Todd A. Carpenter (National Information Standards Organization) uploaded “What Constitutes Peer Review of Data: A Survey of Published Peer Review Guidelines” to the Cornell University Repository to download. The paper reviews the policies around publication of data sets and how to understand peer review and data sets. Carpenter writes:

The process of peer review of articles varies from title to title, but it usually consists of two stages: an editorial assessment by the journal’s editor or editorial team, then an external evaluation by several peer reviewers…If a paper moves passes this initial test, it is then sent to independent reviewers for consideration. These reviewers usually provide a deeper analysis and critique of the paper, a step that, according to Walker and Rocha da Silva, involves factors such as study design and methodology, soundness of process and results, data clarity, interpretation of results, completeness of the study, novelty and significance, ethical issues, and other journal-specific criteria. Of course, this process isn’t without its critics, its faults, its troubles, or its resulting errors.

The University of Michigan Press/Michigan Publishing and the University of Michigan Library IT announced the beta launch of the new digital tool, Fulcrum. This platform uses the Hydra/Fedora Framework and “helps publishers present the full richness of their authors’ research outputs in a durable, discoverable, and flexible form.” During this beta phase, the platform will feature its first project, The Director’s Prism: E.T.A Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.

Fulcrum is focused on the presentation of digital source and supplemental materials that cannot be represented adequately in print form. Fulcrum allows for a richer experience and deeper understanding for the reader and enables authors to make better, multi-faceted arguments. The platform readily supports multimedia content, including playback for audio and video files and pan-zoom capability for high resolution images. All content is discoverable and preserved via durable URLs. Structured metadata and faceted search results also allow for further exploration of the materials.

The Open Library of Humanities announced the launch of their platform with an editorial by directors Martin Paul Eve and Caroline Edwards. Launched after more than two years of planning, with supporting membership funding, OLH represents “the seed of a scalable model for journal transition to open access in the humanities that does not rely on payment from authors or readers” and that attempts to counter “staunch resistance in the humanities to open access.” As Martin and Edwards write:

For this initial launch, six journals have moved from their existing homes to our new model: 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long-Nineteenth Century; The Comics Grid; Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon; ASIANetwork Exchange; Studies in the Maternal; and The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. These publications span the range of journal types that the platform can support: those publications that are already open access but that rely on unsustainable volunteerist labour; those that are open access but that rely on unsustainable article process charges; and those that are currently subscription-based but that want to achieve open access. Applications are now open for other journals that wish to join the platform.

Start Sociable End Sociable

I am pleased to present Make It New? A dh+lib Mini-Series the ebook. It is available for download in epub and pdf format.

This ebook is an experiment in publishing, demonstrating one way that openly-published works can be built upon and carried forward. It features the posts from Make It New? A dh+lib Mini-Series alongside the original Journal of Library Administration articles. Open access publishing allows us to invite our readers – all of them, regardless of their location relative to paywalls – to respond to the ideas presented in scholarly articles. Here, it has enabled us to repackage the articles and responses in a self-contained and more stable format for distribution. At this particular moment, where the work of publishers, libraries, and other like-minded institutions are overlapping in interesting ways, we need more experimental projects that explore the boundaries of what’s possible and what’s useful.

This work is a product of the collective effort of the authors and editors whose works are included– Barbara Rockenbach, Chris Alen Sula, Jennifer Vinopal, Monica McCormick, Miriam Posner, Bethany Nowviskie, Micah Vandegrift, Stewart Varner, Ben Vershbow, Sarah Potvin, Roxanne Shirazi, Devin Higgins, Kevin Butterfield, Trevor Muñoz, Nathaniel Gustafson-Sundell, Daniel Griffin, and Chella Vaidyanathan.

Special thanks go to Micah Vandegrift for his skillful negotiations with Taylor and Francis, which allowed the authors of the JLA articles to maintain copyright to their work. I am grateful to the JLA authors, all of whom have made peer-reviewed open access versions of their articles publicly available, for allowing us to include these works in this publication under a CC-BY-NC license. The authors of the dh+lib responses, all of which were published under Creative Commons licensing terms, were equally willing to participate in this experiment, and we thank them for making this possible. I particularly appreciate the help of Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University, who helped elucidate the rights issues and claims embedded in this project.

Finally, I would be remiss not to give thanks to my dh+lib co-editors, Roxanne Shirazi and Sarah Potvin, whose consummate editorial work on the mini-series resulted in a delightfully thought-provoking set of work.

I hope you enjoy the works presented here. May you discover many answers, new questions, and find inspiration.

Zach Coble

Digital Scholarship Specialist, New York University

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Text and slides from a talk delivered by Trevor Muñoz, Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research at the University of Maryland Libraries, at the CIC Center for Library Initiatives conference. Muñoz presents an intriguing synthesis of a couple of growing trends in libraries – data curation and publishing. Data curation here is defined as “information work that integrates closely with the disciplinary work practices and needs of researchers in order to ‘maintain digital information that is produced in the course of research in a manner that preserves its meaning and usefulness as a potential input for further research.'” Muñoz argues that “data curation work would also be ‘publishing’ in the sense of ensuring quality and disseminating outputs to interested communities…By recognizing data curation work as a publishing activity, libraries would have a ‘market opportunity’ to address unmet needs in the digital humanities community.” More broadly,

Data curation as a “publishing” activity is increasingly relevant to the working lives of digital humanities scholars. Moreover, articulating connections between “publishing” and data curation is important in the context of strategic decision libraries might make and, in fact, are making about how to participate in “publishing.” Data curation as publishing is publishing work that draws directly on the unique skills of librarians and aligns directly with library missions and values in ways that other kinds of publishing endeavors may not.

The Open Library of the Humanities is seeking editors for its disciplinary fields. As described by its cofounder Martin Eve in a piece in the Guardian’s Higher Education Network blog in March, the Open Library of the Humanities seeks “to offer a low-APC (academic publishing costs) or APC-free solution for rigorously reviewed, digitally preserved work across the humanities.” Editors are sought in disciplines included, but not limited to:

+ History

+ Theology & Religious Studies

+ Literature & Languages

+ Modern & Ancient Languages

+ Philosophy

+ Cultural Studies & Critical Theory

+ Film, TV & Media Studies

+ Musicology, Drama & Performance

+ Classics

+ Art, Design & Art History

+ Legal Theory

+ Digital Humanities

+ Politics & Political Theory