Open Science: Key Resources for Medievalists

A living article

The following collection of online resources is part of our article “How to make your medieval research more visible with Open Scholarship Methods and Tools” to be published in Imago Temporis Medium Aevum 15 (2021) at Lleida University (Spain). We would like to thank the editors of Imago Temporis Medium Aevum to allow us to bring a so-called living version of the section “Key Resources” online before the final publication of the article (read more about the journal here). The living version may differ from the upcoming printed version (updates, additional resources).

In the following we would like to share a (commented) list of useful resources for medievalists in the digital age with a focus on Open Science (Communication). Within each section the items are ordered alphabetically. This list does by no means claim to be exhaustive and it contains mainly non-profit resources. Often your university or institutional library can provide you with more information about Open Access content, policies, initiatives, and services available at your institution and beyond. We recommend to check online guides provided by libraries and welcome suggestions for additions and changes.

Open Science & Open Access (General) / Open Research Data

• BARTOC (Basel Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications): Resource to identify relevant standards. URL: https://bartoc.org/.
• Böhm, David; Grossmann, Alexander; Reiche, Michael; Schrader, Antonia. “Open-Access-Publikationsworkflow für akademische Bücher. Ein Handbuch für Hochschulen und Universitäten”, Leipzig 2020, DOI: 10.33968/9783966270175-00.
• Creative Commons: Information about the Creative Commons Licenses, License generator etc. URL: https://creativecommons.org/.
• ELDAH: The DARIAH Working Group ‘Ethics and Legality in the Digital Arts and Humanities (ELDAH)’ is dedicated to issues such as privacy, copyright, licensing etc. and provides useful resources. URL: https://www.dariah.eu/activities/working-groups/ethics-and-legality-in-the-digital-arts-and-humanities-eldah/.
• Edmond, Jennifer; Tóth-Czifra, Erzsébet. “Open Data for Humanists, A pragmatic guide”. 2018. 9 March 2020. URL: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02115443.
• Eve, Martin Paul. “Open Access in the Humanities. Contexts, controversies and the future”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316161012. This discipline-specific discussion of Open Access is also available Open Access.
• FOSTER: The FOSTER (Fostering the practical implementation of Open Science in Horizon 2020 and beyond) project has produced and collected (discipline) specific training materials to all areas related to Open Science and made them accessible in an online portal. URL: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/.
• GO FAIR: Initiative dedicated to the implementation of the FAIR data principles that offers information and training materials. URL: https://www.go-fair.org/.
• How open is it? A Guide for Evaluating the Openness of Journals. URL: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/howopenisit/.
• Open-access.net: This platform provides information on Open Access and offers practical advice (German, English). URL: https://open-access.net/en/germany-english.
• Open Access @ Archivalia: Numerous blogposts concerning Open Access from Open Access advocate and archivist Klaus Graf (mainly in German). URL: https://archivalia.hypotheses.org/category/open-access.
• The Open Access Interviews: Plenty of interviews conducted by Open Access Advocate Richard Poynder. URL: https://richardpoynder.co.uk/The%20OA%20Interviews.htm.
• Open Research Glossary: Glossary with a lot of information about various aspects of Open Scholarship. URL: http://www.righttoresearch.org/resources/OpenResearchGlossary/.
• Open Science MOOC: Community sourced, co-created online course about various aspects of Open Science. URL: https://opensciencemooc.eu/.
• PARTHENOS: Hollander, Hella; Morselli, Francesca; Uiterwaal, Frank; Admiraal, Femmy; Trippel, Thorsten; Di Giorgio, Sara. “PARTHENOS guidelines to FAIRify data management and make data reusable”. 12 August 2019. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3368858.
• PARTHENOS Training Suite: Training modules and resources in Digital Humanities and Infrastructures, including e.g. the module ‘Manage, improve and open up your research data’. URL: https://training.parthenos-project.eu/.
• Tóth-Czifra, Erzsébet; Romary, Laurent. “Open Access guidelines for the Arts and Humanities: Recommendations by DARIAH”. DARIAH Open, 20 February 2019. URL: https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org/390.
• Suber, Peter. “Open Access”. Cambridge (Mass.), London: MIT Press, July 2012. This seminal book on Open Access is also available Open Access (in several languages). URL: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access.
• Wuttke, Ulrike. “Is your research future proof? Data management techniques & tools for Digital Historians”. Zenodo, 16 June 2019: Training Slices. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3247014.

