As many of you know, we have been publishing our conference proceedings with CEUR Workshop Proceedings since the first edition of CHR back in 2020. CEUR has provided an accessible and open platform to share our work. However, our conference’s growth has led CEUR to inform us that they are no longer able to publish our proceedings, also considering that we’re not a computer science conference.
This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for us. We need to identify a new, sustainable solution that aligns with our values as a community: openness, accessibility, and inclusivity. We are committed to ensuring that the process of selecting a new venue is as participatory and transparent as possible, which is why we are reaching out to all of you for suggestions, ideas, and feedback.
Here are some points to consider when proposing or evaluating alternatives:
We want to continue using TeX
How can we ensure that our proceedings remain freely accessible to researchers worldwide?
What are the long-term implications in terms of costs, maintenance, and scalability?
Does the venue reflect the interdisciplinary nature of our work, particularly the balance between computational methods and humanities research?
If you have suggestions, please share them in the comments below.
OpenReview looks very interesting! Compared to CEUR, it seems that it is a reviewing platform at the same time as a publication venue. And no DOIs, indeed.
As far as I was able to find out quickly, PubPub is moving to a new model of operations that does not involve free hosting anymore on their platform, which might be a problem: “We will not provide a free, centrally-hosted version of PubPub Platform at this time. Groups that wish to use it for free will be able to self-host it.” Knowledge Futures invests in PubPub Platform, a new vision for full-stack knowledge infrastructure Not sure we would want to take this on.
But there might be other avenues to explore as well, including using the preprint, review and publish model of the recently-launched journal “Transformations” run by DARIAH-EU, where it might be possible to publish CHR proceedings as special issues. See: https://transformations.episciences.org/ Some workflow details would certainly need to be clarified to see whether that is feasible, but it would be quite a free and stable platform, with potentially good visibility due to the fact that it is part of a larger journal and part of the DARIAH-EU ecosystem.
Of course, as the most low-key solution, it is always possible to create a Zenodo community and deposit contributions there. While deposits do get a DOI there, which I think is pretty essential, this is probably a solution that does not provide much visibility and recognition beyond that derived from the CHR label itself.
As far as I know, PubPub will be quite expensive, as would something like Open Journal Systems. The Dariah/‘Transformations’ suggestion seems quite promising, although it might be a bit confusing if it appears as a sub-section of another journal.
More DIY options might be:
to use an institutional repository which might allow the creation of a ‘collection’ to help with discoverability such as Cambridge University’s ‘Apollo’ – which allows PDFs to be given DOIs. I could help organise this as am affiliated with the Library. Or;
I wondered that given that the CHR journal is with Cambridge University Press, maybe it would make sense to use this service they offer for pre-prints called ‘Engage’, where you can make a ‘Community’ for free, and it’s quite flexible and generates DOIs (Communities | Cambridge Open Engage)
The Association for the Computers and the Humanities (ACH) has a group focused on Publications. We are currently expanding our open access publication options, and one area that we are exploring is a way to publish proceedings through crossref (DOIs, etc). We are looking at setting this up as a service of ACH like the Association for Computational Linguistics/ ACL Anthology. If CHR would like to work with us, please let me know. I think we could make this happen in time for the next conference, but we’d need to get going quickly.