When we launched the Journal of Digital History, we opted for a double-blind peer review process. This enabled us to adopt a rigorous scientific approach from the outset.
Today, however, our double-blind peer review process is a bottleneck. The Journal of Digital History and its editorial and software specificities -- the narrative and hermeneutic layers in particular and their software translation through the use of code notebooks -- are weighing down our publication process, which is causing problems for our reviewers as well as for our authors.
In agreement with our board, we have now decided to change our review process to a single blind process. By doing away with article anonymisation -- a cumbersome process not only for the authors but also for the JDH team, which has to ensure that no trace of the authors remains on github, where the articles are currently stored -- we are removing part of this bottleneck that is hampering the smooth running of our journal's review process.
In 2021, we opted for a double blind peer review process because it remains the gold standard for scientific publication. The fact that the JDH switches to a single-blind peer review process today does not mean that it is any less rigorous, as we have chosen to implement a number of safeguards:
- at the same time as publishing this text, we are publishing an ethical charter for evaluators;
- we are putting in place a procedure for any author or evaluator who suspects fraud.;
- the ethical charter as well as the scientific misconduct procedure will be evaluated regularly to continuously improve them;
- as readers, as authors, as reviewers, you are all invited to comment on those two texts.
In the next few years, we do not rule out the possibility of moving towards other, mixed, evaluation methods, including, for example, a dose of open peer review. However, these developments may have far-reaching consequences: they are not planned for the near future.
Finally, this change in evaluation method goes hand in hand with a change in software, since we will no longer be using ScholarOne, the default tool provided by our partners at De Gruyter, but OJS thanks to De Gruyter's recent acquisition of Ubiquity Press. This change will also introduce greater flexibility.
The Journal of Digital History was conceived from the outset as a scholarly journal that would by its very nature evolve, as we explained in the editorial to our issue 2. We see it as an extraordinary editorial adventure, which has its pitfalls, notably the current slowness in evaluating articles, which is not to the benefit of our fantastic authors, whom we can never thank enough. With this decision, we hope to provide them with an even more optimal publication experience than it has been since 2021.