The Journal of Digital History switches to single blind peer review

When we launched the Journal of Digital History, we opted for a double-blind peer review process. This enabled us to adopt a rigorous scientific approach from the outset.

Today, however, our double-blind peer review process is at a bottleneck. The Journal of Digital History and its editorial and software specificities -- the narrative and hermeneutic layers being based on code notebooks -- demand intense curation and testing. The complex technical review process has been a challenge for our reviewers as well as for our authors.

In agreement with our Editorial Board, we therefore decided to change our review process to a single blind process. By discarding the anonymisation of articles -- it was a cumbersome process for both authors and the JDH team to ensure that no trace of the authors remained on Github where the articles are currently stored -- we are removing this bottleneck and hope to smooth and fasten our journal's review process.

We are aware that a double blind peer-review process remains the gold standard for scientific publication. The fact that the JDH switches to a single-blind peer review process today does not mean that it is any less rigorous, as we have chosen to implement a number of safeguards:

• at the same time as publishing this text, we are publishing an ethical charter for evaluators;
• we are putting in place a procedure, described in the ethical charter, for any author or evaluator who suspects fraud;
• the ethical charter as well as the scientific misconduct procedure will be evaluated regularly to continuously improve them;
• as readers, as authors, as reviewers, you are all invited to comment on those two texts by sending an email to [email protected].

In the next few years, we do not rule out the possibility of moving towards other, mixed, evaluation methods, including, for example, a dose of open peer review. However, these developments may have far-reaching consequences: thus they are not planned for the near future.

Finally, this change in evaluation method goes hand in hand with a change in software, since we will no longer be using ScholarOne, the default tool provided by our partners at De Gruyter, but OJS thanks to De Gruyter's recent acquisition of Ubiquity Press. This change will also introduce greater flexibility.

Since the beginning, the Journal of Digital History was conceived as a scholarly journal that would - by its very nature as an experimental platform for data-driven publications in the field of history - continuously change and evolve, as we explained in the editorial to our issue 2. With the decision to move to single-blind peer review, we hope to provide future authors an even better publication experience than it has been since we started this journey.

Andreas Fickers (editor in chief) Frédéric Clavert (managing editor) Speaking on behalf of the whole Editorial Board of JDH