(based on: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/peer-review/ethics-in-peer-review)
6.11.2023
The Journal of Digital History (JDH) is a joint initiative of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg and the De Gruyter publishing group. The journal serves as a forum for critical debate and discussion in the field of digital history by offering an innovative publication platform and promoting a new form of data-driven scholarship and of transmedia storytelling in the historical sciences. As an international peer-reviewed open access journal, the JDH sets new standards in history publishing based on a novel multi-layered approach. Based on code notebooks, articles include:
- a narration layer exploring the possibilities of multimedia storytelling;
- a hermeneutic layer highlighting the methodological implications of using digital tools, data and code;
- a data layer providing access to data and making it reusable (when possible).
Starting January 20241, the Journal of Digital History follows a single-blind peer-review policy, meaning that reviewers know the name of author(s) of article they review, but that authors do not know their article's reviewers. This policy has been chosen after careful consideration and validation by the Journal's board, as it best fits the Journal's values and specificities. This policy might be changed in the coming years, as the question of the open peer review will be considered. In any cases, any changes will be publicly announced.
Nevertheless the Journal of Digital History's editorial team and board are conscious that a single-blind peer review process can lead to many biases, most often unconscious, linked for instance to gender or origins of authors. This document is hence aimed at peer reviewers, to promote ethical review practices. Our wish is to publish articles based on rigorous and ethically sound research.
After careful examination of several other journal's statement on ethical peer review process, we have retained five points, inspired by Cambridge University Press, a texte that follows COPE guidelines.
We define a conflict interest as
situations that are, or could be perceived to interfere with the objective presentation, review or publication of a piece of work.
(Source: Publishing Ethics).
To identify conflict of interests, the JDH is committed to and asks reviewers to be committed to transparency. Transparency only allows to identify potential conflicts, but also ways to mitigate them.
In case of potential conflict of interest, reviewer should contact the managing editor. A conflict of interest does not mean that one cannot review the article: our editorial team will discuss if there are possibilities to mitigate the conflict of interest.
Reviewers might not identify immediatly a conflict of interest. A conflict can indeed become aparent at any point of the review process. Reviewers are hence invited to contact the managing editor as soon as the conflict of interest becomes obvious.
There are many examples of conflicts of interests. Here are some of them:
- personal connections between any of the authors and the editors or reviewers
- contractual or professional commitments
- financial or personal interests that would be affected by the publication of the research
- patents held, or pending
- grants received by the authors or institutions.
(source).
There are many occasion where (unconscious) biases can be introduced in the peer review process. As the Journal of Digital History peer review policy is single blind, all reviewers should asked themselves if knowing the author(s), if their gender or origins might influence the writing of their review process. To avoid biases in your review, rooting all your affirmation / arguments on elements from the paper is key.
The editorial team will ensure that the authors do not identify their peer reviewers. The editorial team will ask the authors not to try to guess who are their peer reviewers are.
Peer reviewers should be careful when they write their review and should avoid adding any elements that can help authors identifying their reviewer.
Furthermore, as long as not published, papers and reviews are confidential documents. Peer reviewers should refrain from actions that might lead to a confidentiality breach: talking to someone else about the article and its review or submitting it to a chatbot, for instance.
Reviewers should not ask someone else to write the review on their behalf.
Timely reviews are key to a smooth publication process. When they accept to review a paper, reviewers clearly communicate with the editor about the time they will need to write the review. If a reviewer -- whatever the reason -- realises that they will not be able to send their review on time, they should declare it to the editor as soon as possible. The editor will then decide if it is possible or not to grant an extension to the reviewer. The JDH editorial team understands that quality review requires time.
Though reviewers can send a confidential comment to the editors, the whole review should be written in a respectfull maner, even if the modifications asked for are important, even if the reviewer think that the article should be rejected. One way of being respectfull is to imagine that the review could be publicly available.
Any review should follow the idea of aiding authors to improve the quality of their research. Though quality reviews are especially important for young researchers, they will be of interest at all stages (add s!) of a research career.
All elements of the review should be grounded in evidence from the article reviewed. It should be detailed and constructive.
- In case a reviewer is concerned with an author misconduct (plagiarism, fabricated evidences, etc), they should report it to the managing editor.
- In case a reviewer is concerned about a potential editor's misconduct, they should report it to the editor-in-chief.
The Journal of Digital History team, at the C2DH as well as at De Gruyter, is conscious that reviewers' work is of crucial importance to make the JDH's articles better. And we thank all reviewers -- past, present and future -- for their work.
Footnotes
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Before 2024, the JDH followed a double-blind peer review process. One of the things that had us change our minds is the difficulty to find peer reviewers, the workload for our editors, that is quite high as the Journal -- using jupyter notebooks -- has already a very specific way to publish articles. ↩