Peer Review
All tutorials at the Programming Historian are rigorously peer reviewed, guided through the review process by one of our editors. Review involves a thorough exchange with the lesson editor to ensure the lesson works as intended and that all concepts are explained for a non-specialist reader, before the tutorial is sent to external reviewers.
Our peer review process is a bit different from what might be considered the traditional peer review process. We do not solicit reviews to judge whether a tutorial is “good enough” to be published. Rather, we consider the review process an integral component of a collaborative, productive, and sustainable effort for scholars to teach and learn from each other. Once a tutorial slips into our editorial workflow, we do everything we can to make sure the tutorial becomes as useful as possible and published in a reasonable amount of time. Consult our Reviewer Guidelines for more information.
Open Source
The Programming Historian is committed to open source values. All contributed lessons make use of open source programming languages and software whenever possible. This policy is meant to minimize costs for all parties, and to allow the greatest possible level of participation. We believe everyone should be able to benefit from these tutorials, not just those with large research budgets for expensive proprietary software. Since 2016, a citable version of the Programming Historian project has been deposited on Zenodo. The 2017 deposit is available at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1046738.
Gold Open Access
All submissions to the Programming Historian are published under a Creative Commons ‘CC-BY’ license. This adheres to a ‘Gold’ open access model of publishing, which is fully compliant with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, RCUK funding and HEFCE publishing requirements for scholars in the UK, as well as the Canadian Tri-Agency Open Access Policy. ‘Gold’ open access means that the version of record is made freely available without subscription fee or restrictions on access. Authors are permitted to republish their tutorials anywhere. And so can anyone, as long as they cite the original author and respect his or her moral rights.
We do not charge Article Processing Charges (APCs), nor do we charge library subscriptions.
The Programming Historian (ISSN 2397-2068) is indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals.