIRE Research Graph to increase their visibility and reusability beyond geographical, language and disciplinary borders.

Billets / Open scholarly research

Open Science in the Horizon Europe funding programme: what to expect?

Without the slightest doubt, I think, we are all ready to let 2020 go and look forward to something different to come. In this forward-looking spirit, sharing information about the coming EU funding framework seems to be an appropriate topic for the last DARIAH Open post in 2020. As such, we are going to have a look at how Open Science is taking shape in the nascent Horizon Europe funding programme for 2021-2027, what to expect and what are the major changes compared to the previous funding programme, Horizon 2020.

Billets / Initiatives / Open scholarly research

DARIAH’s highlights for the Open Access Week 2020

Beyond any doubt, 2020 marked an extraordinary year in the development of Open Access. To celebrate Open Access Week of this special year, we brought together a brief selection of events, resources and tools that help scholarly communities to gain back control over scholarly communication infrastructure. In addition to DARIAH’s highlights, we also recommend programs from the rich Open Access Week calendar of the Open Access Book Network.

Billets / Open scholarly research

One more word about ResearchGate/Academia.edu and why using these platforms will never be equal to proper self-archiving

The use of ResearchGate and Academia.edu, two of the most popular but also heavily criticized social networks that compete with each other for the ‘Facebook for academics’ title, is still an ever recurring topic in conversations about self-archiving choices, or even in recent discussions about the role and competitive advantage of universities investing in open infrastructural components. These conversations inspired me to leave here an easily citable note in which I clarify why DARIAH does not endorse the use of these services, what the major differences are between sharing papers via these privately-owned platforms vs. self-archiving (a.k.a. green Open Access) and why understanding the persistent popularity of these services is crucial if we wish to take back control over the ways we communicate our work.

Billets / Initiatives / Open scholarly research

In memoriam of Jon Tennant (1988-2020)

We will remember April 2020 as days of uncertainty and tragic losses worldwide. In this extraordinary time, we do not only mourn victims of the pandemic. Just as incomprehensibly, on the 9th of April we lost Jon Tennant, a bright and tireless pioneer of Open Science and democracy in access to knowledge. In this post, I wish to connect you with and highlight pieces from his legacy.


Billets / Open scholarly research

Open Science and DH tools that come handy at the time of corona (and beyond)

As a response to the challenges ahead, from last week, suddenly online became the default means of teaching for the great majority of European schools and higher education institutions. In response to the immediate challenges coming with the rapid switch to online-only teaching systems, a variety of crowdsourced collections started to float around on Twitter, blogs and other online platforms (you can find a selection them at the bottom of this post) – and I could not help but think about some Open Science and DH tools that I think could be valuable additions to any distant learning setting, regardless on which institutional apparatus we have at our disposal.