Open Access Journals, Books, Repositories: Publishing and Discovery

• AMAD (Archivum Medii Aevi Digitale): Forthcoming disciplinary repository for Medieval Studies. URL: https://www.amad.org/.
• BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): Search engine for (mostly freely available Open Access) academic web resources. URL: https://www.base-search.net/index.php.
• BodoArXiv: Open Access preprint server for Medieval Studies. URL: https://osf.io/preprints/bodoarxiv/.
• DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books). URL: https://www.doabooks.org/.
• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). URL: https://doaj.org/.
• Internet Archive: Database for free digitized books and other resources. URL: https://archive.org/.
• ISIDORE: Search engine for electronic publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences. URL: https://isidore.science/.
• HAL: Open archive for scholarly documents from all academic fields. URL: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/.
• Humanities Commons: A disciplinary Open Access repository for the Humanities. URL: https://hcommons.org/.
• Publishers of OA Books: Community sourced list, part of the Open Access Directory. URL: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/index.php?title=Publishers_of_OA_books&oldid=27763.
• ORCID: Register here to get your Open Researcher and Contributor ID and start building your open researcher profile. URL: https://orcid.org/.
• OLH (Open Library of Humanities): Non-commercial initiative that offers a variety of journals. URL: https://www.openlibhums.org/.
• OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories. URL: http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/.
• OpenEdition: OpenEdition brings together platforms for electronic Open Access journals, books, blogs, and events announcements. URL: https://www.openedition.org/.
• Open Access Digital Theological Library: Virtual library for digital resources in Theology, Religious Studies and related subjects. URL: http://oadtl.org/.
• Open Access Journals relevant for Medieval Studies, Dutch Studies, or Digital Humanities: List collected by Ulrike Wuttke. URL: https://ulrikewuttke.wordpress.com/links/.
• OpenMethods: Metablog that highlights and promotes especially Open Access content in the field of Digital Humanities Methods and Tools, including Digital Medieval Studies. URL: https://openmethods.dariah.eu/.
• re3data: Global registry of research data repositories. URL: https://www.re3data.org/.
• RI Opac: The major freely accessible literature database for Medieval Studies with more than 2.3 million titles. URL: http://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_en/.
• RM Open Archive: Repository for free accessible publications in the field of Medieval Studies. URL: http://www.rmoa.unina.it/.
• SHERPA/RoMEO: Database with information about publisher copyright and self-archiving policies. URL: http://sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php.
• Think.Check.Submit: Initiative to assess the trustworthiness of Open Access journals. URL: https://thinkchecksubmit.org/.
• Unpaywall: Popular browser extension that shows immediately if an Open Access version of an article exists. URL: https://unpaywall.org/.
• Zenodo: General (catch-all) repository funded by CERN and OpenAIRE. URL: https://zenodo.org/.

Science Communication, (Academic) Blogs, Social Media, Podcasts & Videoing

• Carrada, Giovanni. Communicating science: “A scientist’s survival kit”. 2006. URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20200309143459/https://www.livingknowledge.org/fileadmin/Dateien-Living-Knowledge/Dokumente_Dateien/Toolbox/LK_C_Communicating_Science_Kit.pdf.
• Duke, Monika (et al.). “How to write a Lay Summary”. DCC, May 2013. URL: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/write-lay-summary.
• Gawne, Lauren. “Why podcast your research?”. The RED Alert, 17 April 2018. Short general introduction to academic podcasting. http://redalert.blogs.latrobe.edu.au/2018/04/why-podcast-your-research-lauren-gawne.html.
• Hypotheses: Platform for academic blogs, part of OpenEdition. URL: https://hypotheses.org.
• Innes, Alison. Blog: “Finding your Voice through Podcasting”. Classical Studies, 15 May 2017: Short general introduction to podcasting. https://classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/alison-innes/blog-finding-your-voice-through-podcasting.
• König, Mareike. “Twitter in der Wissenschaft: Ein Leitfaden für Historiker/innen”. Digital Humanities am DHIP, 28 April 2015: Guide for historians on how and why to use Twitter (in German). https://dhdhi.hypotheses.org/1072.
• Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte (= Mittelalterblog): Academic blog that has become a popular platform for Open Access publications in the field of Medieval Studies (German, English). https://mittelalter.hypotheses.org/.
• Scoble, Jojo. “Twitter for Academics”. The Online Academic: General introduction to Twitter for academics. https://onlineacademic.wordpress.com/social-media-for-academics/twitter-for-academics/.
• Stevenson, Ana. “How can historians best use Twitter?” Australian Women’s History Network, 20 July 2016, http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/can-historians-best-use-twitter/: Guide for historians on how and why to use Twitter.
• Ullyot, Michael. “On blogging in the Digital Humanities”. Michael Ullyot, 24 February 2012: Short reflection on why and how to blog (not only) in the Digital Humanities and useful links. http://ullyot.ucalgaryblogs.ca/2012/02/24/on-blogging-in-the-digital-humanities/.
• Wuttke, Ulrike. “How to make your medieval research more visible with Open Scholarship methods and tools: Workshop at CARMEN Annual Meeting Tampere University (28 August 2018) (Version 2.0)”. Zenodo, 3 September 2018. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1408007.

