Principles

Eligible Content

The project should have a Canadian dimension and intersect in significant ways with scholarship in or about Canada. This is in keeping with the CWRC mission statement:

“CWRC brings together researchers working with online technologies to investigate writing and related cultural practices relevant to Canada and to the digital turn."

Projects eligible for consideration may include but are not limited to:

  • a digital edition of a text or a set of texts

  • a bibliography

  • a digital exhibit or collection of multimedia materials

  • a curated set of digital materials

  • a chronology based on some principle of coherence (e.g. theme, biography, text)

  • a digital anthology or collection of writings

  • an edited collection of born-digital materials (e.g. biocritical entries, topic entries)

  • other born digital scholarly content

Content

Content should be sound scholarship adhering to best practices in the field. Check out CWRC Commons to browse some of our peer-reviewed publications.

Given the diversity of projects on CWRC, don't panic if your project doesn't resemble some of the ones we have showcased on our site. CWRC is open to a diverse range of projects from scholars of different fields. As a note, however, the digital delivery of the material is not incidental. There is some deliberate planning and effort put into taking advantage of the digital environment. If you have any questions about this, contact us at cwrc@ualberta.ca.

Content is approved based on the following criteria. The project must be:

  • clearly formulated and coherently structured

  • intrinsically linked with the digital environment

  • clearly defined in terms of copyright and access

If you meet this criteria, and the board has approved the content, your project is now eligible to be peer reviewed.

Completeness

In order to be considered for peer review, projects need to have achieved a critical mass of source materials and research output for the declared goal of the project.

Significant additions or cumulative changes to the content, structure, or presentation method of a project will trigger re-evaluations of the peer review status, at the discretion of the peer-review board.

Methodology

A methodology is a section of clearly established scholarly principles.

Methodologies should be:

  • transparent and consistently applied workflow process

  • project-specific contextualizations of the digital object  (e.g. documentation)

  • include scholarly introduction

Here is an example of a methodology section that has been incorporated into the larger paper. Notice how the author defines important concepts that are linked to larger ideas within the paper.

Technology

Part of the peer-review process goes over the technologies employed within the project, including but not limited to:

  • the evaluation of custom-built interface and tools

  • accessibility standards

  • level of interoperability of data

  • extent of linkage to other projects/resources

  • adherence to technical standards/best practices; i.e. an adoption of well-defined and consistently applied technical standards that are appropriate for the content of the project

There is a preference for the adoption of well-established, open-source standards. Where this is not possible and/or adaptation of the existing standards is needed, justification should be included in the project documentation and supporting materials. If you have any questions about the formatting of this justification, please email cwrc@ualberta.ca.

Procedures

Both field-specific and technology peer-review will be coordinated as part of the process, although they need not necessarily be conducted by the same person.

The Peer-Review Process

The peer-review process has a projected timeline as part of a counselling doc that prefaces the actual form, urges consultation with CWRC in advance of peer-review, etc.

This process also allows for questions from reviewers to go to projects as part of the process--this may be necessary.

Peer-reviewed projects will be required to indicate the date of their peer-review on the project homepage.

Peer-Review Board and Reviewers

A peer-review board (different from the CWRC research board) will be established. Other reviewers will be called in for niche area projects or projects outside the subject areas of expertise of the regular peer-review board members.

We will not have separate subject and technology peer-review groups. Rather, we will recruit DH-oriented people or people from within the CWRC community and supplement with subject experts as needed for specific projects.

Criteria for board/reviewers selection will be nomination by member of peer-review board or research board, followed by approval by research board.

The length of appointment on the peer-review board is 3 years. The position is renewable.

Peer-Review Application Process

Projects will have the opportunity to indicate intention to go up for peer-review in the CWRC application process. The actual peer-review will be triggered by a request when the project is ready.

Every CWRC project (peer-reviewed or not) will submit a yearly report.

Projects applying for peer-review will fill in a form similar to MLA (see comparison chart). May need to ask follow-up questions given the diversity of the projects. The form is created by the research board.

Peer-Review Re-Evaluation

A peer-review re-evaluation may be triggered for two reasons:

  1. Upon request from the project

    This includes reaching major milestones, gaining tenure or promotion, filing for a grant application, or if the project is simply ready to be re-evaluated by the peer-review board.

  2. An automatic review

An automatic review is triggered after five years. It can also be requested if there is: significantly increased resources (this is at the discretion of CWRC), substantial changes in editorial policies and practices, and/or substantial changes in tools or interface.

Alternatively, peer-review revocation is prompted by:

  • plagiarism

  • infringement of copyright