Anvil is pleased to offer the following core services, developed in response to input from institutional partners, potential authors, and our editorial board and board of directors.
While these services are not exhaustive, they attempt to capture what we see as the most pressing (and, for our operation, the most actionable) needs facing digital publishing in the humanities. Our hope is that needs outside our startup size and scope can be addressed through consortial efforts now underway at various organizations. Given the absolute necessity of consortial thinking and acting, we are committed to helping new scholarly publishing networks thrive.
EDITORIAL AND PEER REVIEW
Our primary service is bringing a collaborative approach to peer and editorial review of digital scholarship. Our editorial board includes many key figures in digital humanities scholarship. We’re also committed to creating robust networks of discipline-specific scholars for review of submitted publication projects.
Our review services include:
- Brokering review by top scholars in the digital humanities
- Brokering review by top (digital and traditional) scholars within a project’s specific discipline
- Establishing easy to use and effective workflows for moving content from submitter to editors and reviewer(s)…and back again
- Fostering transparent standards and guidelines for review of digital projects. In general, we are interested in creating standards that make sense not only to our reviewers but also to potential authors and readers. Evaluating digital scholarship requires input from all stakeholders within the scholarly communication system. While we actively consult evaluation guidelines from the NINES Guidelines for Peer Review and The MLA Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media, we are equally aware that our review standards will need to be responsive to individual projects.
DEVELOPMENTAL AND FINAL COPYEDITING
Anvil will provide rigorous editing and copyediting of our digital publications, in line with long-established scholarly publishing tradition.
SEARCH AND DISCOVERABILITY
Part of our commitment to being a good publisher–and publishing partner–is offering quality discoverability and distribution services, including:
- Providing guidelines for search engine optimization (SEO)
- Assigning ISSN
- Assigning DOIs or MARC records for designated material (in conjunction with library partners)
- Distribution and promotion via social media outlets (primarily Twitter, Facebook, and Google+)
- Distribution via other aggregation services
- Representation on anvilacademic.org
ANALYTIC DATA AND USER METRICS
In order to provide useful feedback to authors and partners, we offer the following tracking and usage reports:
- Tracking viewership through Google Analytics
- Regular reporting on use data
- Assistance with establishing “alt metric” best practices
LICENSING GUIDELINES
We are committed to providing the broadest access possible for our publications. This means:
- Determining the best copyright license for a given publication (primarily non-exclusive or Creative Commons licenses)
- Clarifying fair use guidelines for media content
IMPRIMATUR
Anvil will provide more than a simple watermark for publications. The Anvil imprimatur is based on two strengths: the reputation of its editorial board and the value of good brokerage in locating and galvanizing institutional collaborators.
We believe wholeheartedly that web-based scholarship should count at (or beyond) the level of print publication. But in order to construct legitimacy for digital publications as true publications in the traditional sense, we need to build mechanisms for vetting and reviewing that make sense to authors, readers and, ultimately, institutional governance boards and tenure committees. In other words, our reputation will build title by title, building upon the reputation and skill of our editorial board and other reviewers.
At the same time, our imprimatur is only as strong as our guarantee that Anvil publications will remain stable and accessible decades from now. For this reason, we are committed to partnering with presses, library-based university publishers, and digital scholarship and cultural heritage centers to create strong infrastructure–and strong socio-institutional networks–for digital scholarship.
PRESERVATION
We are committed to preserving all of the dynamic web content that carries the Anvil name. We have partnered with Internet Archive’s Archive-It service to guarantee that our collections are consistently harvested and securely preserved.
DOCUMENTATION
A final service is the more global one of offering through our website regular narrative detailing the successes, failures, and granular decision-making that comprise Anvil’s experiments in digital scholarly communication. To stay in touch with Anvil’s progress, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our feed.