• Rationale

Communicating is a par excellence scholarly primitive, all probably the most universal scholarly activity across disciplines and over time. This, however, does not imply the uniformity of scholarly communication practices. This is especially true for the humanities domain where the need for cultural nuance in many fields, scholarly outputs are usually grounded in regional, national and language-specific communities. But what are the chances and limitations of bibliodiversity and media diversity in everyday scholarly communication practices? How we can communicate research results in ways that truly align with our increasingly digital and diverse research workflows? What are the cases where the evaluation is disconnected to novel forms of research and what are the possibilities for re-harmonization? Considering that the traditional paradigm of article and book publishing still serves as the highest value currency of career-development in Humanities, the stakes are especially high when looking for answers to such questions. 

The Innovations in Scholarly Communication Work Package of the Horizon2020 project OPERAS-P is conducting an open consultation to get a better understanding about current trends, gaps and community needs in scholarly writing and research evaluation practices. Working closely with the OPERAS infrastructure dedicated to scholarly communication in the SSH domain, we are in the position to directly translate these needs into supporting the development of the relevant OPERAS activities and services. This workshop, organised in coordination with the DiMPO WG, will be centred around the four scholarly primitives of communicating, linking, commenting, and evaluating. We will look how these basic scholarly activities can be supported by novel scholarly communication practices. 

• Workshop format

Target audience: scholars in various humanities disciplines from the DARIAH-community.

What participants can gain: Shared knowledge of workflows and resources for innovative scholarly communication that are well-grounded in research realities of the Humanities. Participants' needs will be amplified in the European policy debates and will be considered in the development of scholarly communication services provided by OPERAS: 

Contribution to DARIAH community: Although scholarly communication is an elementary scholarly activity, this topic has not yet been addressed in DARIAH Annual Event workshops. Recommendations will be incorporated into both DARIAHOpen and DARIAH DiMPO outputs, as well as the forthcoming recommendations to Humanities researchers being prepared by the OPERAS Innovations WG. 

Method: World café with questions addressing various aspects of research publications (writing, linking, commenting, evaluating) in the humanities. The workshop will build upon the versatile experience of the DiMPO and the OPERAS Working Groups covering such techniques as user stories, process collage, thermometers of indicators etc. adapted for this workshop.

Tentative outline:

• Brief introduction to the scholarly communication workflows, examples on innovative writing and co-creation practices, the many flavours of openness in peer review etc. ; participatory knowledge creation, design thinking and problem crowdsourcing on the given case study.
• Core questions are identified through the participatory process. In a world café setting, participants divided into tables are discussing and presenting their outcomes.
• In the summary phase the core challenges are identified and addressed in more detail.