New Open Access Journal: DHCommons journal

DHCommons is the official Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)-sponsored publication of centerNet, the international network of Digital Humanities Centers with the support of the European DARIAH infrastructure in the Arts and Humanities. The DHCommons journal overlays and interacts with the DHCommons project registry and will provide peer review for mid-stage digital projects. The most ambitious aim of DHCommons is to make visible the important, developmental work that often goes unseen in the midst of a DH project and to help DH scholars claim departmental, disciplinary, and institutional credit for that labor. DHCommons will become the robust and recognizable system of academic credit that its practitioners require.

As the journal of centerNet, DHCommons aims to bridge the “evaluation gap” between the Digital Humanities and more traditional disciplinary scholarship. Digital projects often continue for many years as a continuum of work. Rather than building to a single publication moment as monographs do, digital projects often mark mark progress through a series of significant milestones. DHCommons will provide a concrete way to certify the value of long-standing, influential, but unfinished projects to colleagues unfamiliar with the contours of digital scholarship. DHCommons’ primary goals are:

1. To represent the global, multilingual, and multidisciplinary scope of the digital humanities community. DHCommons’ editors-in-chief and editorial board come from around the world, work in a range of academic disciplines, and speak diverse languages. They will work with Anvil Academic, DHCommons’ publisher, to identify reviewers capable of assessing each project submitted to the journal. DHCommons will make its best effort to review submissions in the language submitted to the journal by the project’s directors.
2. To certify the scholarly contributions made by digital projects-in-progress, helping scholars articulate the interventions of their digital work to dissertation readers, hiring committees, department colleagues, funding and research agencies, administrators, and/or tenure and promotion committees. For DH scholars, the DHCommons review will compare in prominence to a peer-reviewed article. DHCommons aims to speak not just to digital humanities practitioners, but also to members of each humanities discipline or other such as computer science, from which its contributors come.
3. To foster an innovative, truly developmental model of peer review. DHCommons will review mid-stage, rather than finished, projects so that the ideas and suggestions of its expert reviewers can help DH scholars improve those projects moving forward. By mid-stage projects we refer to projects that have moved well beyond the planning stage and have made concrete advances without having necessarily completed the project. DHCommons’ review process aims to establish a productive dialogue between project teams and reviewers which will form the core of each journal issue. Projects will be assessed for both their form (technical aspects) and content (humanities content).

By default, all content in the DHCommons journal is licensed using a Creative Commons Attribution license. However, authors may choose another Creative Commons license for their submissions.

The journal is available online at http://dhcommons.org/journal, at no cost. An RSS feed will be available once the first issue is published.