DHQ is now beginning its third year of publication; with the upcoming issue 3.2 we will have published 48 articles, editorials, and reviews during that time. We anticipate that in 2009 for the first time we will publish a full complement of four issues. During the past year we have worked to put the journal on a stable technical footing and to manage the increasing scale of submissions.

In the 2008-2009 year, DHQ undertook several major technical updates which have streamlined the journal's production processes and made it easier to support. In the summer of 2008 we moved our publication from OpenCMS to a more modular open-source publication platform using Cocoon; we also relocated the journal from institutionally hosted server to a paid hosting service at Slicehost. These changes have made the journal less dependent on specific institutional relationships and have also consolidated its technical infrastructure with that of other ADHO web publications. Later in the year, further changes to the underlying file management enabled us to integrate the XML encoding of articles more fully into the publication process (including version control and author review), making the entire process much more efficient and easy to manage. We also began the process of expressing the DHQ schema as a TEI P5 customization, and this work is nearly complete.

These changes were very substantial and took significant effort from our technical team, although they did not produce directly visible results for the DHQ reader. Other updates were more noticeable: with the June 2008 issue, we began integrating TaporWare tools for text analysis into the DHQ interface. In winter 2009 we also added author and title indexes, and began working on a cross-article search interface which will be included in an upcoming issue. With the next issue we will also be introducing a preview feature, through which we can now make articles visible as soon as they are publishable, without waiting for an entire issue to be completed.

On the editorial side the journal was occupied with several very large special issues during most of 2008-9. The first was a special issue on e-science, edited by Stuart Dunne; these materials were reviewed and the authors are still revising for publication. The second was a special issue on digital classics, co-edited by Gregory Crane and Melissa Terras, in memory of Ross Scaife. This issue was published in winter 2009 as issue 3.1, our most substantial to date with thirteen major articles and several introductory pieces. A third was a special issue on Digital Textual Studies, co-edited by Maura Ives and Amy Earhart, which will is currently in production and should be published as issue 3.3. In addition to these special issues, we also published a regular issue (3.2, released as a preview in May 2009) in which we experimented with article "clusters"--groups of thematically related articles, submitted as a group--as well as conventionally submitted articles.

Special issues continue to be a strong interest among our authors. In addition to those mentioned above, we have accepted three further special issues for future publication: one on "Theorizing Connectivity: Modernism and the Network Narrative", co-edited by Wesley Beal and Stacy Lavin; and one on "CodeWork", co-edited by Charles Baldwin and John Cayley. The special issues sometimes arise out of specific events (as in the case of the E-science and Digital Textual Studies issues) but increasingly they emerge from topical concerns that range widely.

Submissions have been strong during the past year. Excluding special issue submissions, we received 22 submissions between May 2008 and April 2009. Our acceptance rate is fairly high (85% during this same period) but as in previous years, our emphasis has been on revision rather than on outright rejection. All articles are peer reviewed by at least two reviewers, including articles submitted for special issues.

We continue to work on improving our efficiency in moving articles through our system, but this is an area of ongoing concern. Because of the journal's extremely limited funding, we do not have the resources to fund the Managing Editor position as a regular staff role. Our reviewing processes are quite efficient (on average taking a little over a month), but the additional time before the author receives review feedback is often much more than this. This is because the reviewers' comments are not simply passed along to the author, but the editorial staff also provide specific advice or requirements for revision, to ensure that the revised article addresses the reviewers' concerns and meet the requirements for publication. This process is important, since it helps reduce the need for subsequent revisions (or the uncomfortable possibility that the revised version will still be unsuitable despite the author's efforts), but it takes time and draws on skills that are in short supply. Finally, there is the time taken after a final version is received from the author; we have been successful in streamlining our production process (which includes XML encoding, copyediting, proofreading, and final authorial review), and with the introduction of the preview feature, we expect that time to publication will be considerably reduced.

-- Main.JuliaFlanders - 12 May 2009