Open research
The C²DH believes that supporting and practising open research is essential to its mission to focus on new forms of public dissemination and societal engagement with history in Luxembourg. Open research takes many forms and has many advantages – for example, it attracts more citations and media coverage. There are many reasons to share research, not just because it is now required by funding bodies: preservation and accessibility, gaining more citations and visibility, finding new projects and collaborators, and facilitating access to novel data and software resources. All this ultimately means that open research increases collaboration, unlocks access to knowledge, improves the transparency and reproducibility of research and underpins research integrity.
We encourage our researchers to be “as open as possible and as closed as necessary”, bearing in mind any constraints they may have (data protection, confidentiality of contract research, etc.). We urge our researchers to:
- Ensure that publications are open access and accessible via a Creative Commons CC-BY licence;
- Publish the underlying data using FAIR principles;
- Make algorithms, software and tools openly available;
- Use collaborative approaches during the research process including blogging, online publication, releasing teaching materials, publishing pre-prints, experimenting with electronic notebooks and open peer review, etc.
Research assessment
The C²DH supports a change in research assessment methods, maintaining that research assessment must rely on expert judgement that includes both qualitative review and the use of appropriate quantitative indicators. Quantitative indicators should never replace qualitative expert judgement and peer review. In light of the recommendations in the Metric Tide report,6 the Leiden Manifesto7 and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA),8 the C²DH will initiate an open, transparent discussion with its researchers to define a researcher development framework. This framework will be used not only to help advance the careers of its current researchers but also to direct future recruitment processes.
Through its many public history outputs, its open access publication series, the Journal of Digital History, educational platforms such as Ranke.2 and research projects like impresso, the C²DH has demonstrated its ambition to share its knowledge and expertise widely with the academic community as well as with the general public. We will of course continue to do so in the future – in 2023, for example, we will be hosting the annual conference of the “Digital Humanities in German-Speaking Countries” association, organised in cooperation with the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. The theme for this year’s conference is “Open Humanities, Open Culture”.
Check out our C²DH Github repository: https://github.com/C2DH
