CFP: The Journal of Open Humanities Data: Weathering the Storm: Opportunities and Challenges in Data Rescue and Safeguarding

The Journal of Open Humanities Data has announced a special collection on Data Rescue and Safeguarding. The call invites submissions from humanities practitioners and scholars on rescuing at-risk data and on safeguarding practices, with topics including digitization, institutional and community responses, disinformation, cyberattack, sustainability, ethics, and user experience. The collection accepts both short data papers and discussion papers. Expressions of interest are due May 31, 2026, and full papers are due September 7, 2026 after abstract acceptance.

From the CFP:

We are pleased to invite humanities practitioners including librarians, archivists, curators, and data stewards as well as researchers and scholars, to contribute to a Special Collection of the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) focusing on Data Rescue and Safeguarding. The role of humanities practitioners and institutions in safeguarding and rescuing cultural data has become even more relevant due to the recent funding cuts, conflicts and censorship and takedowns of data by governments and institutions across the world, which have put data at risks of erasure, and the increasing cost of safeguarding data from AI disinformation, “data pollution” and scraping.

We encourage both discussion and data paper submissions about rescuing at risk data and on safeguarding practices.

This Special Collection aims to showcase innovative approaches and practical solutions to preserve valuable data in the face of increasing pressure from austerity, war, national disasters, cybersecurity issues, and censorship. The goal is for the papers of this Collection to improve discoverability and reuse of rescued datasets (which may no longer be available in their usual homes), bring hope that information under threat is not necessarily lost, and inspire others to action.

We will prioritise submissions which explicitly address dataset creation and safeguarding methods that can be applied in low-resource, urgent and time-stretched situations.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Data Rescue
  • Different types of risk
  • Digitisation as data creation for at-risk physical items
  • Reasons for rescuing: what do you select and why?
  • Methods for rescuing
• Data Safeguarding
  • Institutional safeguarding
  • Community and voluntary initiatives
  • Integrating the traditional & institutional with the community & voluntary
  • “Safeguarding” and “preservation”
  • Methods to protect against disinformation, cyberattack and bots
  • Financial sustainability
  • Sustainability and ethics
• Other issues
  • Indigenous knowledge
  • Positionality & bias, cultural perspectives
  • Capturing context, selection & curation decisions (e.g. datasheets for CH datasets)
  • Promoting interest in the general public in data rescue
  • User experience of rescued data

We invite submissions of one of the following two types of papers:

• Short data papers contain a concise description of a humanities research object with high reuse potential; for this collection that might include specific focused collections of at-risk data or more general databases, including datasets that have been backed up or “rescued”. These are short (1000-1500 words) highly structured narratives and must conform to the data paper template. A data paper does not replace a traditional research article, but rather complements it.
• Discussion Papers illustrate methods, challenges, and limitations in the creation, collection, management, access, processing, or analysis of data in humanities research, including standards and formats. These aspects may not necessarily be discussed with reference to a specific dataset (or collection thereof). Discussion Papers are intended to be longer narratives (3,000-5,000 words), which give authors the ability to contribute to a broader discussion. See the Discussion Paper template for more information.