Ruth Sargent Noyes holds a BA (Harvard University) and PhD (Johns Hopkins University) in Art History and is currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen. Ruth’s research takes up the intersection of art, religion and science of the Early Modern period (c. 1500-1800) in its global context, with special focus on cross-cultural perspectives between Italy and Northern Europe, including Germany, the Low Countries, and the Nordic-Baltic region.

A 2014 Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Ruth is currently investigating artistic and cultural exchange between historical territories in Italy and the Baltic-Nordic sphere. Here she talks about her latest research, and her experience of the open peer review model available on Open Research Europe (ORE).

Project TRANSLATIO

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Individual Fellowship project TRANSLATIO, of which this research article is a part, investigates the ritualized relic in the history of early modern Europe (c. 1500-1800) through the art, architecture and material attending translatio, the ceremonial transfer or removal of holy objects and corporal remains of saints and holy persons from one locality to another, according to a venerable tradition of Roman Catholicism.

TRANSLATIO explores the central role of diverse forms of ritual not merely as a focus to highlight cultural changes, but as a prime generator of changes driving interreligious identity formation and coexistence between European communities, with an emphasis on cross-cultural exchanges between the Italy and the Nordic-Baltic region. A broader goal of this research is to reframe conventional dynamics of ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ connecting isolated regional histories and thereby contributing to encouraging more integrated conceptualizations of European cultural histories, and indirectly de-Westernizing the discourse. It also aims to develop comparative methodological approaches to historical analysis that enable a way to take up the issue of the questions of the historical relation between religious ritual, memory and identity formation, and artistic-material culture, that can have a larger iterative impact beyond the project’s lifespan and the field of art history.

Publishing with Open Research Europe

There are three main reasons why we published on Open Research Europe:

1. ORE’s international visibility and intellectual credibility were powerful motivators for me and the team of co-authors from Belarus, Lithuania and Poland (the brilliant Radosław Budzyński, Dzianis Filipchyk, Melchior Jakubowski, Dzmitry Marozau, and Vika Veličkaitė). This promised an exceptional opportunity for us as a team to have an English-language publication shedding light on an understudied and very trans-European topic on a major EU platform with global dissemination.
2. ORE’s commitment to interdisciplinary research is key because our article topic transcends not only traditional disciplinary boundaries, but also national and regional divides. This could thus pose a challenge to assign to more conventional academic journals, both in terms of topicality and (even more crucially) the issue of recruiting expert peer reviewers. ORE offered a perfect home for our work that transcends these divisions and can hopefully contribute to opening new horizons for possibilities of research, which I see as being one of ORE’s most exciting and valuable features.
3. ORE’s mission to actively promote openness in research very much aligns with concerns specific to this article, as well as a broader missive of the TRANSLATIO project and my own scholarly philosophy. For now, I would just say that I would also file ‘alacrity’ under this proverbial umbrella of openness—by this I mean that the option to have the article immediately available and citable as a pre-print. I once had an article held up for six years pending publication in a leading humanities journal, and as a researcher with a limited project timeline of 2 years eager to disseminate initial research findings, I greatly appreciate this feature on ORE, and wish it would be adopted by more publishing platforms.

Also, although I initially had some apprehensions about publishing a very image-heavy article with a platform not necessarily orientated to art history content, the ORE editorial team was incredibly supportive, responsive and collaborative, making the entire publishing process that much more stress-free and resulting in a very good-looking article, I think.

The open peer review model

The fact that I, as author, could identify and suggest potential peer reviewers for the article was extremely valuable. This aspect of ORE affords authors the rare opportunity to exercise their own expertise in their subject field, to solicit international engagement and feedback from precisely those scholars whose experience might best recognize and strengthen the content of a given article through constructive criticism.

When nominating peer reviewers, I considered both scholars whose work was cited in the article, and those whose work I had read and admired on related subjects. I also took into account the fact that sometimes senior scholars have so many demands on their time, and so I targeted more early-to-mid-career scholars, as well as international specialists whose backgrounds might offer particular insight on certain subfields treated in the article that are relatively new to me.

I find the collegiality and transparency of the open peer review model to be exceptionally valuable as well, with very constructive feedback both on specific points and broader theoretical questions that will be re-incorporated into a subsequent version of the article.

Reaching a milestone

We were thrilled and incredibly proud to learn our article was the first to pass peer review on the platform! I view achieving this milestone as a testimony to not only our hard work to bring the research material together —all while coordinating remotely under the global pandemic conditions—but also to the success of the ORE model. I think the opportunity afforded by ORE to be strategic and thoughtful in identifying peer reviewers can really pay off.

Openness in the Humanities

I think the recent global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in extraordinary cooperation across Europe (and the wider world) to safely mobilize people, material goods and shared principles. These circumstances demonstrate not only the continued social relevancy of questions of openness, but also the urgency of framing these questions in historical and cross-cultural perspective, which the article tackles in a very broad thematic sense. The COVID-19 crisis has also underscored how, despite increasingly positive attitudes to openness in Humanities research in recent years, persistent inequalities amongst different national, ethnic and socio-economic groups within global academia continue to pose challenges to integrating and democratizing high-level research on a meaningful, fundamental level. The increased need for remote access to sources has only further highlighted some of these challenges. Thus, ORE’s commitment to specifically open access, open data and open peer review significantly enhance, in my opinion, the global scholarly ethics of this publishing initiative, and were certainly a factor in attracting me as an author.

Crucial to this article were many hi-quality digital images, as well as extensive documentary appendices, because of the novelty of the subject covered and the fact that much of the source material was previously unpublished. With most conventional journals, adding this essential supplementary material would have been impossible or too expensive. There’s also an element conducive to greater diversity entailed in ORE’s peer review framework. Journal editors, whether out of expediency, habit, national divides, or other reasons, might tend to over-rely on a certain pool of peer reviewers. ORE offers the prospect of widening academic horizons on this front too.

I’m happy that the five peer review reports for this article come from all outstanding female specialists from different disciplines and three different countries (Poland, Serbia, and US), which aligns with the diversity of the research team for this article, and indeed the topic of the article itself, which covers materials and historical sites and objects in at least six countries.