Author: Françoise Gouzi
Reviewers: Elena Giglia, Sy Holsinger, Tomasz Umerle
The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) is planning the introduction of an overlay journal, and has chosen Episciences platform for this project. The application for this overlay journal is now accepted. Episciences is a French public publishing platform provided by one of DARIAH’s French partner institutions, the Centre for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD). It will help its communities to develop a new transparent and ethical publishing model within their own institutions. CCSD is developing the French national open repository HAL-SHS, which is one of the DARIAH-FR’s in-kind contributions. Episciences is also onboarded on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Portal.
What is in an “overlay journal”?
An overlay journal is an innovative type of scholarly publication that operates on top of pre-existing data repositories and preprint servers. Unlike traditional journals, overlay journals do not host content themselves. Instead, they select, peer review and formally publish links to content that is already hosted on other platforms, such as HAL or arXiv, or institutional repositories. Articles, or any type of content that has been selected for publication, receives a proper citation and a digital object identifier (DOI), making it possible for readers to reference and link to these documents reliably.
Earlier literature has referred to such journals as “deconstructed journals” or “superjournals” (Eysenbach, 2019 & Smith, 1999). Overlay journals combine elements from the gold and green routes to Open Access (OA), which have often been presented as separate paths to enable Open Access.
An overlay journal is a scientific journal, with a unique editorial line and publication project, which relies on a Diamond Open Access evaluation and publication platform.
- There are no access fees
- There are no publication fees
With the overlay model, the gold OA element is reflected in the journal curating content through editorial work, managing its peer-review and ultimately making the final output available in OA without any paywall for readers. The green element comes from overlay journals basing parts of their publication processes on public OA repositories (see e.g. Pinfield, 2009, Rousi & Laakso, 2022).
Innovating editorial workflows or how to transform evaluation practices
As an overlay journal, and if accepted by Episciences, Transformations will be a distributed publication system that decouples publication from evaluation:
- Authors deposit their work as a preprint in an institutional repository (HAL, Zenodo, ArXiv or other national repositories) and send the link to Transformations for consideration.
- Transformations organises peer review of the preprint.
- Corrections are made by the authors and a new version of the preprint is deposited in the open repository.
- Once the required corrections have been made, the publication receives a DARIAH seal of publication and a citation from Transformations (which is automatically communicated to the repository).
Transformations: A DARIAH Journal will make public the time between submission and publication (average time in weeks between the first submission of the article and its publication in the journal), which is one of DOAJ criteria regarding transparency of editorial practices, guaranteeing authors reasonable publication times.
The editorial board will encourage referees to review the article as soon as possible, preferably within three weeks.
Reviewers will be asked to provide formal feedback, even if an article is not deemed suitable for publication in the journal. For the peer review process, the editorial board will rely on the Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers from COPE.
Transformations: A DARIAH Journal will enable researchers to publish a diversity of Digital Humanities outputs (publications linked with data) that they usually don’t get enough academic credit for.
Through this new overlay journal DARIAH aims to reach several objectives that we present below: propose a transparent and ethical publishing model ; promote best practices and editorial quality standards to contribute to the evaluation framework of innovative outputs ; improve metadata quality of open repositories from DARIAH member states and SSH communities. With this innovative journal, DARIAH would like to demonstrate leadership and popularise distributed publication platforms in the domain of Arts and Humanities.
What’s innovative in open peer-review?
Purely transparent peer reviewing can have multiple aims, including ensuring accountability for comments and allowing other readers to benefit from the reviewers comments.
Open Peer Review enhances the quality, reliability and effectiveness of the Peer Review process by enabling open discussions among reviewers and the wider community. It also enhances the visibility, recognition and reputation of reviewers and their contributions.
Furthermore, more transparent evaluation fosters greater accountability and effective error detection, building trust and confidence in the research community.
It facilitates the exchange of knowledge and ideas among researchers, encouraging constructive criticism and helping identify flaws or areas for improvement.
The content selected to be published will be based on the quality of the methodology rather than the expected impact of the research results.
Episciences, an alternative publishing platform
Episciences has a complete publishing system, covering all disciplines and is based on a Diamond model. It provides this on its own site which allows it to manage both the editorial workflow and the publication of articles for the overlay journals.
It enables an open peer review process, a more innovative way of reviewing (both names of authors and reviewers are known) that DARIAH encourages and advocates within its communities of researchers.
Episciences meet the “FAIR practice” (6 recommendations on how to put FAIR into practice for the EOSC, research funders and policymakers) and the exemplary criteria defined by the Open Science French Steering Committee. The Episciences platform is also onboarded on Open AIRE Graph as Data source (https://oai.episciences.org/) enabling broader visibility and use for all SSH and Arts communities in Europe.
- Diamond open access allows immediate free access—without identification or DRM (Digital rights management, the management of legal access to digital content)—to publications being deposited in an open archive. Submission and publication are not conditional on the payment of a per-unit publication fee (APC).
- The data and metadata produced are open, standardised, structured, easily accessible and interoperable. Each published editorial unit has a unique, persistent identifier (DOI).
- Throughout the editorial process, the article remains the full and complete property of its author.
- Long-term preservation is ensured by Cines (French National Computer Center for Higher Education).
