About the Journal

Motivation

Tools and data services are a crucial part of research in the humanities. Their conception, development, and implementation constitutes an entire field of specialization at the interface of more traditional humanities research and computer science. Such tools and services enable innovative research and promote methodological, conceptual, and practical progress. At the same time both tools and services are essentially software and unsuitable algorithms, mismatched implementations, and ill-fitting user interfaces can lead to the failure of whole research projects. Thus, it is indispensable to assess the quality and fit of research software from multiple perspectives, including domain specific research questions to be answered, the necessary practical work, and information science requirements like support of (open) standards and best practices.

CKIT translates the established procedures of scientific quality management by reviews to the field of research software engineering in the humanities. In doing so, CKIT fills the still only rarely bridged gap between journals for publishing software that are entirely part of the computer science community, and forums that essentially offer recommendations from the application perspective. CKIT follows an agile approach with respect to review length, the publishing of test data, and the interests of both readers and authors.

Evaluation of the reviews  

The CKIT editors are assessing all submissions regarding their suitability for our journal. The selected submissions then undergo a peer review. The criteria of the evaluation follows along a list, to ensure a balanced, fair and transparent judgement. Afterwards, the authors are given the opportunity to revise their texts. The final decision to publish the text will be made by the CKIT editors. These reviews are a keystone of the quality management and meant as support for both the authors and the readers.

Publication Frequency

Tools and data services are a dynamic field and the value of evaluations depends to a certain degree on their timeliness. Accordingly, CKIT publishes its texts with no restrictions to schedules and has no submission deadlines.

Open Access Policy

Construction KIT: a review journal for research tools and data services in the humanities (CKIT)  is an open-access gold e-journal. We do not charge any author processing fees (APC) or article submission fees. All content is published under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA). See also the "Copyright Notice" under How to Submit.

Ethical guidelines

The editors of CKIT are committed to applying the principles of good research practice as detailed in September 2019 by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) in the Guidelines of safeguarding good research practice in order to ensure the scientific integrity and quality of the contributions (see here especially guidelines 14 and 16). 

This encompasses on the site of the editors to respect any dependencies and potential conflicts of interest  between the editors, the subject of the review and the authors. Where such dependencies and conflicts are noticed, the editors concerned will make this clear to their co-editors and will refrain from any further decision on the publication of the review, nor will they exert any other influence on its content. Wherever the editors are noticed, that a review displays despite the peer-review verifiable inconsistencies, wrong statements or plagiates they ensure to indicate this for the readers.

For the authors it is obligatory to indicate and attribute ideas, phrases and results, which they obtain from other researchers and sources, with correct and adequate citations. Authors are aware of possible dependencies and conflict of interests towards the object of their review and the editors. They disclose them immediately. Developers and researchers who took active part in the development, maintenance or marketing of a tool or data service can not review the tool or data service in question. 

The peer-reviewers of submitted reviews are obligated to treat the manuscript confidentially. They do not share information about the subject and results of the review with anyone else but the editors. They undertake not to disclose the contents of the manuscript entrusted to them. Dependencies towards the author(s) or the software reviewed have to be disclosed immediately to the editors. Interests of conflict can be based on the entanglement of the reviewer with the development, maintenance or marketing of the tool or data service but also by the engagement in the developing and marketing of a competing product.