Awareness of the importance of data in DH research has grown considerably recently due to growth in different areas: availability of digital collections, involvement of research libraries in data curation, data infrastructure and pressure from funders, data-intensive methods, and requirements of data management plans for preservation purposes (Lippincott 2021). Interest in data production, sharing, and reuse has steadily expanded and created a need for outlets for data-focussed publications, especially as data availability is relevant for transparency and reproducibility (Mahony 2022).
However, the “cultures and incentives in the humanities are not conducive to open data” (UKORDTF 2019: 36), and considerable effort is required to make data available for reuse. To this purpose, data require proper curation, description, and packaging (Schöpfel et al. 2019). This work is often seen as out of scope, largely because traditional academic recognition of this labour has been non-existent or unevenly rewarded (Ruediger / MacDougall 2023).
Launched by Ubiquity Press in 2015 in response to the growing importance of open access principles and non-traditional academic outputs in scholarly communication, the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) publishes articles about datasets relevant to DH research. It is an outlet where DH researchers and practitioners converge to share and enhance openly accessible datasets and related tools that support DH projects. Following the principles of transparency, reproducibility, and open access, JOHD challenges traditional concepts of the ‘academic article’ and associated credit by stressing the multifaceted nature of data creation. As of 9 May 2024, JOHD has published 149 articles, including 91 data papers describing datasets deposited into open repositories and highlighting their reuse potential and 58 research papers discussing challenges around analysis, access, and processing of humanities data. Emphasising the datasets’ potential for reuse, JOHD’s data papers have been shown to increase the visibility of the datasets themselves, and therefore their research impact (McGillivray et al. 2022).
In recent years, JOHD has become the largest and fastest growing data journal of its kind (McGillivray et al. 2022), being pivotal in driving the conversation on data sharing and open research in DH. The research questions we explore in this poster are: what has enabled this growth, and what can support it? What effects is JOHD having on research practices in DH, and how can it continuously adapt to the evolving landscape of DH and open research? This poster will review the journal’s genesis, unique profile, and evolution, discussing its strategies for the future. Our mixed-methods approach includes analyses of the journal’s publication data and social media engagement.
JOHD actively engages with the broader DH community to encourage data reuse. Through tailored initiatives and an active social media presence, the journal has been expanding its role in the community and facilitating dialogue on emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities offered by data sharing. JOHD is also advancing these goals through special collections, such as Representing the Ancient World through Data, which is the journal’s largest special collection to date, with seventeen articles in different sub-fields where datasets are rarely published (e.g., religion studies, philology, epigraphy). On the other hand, the “show-me-your-data” campaign on X/Twitter invites authors to share an image of their dataset thus demystifying the concept of “data” in the humanities, providing additional visibility to the datasets, and actively addressing and engaging the community.
Open challenges facing the community remain, which JOHD is actively working to address. Along with authors, the editorial team are discussing data privacy, consent, and responsible data sharing. Moreover, the current peer-review process already ensures quality and reliability of the articles, but JOHD is considering expanding the process to cover the datasets themselves, including a formal inclusion of FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) in the peer-review steps. This would further promote a culture of reproducibility within the DH community, since engagement from scholarly communities at various stages of the peer review process can benefit the whole community (Plan S 2023). By engaging with these considerations, the journal aims to contribute to the establishment of best practices in open data within the humanities, ensuring that technological advancements align with ethical concerns. JOHD is advancing the open scholarship agenda as a champion for open data in the humanities, enabling opportunities for the sharing and reuse of datasets so that this will become standard practice within DH projects. We hope to engage in interesting discussions with poster attendees on all these issues and ways to address them.