Are Digital Humanities really committed to open? An exploratory study on the availability of methodological workflows and open peer review practices

2026-04-26

AI Summary

This study addresses a significant gap in the digital humanities concerning methodological transparency and open peer review, where data management documentation and open review mechanisms are largely absent. Through a systematic investigation combining content analysis of published works with a survey of publishing practices, this research reveals that only a minimal number of articles provide reusable methodological documentation, and the vast majority of journals and conferences continue to employ traditional blind peer review. As the first comprehensive assessment of open science practices in the digital humanities, this work fills a critical void in the literature and underscores the urgent need for improved transparency and reproducibility in scholarly communication within the field.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Open Science has become a central framework for promoting transparency, accessibility, and inclusiveness in scholarly research. While the Digital Humanities (DH) community has long embraced openness in terms of research outputs, less attention seems to have been paid to the openness of the methodological and evaluative processes underlying knowledge production. This paper presents an exploratory study that investigates the current state of openness in DH research practices, focusing specifically on research data management documentation and peer review processes. In particular, this study addresses two research questions: (1) to what extent DH publications that describe data explicitly reference external documentation detailing data creation and management processes; and (2) how widely open peer review practices are adopted across DH conferences and journals. The results revealed a limited adoption of open methodological practices. Only a small fraction of the analysed articles provided explicit, reusable documentation of data creation workflows, and no references to data management plans or formal research data management documentation were found. An even more critical picture emerges from the analysis of peer review practices: the vast majority of DH venues continue to rely on traditional single- or double-blind review models, with open peer review adopted in only a few isolated cases.

Problem

• Digital Humanities
• Open Science
• research data management
• open peer review
• methodological transparency

Innovation

• Open Science
• Digital Humanities
• research data management
• open peer review
• methodological transparency