Fostering Diamond model
As part of its Open Science strategy, DARIAH-EU is willing to make a strong commitment to Diamond Open Access. DARIAH-EU recently signed the Manifesto on Science as Global Public Good: Non commercial Open Access which is aligned with the following main principles: science as a public good is an universal right; equity, diversity and multilingualism; recognition and assessment ; scientific outputs as scholar property and human heritage; collaboration with non-commercial stakeholders.
Innovative and transparent publication in the arts and humanities that enable alignment with the increasingly digital research workflows is among the key strategic priorities of DARIAH-EU, and one of its pillars within the 3rd Strategic Action Plan (2022-2025). This will also engage DARIAH and its communities in strengthening evaluation cultures around valuable scholarship and results that remain out of the scope of traditional research assessment frameworks, such as various forms of data and software publications, digital editions, methodological papers, training materials, etc.
DARIAH also aims to explore and support publication mechanisms that are community controlled and that shed more light on research processes underlying resources than the traditional units of scholarship stemming from print culture. Furthermore, the DARIAH overlay journal is expected to play a role as a layer connecting the dots in our distributed infrastructure, highlighting individual datasets or research outputs and contributing to their increased citability.
With this new innovative publishing project, DARIAH fulfils several commitments:
- Promote and better assess innovative forms and outputs (publications linked to datasets, software)
- Propose a transparent (FAIR) and ethical publishing model and contribute to transforming the evaluation framework of publication landscape
- Enhance reviewing activities and skills in the Research Assessment framework
- Connect and value national open repositories (DARIAH members and SSH communities)
- Demonstrate leadership and popularise distributed platforms in the domain of A&H
The added value of the DARIAH overlay journal is to help the Arts and Humanities communities to reuse tools and workflows. Transformations: A DARIAH Journal does not pretend to be just another “Digital Humanities” Journal, but aims to make sustainability and reproducibility of research its main objectives. We will pay particular attention (as a requirement in the submission phase) to ensuring the availability of the resources and associated software.
Françoise Gouzi, DARIAH Open Science Officer
Best practices and editorial quality standards
In order to be compliant with international standards of editorial quality for open access journals, as soon as the DARIAH journal is created, we will start a process to be registered in the DOAJ (first stage) and reach the DOAJ Seal (higher registration level) in the next two years.
The DOAJ Seal is awarded to journals that demonstrate best practice in open access publishing. There are seven criteria that a journal must meet to be eligible for the DOAJ Seal. These relate to best practices in long-term preservation, use of persistent identifiers, discoverability, reuse policies and authors’ rights.
But open access journals (see definition of DOAJ Open Access) could also apply to be registered in DOAJ (without reaching the DOAJ Seal). However, several conditions must be met before applying:
- Journals should adhere to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.
- The journal must be actively publishing scholarly research:
- Any research subject area
- Publish at least five research articles per year
- Primary target audience of researchers or practitioners
3. A new or flipped journal must demonstrate a publishing history of more than one year or have published at least ten open access research articles.
The full text of all content must be available for free and open access without delay
- No embargo period
- No requirement for users to register to read content
- A charge for the print version of a journal is permitted
Ensuring compliance with more than 40 criteria of the DOAJ form is one of the main goals for publishers to improve their Open Access policy (about copyright and licensing, business model and editorial management). With these criteria, publishers can also address clear instructions for authors (in particular, on data policy linked to publications) and improve metadata quality, as well as the indexing and visibility of the journal.
Improving the quality of Open Repositories
Episciences propose a new autonomous submission and reviewing module adopted by Transformations that will enable the submission of preprint, software and datasets (and link them together). It will also be possible to publish open proofreading reports that could be deposited in HAL (or other Open Repositories – OR) linked to the documents submitted in the platform.
As an overlay journal service, Episciences relies on third-party services for storage and APIs (HAL, Zenodo, ArXiv and other OR).
The publication process is backed up by open repositories that will enable DARIAH to connect and value national open repositories (considered as services of DARIAH members and SSH communities). These repositories will be OAI-PMH compliant and will improve their metadata quality using the “notification protocols” developed by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR).
COAR Notify is a technology that sends notifications to enrich metadata in open repositories, facilitating and automating the link between research outputs hosted in the distributed network of repositories with resources from external services (overlay-journals and open peer review services). Notify notifications are designed to be sent and received using the W3C Linked Data Notifications (LDN) standard.
LDN standard supports sharing and reuse of notifications across applications, regardless of how they were generated. This allows for more modular systems, which decouple data storage from the applications that display or otherwise make use of the data. The protocol is intended to allow senders, receivers and consumers of notifications, which are independently implemented and run on different technology stacks, to seamlessly work together, contributing to decentralisation of our interactions on the Web. Instead of treating notifications as ephemeral or non-persistent entities, this specification enables the notion of a notification as an individual entity with its own URI.
“Next Generation Repositories (NGRs) is an ongoing initiative of COAR to identify common behaviours, protocols and technologies that will enable new and improved functionalities for repository systems.” (COARNotify protocol).
With this new innovative publishing model, DARIAH will work on improving the metadata quality of repositories within SSH communities and providing research evaluation guidelines in order to make peer review more efficient and transparent.
* This post is republished, see original post here.
