@christof good and important point, and thanks for the glimpse into the numbers! I think it would help your case and #OpenAccess arguments in general, if these access statistics were included prominently in the #IJDH journal site.
Springer's own page e.g. at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42803-023-00068-9/metrics does not show much, only the page views of the abstract and its re-use in social media posts, if I understand correctly, but not the # of downloads.
Digital humanities methods have been at the heart of a recent series of high-profile historical research projects. But these approaches raise new questions about reproducibility and verifiability in a field of research where grounding one’s conclusions in a body of historical evidence is crucial. While there have been extensive debates about the nature and methods of historical research since the nineteenth century, the underlying assumption has generally been that documenting one’s sources in a series of footnotes is essential to enable other researchers to test the validity of the research. Even if this approach never amounted to “reproducibility” in the sense of scientific experimentation, it might still be seen as broadly analogous, since the evidence can be reassembled to see the basis for the explanations that were offered and to test their validity. This essay examines how new digital methods like topic modelling, network analysis, knowledge graphs, species models, and various kinds of visualizations are affecting the process of reproducing and verifying historical research. Using examples drawn from recent research projects, it identifies a need for thorough documentation and publication of the different layers of digital research: digital and digitized collections, descriptive metadata, the software used for analysis and visualizations, and the various settings and configurations.
It's been cool to be part of the #IJDH issue on #reproducibility and #explainability.
But my reservations regarding the publishing model are being confirmed:
There is a clear relationship between access modality and number of accesses (see barchart). The #openaccess articles (paid via individual APC or read and publish agreement) have many more accesses per month than the #closed access articles (no payment required), so far.
Open access advantage 😃
Rich country advantage 😟
This has been years in the making, since around 2016 (!), and finally the paper has been published in #IJDH: "Repetitive research: a conceptual space and #terminology of #replication, #reproduction, revision, reanalysis, reinvestigation and reuse in digital humanities". See here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-023-00073-y It's part of a collection on #reproducibility and #explainability in #DigitalHumanities: https://link.springer.com/collections/becggdhbad
This article is motivated by the ‘reproducibility crisis’ that is being discussed intensely in fields such as Psychology or Biology but is also becoming increasingly relevant to Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities, not least in the context of Open Science. Using the phrase ‘repetitive research’ as an umbrella term for a range of practices from replication to follow-up research, and with the objective to provide clarity and help establish best practices in this area, this article focuses on two issues: First, the conceptual space of repetitive research is described across five key dimensions, namely those of the research question or hypothesis, the dataset, the method of analysis, the team, and the results or conclusions. Second, building on this new description of the conceptual space and on earlier terminological work, a specific set of terms for recurring scenarios of repetitive research is proposed. For each scenario, its position in the conceptual space is defined, its typical purpose and added value in the research process are discussed, the requirements for enabling it are described, and illustrative examples from the domain of Computational Literary Studies are provided. The key contribution of this article, therefore, is a proposal for a transparent terminology underpinned by a systematic model of the conceptual space of repetitive research.
Christian Thomas
Christof Schöch
Thorsten Ries
Wenyi Shang