AG Digitales Publizieren

AG Digitales Publizieren (the Working Group on Digital Publishing) is a specialist working group within DHd – Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V., the association for Digital Humanities in the German-speaking world. It is not a commercial publisher but a scholarly body that studies and promotes digital forms of academic publishing. Its remit covers the changing conditions of scholarly communication: as digital methods for capturing, indexing and analysing material become routine, publication pathways often remain traditional and print-oriented. The working group asks what a publication should look like under changed media conditions, and what demands this places on authors, intermediaries and readers. The group's stated focus is the redefinition of the scholarly publication itself. Traditional forms such as the monograph or the journal article are losing their claim to exclusivity, because digital presentation forms are increasingly accepted as fully valid scholarly publications within academic discourse. Digital publications, the group argues, interact far more than their analogue predecessors with the non-academic public, and through collaborative forms such as social media they can enter open discourse with politics, business, law and culture. At the same time, the group acknowledges that this largely unfiltered openness raises critical questions of quality assurance, since mechanisms familiar from the print context no longer apply in the digital realm. It nonetheless stresses the evident advantages of digital formats: digital texts are easy to find, searchable and ideally copyable without restriction, which favours broad distribution. The working group operates within DHd, which was founded on 17 July 2012 at a founding conference at the University of Hamburg under the provisional name "Digital Humanities Deutschland (DHD)". The founding chairs were Prof. Dr. Jan Christoph Meister (University of Hamburg, first chair) and Prof. Dr. Claudine Moulin (University of Trier, second chair). The association was officially registered as "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V., Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg" on 20 August 2013 at the Amtsgericht Hamburg under register number VR 21873. DHd serves the German-speaking Digital Humanities community across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and its working groups, including AG Digitales Publizieren, provide venues for members to address specialised topics. As a working group, AG Digitales Publizieren does not sell products or services. Its output consists of discussion, position-taking and community activity around digital publishing: questions of open access, peer review and quality assurance in digital environments, collaborative and social-media-based publication, and the recognition of digital formats as equivalent scholarly outputs. Its audience is researchers, libraries, infrastructure providers and publishers active in the German-speaking Digital Humanities. The group's public presence is hosted on the DHd website at digitalhumanities.de.

AG Digitales Publizieren is a working group of DHd – Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V., the association for Digital Humanities in the German-speaking world. Its history is bound up with that of DHd itself. DHd was founded on 17 July 2012 at a founding conference at the University of Hamburg under the provisional name "Digital Humanities Deutschland (DHD)". The founding chairs were Prof. Dr. Jan Christoph Meister (University of Hamburg, first chair) and Prof. Dr. Claudine Moulin (University of Trier, second chair). The association was officially entered in the register as "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V., Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg" on 20 August 2013 at the Amtsgericht Hamburg, register sheet VR 21873. Under its statutes, the terms of two elected board members ended after two years in 2015, and those of the remaining five board members after four years in 2017, a rule designed to ensure continuity in board work. Within this association, working groups (Arbeitsgemeinschaften, AGs) form around specialised topics, and AG Digitales Publizieren is one of them. The group's subject matter reflects a tension in contemporary scholarship: while digital methods of capturing, indexing and analysing material are increasingly used, publication pathways often remain traditional and analogue. The working group therefore addresses the question of how a publication should look under changed media conditions and what requirements this imposes on authors, intermediaries and recipients. It observes that the scholarly publication itself is undergoing a process of redefinition, with traditional forms such as the monograph or journal article losing their claim to exclusivity as digital presentation forms come to be regarded as fully valid scholarly publications. It further notes that digital publications interact far more than their analogue predecessors with the non-academic public and can, through collaborative publication forms such as social media, enter open discourse with politics, business, law and culture. At the same time, the group flags the critical question of quality assurance, since mechanisms familiar from the printed context no longer apply in the digital realm. It balances this with the evident advantages of digital formats: digital texts are easy to find, searchable and ideally copyable without restriction, favouring broad distribution. The group's public documentation is hosted on the DHd website at digitalhumanities.de. As a working group rather than a company, it has no commercial history, ownership changes or product launches; its history is one of scholarly discussion and community organisation within the German-speaking Digital Humanities.

• DHd is founded at a founding conference at the University of Hamburg under the provisional name "Digital Humanities Deutschland (DHD)"; founding chairs are Prof. Dr. Jan Christoph Meister and Prof. Dr. Claudine Moulin.

• DHd is officially registered as "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V., Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg" at the Amtsgericht Hamburg, register sheet VR 21873.

• Terms of two elected DHd board members end after two years, per § 9.5 of the statutes.

• Terms of the remaining five DHd board members end after four years, per § 9.2 of the statutes.

A non-commercial scholarly working group within DHd that addresses the redefinition of scholarly publishing under digital media conditions, including open access, quality assurance and collaborative publication.

1. 1AG Digitales Publizieren – digital humanities im deutschsprachigen raumdigitalhumanities.de
2. 2Geschichte DHd – digital humanities im deutschsprachigen raumdigitalhumanities.de
3. 3Wikidata: DHd working group on digital publishingwikidata.org