Opportunities and challenges of the TEI for scholarly journals in the Humanities
Résumé
The landscape of scholarly journals in the Humanities has been changing rapidly over the
past decade. From unaffordable, printed journals conceived as a tool for building up
reputation in selected circles, they are now growing into the open access field, implementing
various forms of peer review and reflecting on accessibility and circulation. The evolution in
mentalities made necessary by changes in the scholarly ecosystem involves an adaptation of
the publishing technologies and, more generally, of the management of the publishing
process. In this overall context, this paper will concentrate more specifically on strategic
issues (accessibility, challenges of openness) and on mechanisms of reputation building
(reviewing formats, their implementation and their possible evolutions), both in their
relationship to the technical opportunities offered by the TEI.
First, the paper will address a series of publishing issues that are likely to be eased by using
the TEI as a format for scholarly journals (among others questions of archiving, accessibility,
interoperability, connection to the data). In a second step, it will draw from concrete
examples to define the specific challenges involved by the use of the TEI in scholarly journals
in the Humanities. The Open Edition Journals platform, the Journal of the TEI and the overlay
platform episciences will serve as examples and lead to a discussion of the concept of
publication itself.
By addressing these questions, the paper offers a reflection on the meaning of the TEI for
scholarly communities, and on its capacity to contribute to implementing not simply
cosmetic, but truly epistemic changes in the Humanities.
