Criteria for acceptance

OAr does accept proposals on works in progress. Please try to fit these works in one of the categories described here. Ideally, a work-in-progress (or project) paper should cover methodological issues pertaining to the preliminary phases of data collection/storage/use (depending on the type of described work).

Alongside full-length articles, the journal welcomes proposals for special issues in all areas of oral archives and resources.

Coming to the criteria for paper acceptance, overall, OAr values open and original research the most. Authors are strongly encouraged to present contributions which follow transparency criteria and strive for reproducibility through, for example, the sharing of datasets and statistical coding in accessible repositories.

Specific additional criteria are followed in the case of overlay papers of oral archives (section 1.b). For the evaluation of such contributions, the guidelines of Thieberger et al. (2015. Assessing Annotated Corpora as Research Output. In Australian Journal of Linguistics, 36, 1-21) will be critically adopted. Below are the evaluation criteria concerning the archival effort presented together with the article itself adapted from Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 2021. “A framework for Language Revitalization and Documentation.” In Language, 97(1): 1-11;

Accessibility
(i) deposited in a repository committed to providing long-term curation and access, including a persistent identifier and a citation form for items within the deposit;
(ii) has a landing page or file with a basic description;
(iii) includes access to metadata and a clear path to accessing the data in the corpus;
(iv) files are in formats that are nonproprietary;
(v) levels of accessibility are properly justified from a legal standpoint.

Quality
(i) the nature and amount of contextual and background information;
(ii) the structure of the deposit;
(iii) metadata quality;
(iv) the nature of linguistic annotation of the data;
(v) structural linking between raw data and their annotations (i.e. time-aligned transcriptions).

Quantity
(i) content;
(ii) amount of data.

Revisions of the original system are due to the context of our specific journal. For example, we do review overlay papers of archival collections whose access cannot be granted to the reviewers if this circumstance is effectively justified from a legal standpoint. Moreover, we do also review small collections of data if their content significance justifies their dimensions.

Note that, at the present time, OAr is not linked to, nor endorses any specific oral archive repository, so that authors are free to make their informed choice in this regard. Future changes in this regard will be communicated through this website.

Keywords

oral archives and resources, re-use of research data, replicability, accountability