Tools & Methods (Scientific Communication, Dissemination, Digital Humanities)

• forText: Method descriptions, text collections and tools – from digitisation and digital annotation to digitally supported interpretation and visualisation of literature (in German). URL: https://fortext.net/.
• Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Changing Research Workflows: Project by Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman with a portal that presents (open) tools used in Scientific Communication. URL: https://101innovations.wordpress.com/.
• Konkiel, Stacy. “The 30-day impact challenge: The ultimate guide to raising the profile of your research”. 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20200309141154/http://blog.impactstory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/impact_challenge_ebook_links.pdf: This guide contains a quite comprehensive list of tools and methods (e.g. Twitter, Open Access, preprints, Open Peer Review), though not all of them can be truly be called open (problematic are for example commercial academic networking sites like Academia.edu or ResearchGate).
• OpenMethods: Metablog that highlights and promotes especially Open Access content in the field of Digital Humanities Methods and Tools, including Digital Medieval Studies. URL: https://openmethods.dariah.eu/.
• OpenUp: Portal dedicated to opening up research, look for example at the thematic section ‘Dissemination’ which contains for example a set of tools for innovative dissemination. URL: https://www.openuphub.eu/.
• PARTHENOS Standardization Survival Kit (SSK): Descriptions of prototypical research scenarios from several humanities communities with their relevant standards. URL: http://www.parthenos-project.eu/portal/ssk-2.
• Programming Historian: Peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching (also in Spanish and French). URL: https://programminghistorian.org/.
• TAPoR: TAPoR is a gateway to the tools used in Digital Humanities, esp. sophisticated text analysis and retrieval. URL: http://tapor.ca/home.

Networks

• CARMEN (Co-operative for the Advancement of Research through a Medieval European Network): ‘While based in Europe, CARMEN reaches out to all continents to create an open and truly international platform of co-operation in the field of medieval research and teaching’. URL: http://www.carmen-medieval.net/.
• DARIAH-EU (Digital Research Infrastructure in the Arts and Humanities): Network dedicated to enhance and support digital research and teaching in the Arts and Humanities. URL: https://www.dariah.eu/.
• CLARIN-EU (European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology): This network ‘makes digital language resources available to scholars, researchers, students and citizen-scientists from all disciplines, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences’. URL: https://www.clarin.eu/.
• IFPH (International Federation for Public History): Federation that encourages, promotes, and coordinates, at an international level, contacts, teaching and research in public history. URL: https://ifph.hypotheses.org/.
• Open Knowledge Foundation: Global non-profit organisation focused on realising Open Data’s value to society by helping civil society groups access and use data to take action on social problems. URL: https://okfn.org/.
• Also check EADH (European Association of Digital Humanities) and ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations) for regional Digital Humanities Associations. URL: https://adho.org/.

The links above will be updated on a regular basis.

Empfohlene Zitierweise/Suggested Citation: Ulrike Wuttke und Björn Gebert, Open Science: Key Resources for Medievalists, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, 4. Mai 2020, https://mittelalter.hypotheses.org/25190.

Ulrike Wuttke und Björn Gebert

Shared account by Ulrike Wuttke (FH Potsdam. University of Applied Sciences, ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8217-4025) and Björn Gebert (University of Münster, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9507-7363)

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