Roundtable on Peer Review for Digital Scholarly Work

Related to the question of the expression of scholarship in software, and in other forms of digital publication as well, is the question of how to evaluate it. This topic was the focus of a half-day roundtable, Peer Review for Digital Scholarly Work, held on 30 January 2015 at the University of Berne. Digital scholarly works such as Digital Editions, Digital Libraries, Digital Exhibitions, Data Visualization, Geographical Information Systems and the like are increasingly frequent in the Humanities, as main or secondary output of research projects; the question of how best to evaluate them takes on ever greater importance. At the moment, researchers doing digital scholarly work are usually unable to obtain academic credit for their work—in order to obtain scholarly recognition, they must additionally publish a “normal” article in a print-based journal about their digital work.
As universities and national research funding agencies across the world move toward encouraging more digital scholarship in the humanities, there is an urgent need to discuss the criteria and benchmarks that should be in place for evaluating digital scholarly work.
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Position papers

PHILIP STEINKRÜGER, Editor of RIDE (Review Journal for digital editions and ressources); KU Leuven and Institute for Documentology and Digital Editing (IDE)
Toward a catalogue of criteria for the review of digital editions

NICOLAS THÉLY, Professor for Digital Humanities, Université de Rennes 2
Toward an evaluation grid for Digital Humanities project

SETH DENBO, Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives, American Historical Association
AHA's Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians

INGRID KISSLING, Head of the Humanities and Social Sciences division, Swiss National Science Foundation
Peer review under revision – The digital challenge for funding agencies

JAMES BAKER, Digital Research Team, British Library
Stepping back - playing as research

EUGENE LYMAN, University of Boston
Publishing digital projects reviews: practical suggestions

CLAIRE CLIVAZ, Laboratoire des cultures et humanités digitales, Université de Lausanne
Reshapping the peer-review process: heretic remarks in a digital time

SACHA ZALA, President of the Swiss Society for History & director of the Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland
Some dogmatic postulates for the digital historical sciences