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

TL;DR

This study examines the extent of openness in Digital Humanities research practices, revealing limited adoption of open methodologies and peer review, highlighting areas for increased transparency and openness.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into the current state of openness in DH research workflows and peer review practices, an area previously underexplored.

Findings

Few DH articles include explicit data management documentation.

Most DH venues use traditional peer review models.

Open peer review is rarely adopted in DH conferences and journals.

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.