Evaluation criteria
Scope
OpenMethods highlights already published content: apart from the OpenMethods Spotlight series, you cannot publish an original contribution on OpenMethods. All selected content has to be already published elsewhere. It can be research articles, book chapters, blog posts, reports, presentations, working papers, data papers, podcasts or other multimedia content. It is not a problem if a content is already highlighted on another platform. Contents with persistent identifiers (uri, handle, DOI) are of course more than welcome.
Openness
OpenMethods publishes openly available/Open Access content only – this is a non-negotiable criterion. Content with clear, standard open licensing statements are strongly preferred. Besides, we prefer use cases where tools and methods themselves show commitment to the open source and open research cultures.
Relevance
OpenMethods aims to facilitate critical discourse specifically about Digital Humanities tools and methods. Therefore, we accept content that share reflections on tools and methods (as opposed to e.g. research papers that report research results; tool registries that simply list resources, or websites/GitHub repositories of tools or methods that do not accommodate independent, critical discussion around them). Further, such reflections should be anchored in Digital Humanities practice (that said, tools and methods coming from other disciplines are welcome as long as their adoption to DH is touched upon).
Clarity
Reflections on the methods, tools in question should be written up in a clear and consistent manner that transparently highlights strengths and weaknesses of them as they are applied in certain research contexts. Nominations should be informed but also accessible to a non-technical audience.
Diversity
Keeping a wide variety of topics (e.g. making sure that we do not only highlight tools for textual data analysis but also for image data) is a priority.
Assessment and validation
Editors select, curate and categorize the content proposed by the Community Volunteers using the TaDiRAH Taxonomy as well as conduct a quality check in order to make it more easy to identify interesting high quality resources on Digital methods and tools within the “OpenMethods” metablog. https://openmethods.dariah.eu/about/
Language
Nominations in languages other than English are more than welcome. Currently, we accept nominations in the following languages: Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish, Swedish.