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Watch the video recording of this workshop, or keep reading for a full audio transcript. The chat transcript is also included at the end of this post for those interested in resources and conversation shared by workshop participants.
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If your comments appear in either of these transcripts and you would like them removed, please contact Tonia.
Presenters
- Karen Lauritsen (Director of Publishing, Open Education Network)
- Cheryl Ball (Director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative, Wayne State University)
- Joshua Neds-Fox (Coordinator for Digital Publishing, Wayne State University)
Audio Transcript
Karen: Hello, welcome to the first of two workshops about creating anti-racist publishing practices and programs. This workshop is an orientation to anti-racist documents in digital publishing, and is co-sponsored by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, Library Publishing Coalition and the Open Education Network. My name is Karen Lauritsen. I'm the publishing director with the Open Education Network based at the University of Minnesota in the United States. I'm joined by Barb Thees, the OEN community manager.
I'm going to start with a few housekeeping details. Live transcription should be enabled. If you don't see it, please let us know. We are committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment for all attendees. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. We will be recording this first session only, which will shortly be available on our YouTube channel soon.
So during the hour we have together today, we will get oriented to several anti-racist documents in digital publishing, so that we can consider how they might be adapted for OER, journal and scholarly publishing organizations. Our goal is to offer a proactive foundation for authors, reviewers and editors to develop strategic anti-racist and anti-oppressive initiatives within their own spheres of influence. Now I'd like to introduce our co-presenters and turn things over to them. We are joined today by Cheryl Ball, director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University, as well as Joshua Neds-Fox, coordinator for digital publishing at Wayne State University. And I'm going to hand things over to Joshua now.
Joshua: Thank you, Karen, and welcome everybody. I see a number that represents you all, but I'm delighted that you're here. I'm going to start by acknowledging that Cheryl and I are coming to you from the Metro Detroit area and Wayne State University, and that Wayne State itself rests on Waawiyaataanong, the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Three Fires Confederacy, which is the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi and Wyandot nations, and that Wayne State affirms indigenous sovereignty and honors all the tribes with the connection to Detroit. And I specifically note that we advance our educational objectives here in Detroit on a foundation of colonial violence and erasure for which this acknowledgement does the absolute bare minimum of reparation.
If you're ready to begin doing your own learning, I urge you to engage with the students involved either in your university or in ours; Native American student organizations. Our organization helped advocate for the original text of this land acknowledgement, which I have adapted today to remove the implicit assertion that the 1807 treaty of Detroit justifies the engines of genocide. I'm also going to link to two organizations in the chat that you might consider supporting; The International Indigenous Youth Council, which grew from the Standing Rock indigenous uprising of 2016 to protest the Dakota access pipeline and is establishing indigenous activism for future generations. And the NDN collective, which is an indigenous-led organization dedicated to building the collective power of indigenous peoples and creating sustainable solutions on indigenous terms.
All of that being said, welcome. This is anti-racist documents in digital publishing for journals in OER. And as Karen said, I'm Joshua. And my co-presenter today is Dr. Cheryl Ball. This session is going to outline the mission of open access publishing within libraries with focus on anti-racist and DEI efforts. And we're going to discuss how anti-racist and equity statements and guidelines of the various organizations where we're talking about today offer a proactive foundation for authors, reviewers and editors to develop strategic anti-racist and anti-oppressive initiatives in their own spheres of influence.
We want to talk a little bit from our own context about library publishing and open access values. So we're library publishers. We coordinate digital publishing in a university library. And we want to think before we jump into documents; anti-racist documents, what is the moral case for OA as an equity issue? I'm going to pass it over to Cheryl Ball to start here.
Cheryl: Thanks Joshua. We know not everybody's coming from a library publishing perspective, and Joshua and I both, as you said, work within library publishing and also with an independent publishing that's not affiliated with an organization or institution, but we do look to the Library Publishing Coalition for a lot of our values and guidelines in the work that we do. And since not everybody may be familiar with that organization or with library publishing, we wanted to start with that basic definition, talking about a set of activities that support the creation, dissemination and curation of scholarly creative and educational works. So, the journal work that we do, that we all probably do, and the OER work that many of us do can fall within this definition. Further, within that, we work within the Library Publishing Coalition's set of five basic values that underpin all of the work and the mission that we strive to achieve.
We start with professionalism. And professionalism helps us, the organization as a whole, helps to seek, to improve the quality and sustainability of library publishing through advocacy, professional development and shared best practices, and openness, which we will talk a little bit more about today. We believe firmly that the products and the processes of scholarly communication should be as open as possible, thereby increasing the reach and impact of scholarship worldwide.
Third, diversity as a value is incredibly important to us in that we recognize that... and we recognize that library publishing has a unique opportunity to amplify underrepresented voices in scholarly communication. And through the work that we do there, we strive to promote inclusivity in all of our professional activities. And this is both at an organizational level and in our publishing unit at Wayne State specifically in alignment with these particular values.
And fourth, we strive for collaboration and working towards leveraging our collective knowledge and resources to enhance our own publishing efforts and to support each other through this work. And that's a big part of what we're talking about today. We're bringing you some resources that we are familiar with, that we've come across in different avenues to be able to share and leverage that collective knowledge for other's benefit.
And then finally, in terms of innovation, we continue to evolve as much as we possibly can and to explore and engage with new technologies and new modes of publishing. And a lot of this is done within the context of, in library publishing, it's almost exclusively done within the context of open access. So I'm going to turn it over to Joshua to give you a little bit more about that.
Joshua: Thank you, Cheryl. I'm assuming that many of you are already familiar with this dichotomy between the status quo in scholarly and other publishing and the vision and concept of open access. But I want to talk about it explicitly for a minute, because as I said earlier, it's good to establish the moral case for open access as an equity issue. We see the vision of open access as the idea that the means of production is distributed, the means of delivering material is distributed. It's not one copy, one person, but that the internet allows us to make infinite copies of a thing for relatively cheap. We have the possibility of freeing material to go anywhere, and that's allowed us to dream about a larger context for openness.
That is the well known five Rs of open content that we would further open material, so that it's free of any restrictions on use as well as free of restrictions on access, that we would be able to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the materials that we work with that's the foundation of open educational materials. We acknowledge that open access is a continuum based on the level of engagement of the creators of open materials from barely open to widely open, to fully open, that is the public domain; materials that have absolutely no intellectual restrictions and are freely available online. And we acknowledge that it's free, as in free puppy, that open access takes work, and that that labor is generally undertaken in varying degrees of acknowledgement, and that for an item to remain open, you gotta continually water and feed it and probably walk it and et cetera. It's over and against the idea of rights management or intellectual property with restriction that closed or toll access is kind of like a closed door.
And you might think about the university library's big deal in this category. For instance, five publishers in three countries represent 60 percent of scholarly publishing at the moment. And that 60 percent is intensely monetized and highly restricted in the framework of intellectual property. And while much of that material, it may sit somewhere on the spectrum of "open access", it actually constitutes a force for the status quo and against equity to continue to have materials siloed in gate keeping commercial publishers against access, both to contribute to and to access that research.
The moral argument, the medium of the internet and of research, demands access. The moral argument is straightforward. Research is a public good, and everyone should have access to it, particularly when it's paid for with public money. And this argument can be furthered by pointing out that OA is a social justice issue, and that approaches to open access can either lessen or exacerbate inequities. So, current access is inequitable. Reggie Raju and others argue that open access needs to be situated in social justice in order not to simply replicate the status quo. So in an unequal publishing system, equality can consolidate uneven distribution of power, can continue marginalization or disenfranchisement. And before we reach equality, equity is necessary. To put it another way, you could say that some of our interventions into open access can exacerbate the scholarly communications divide for the global south or for marginalized communities in the global north. For instance, transformative agreements.
What is guaranteed in a transformative agreement is profit for publishers. The pay to publish model shifts the accessibility issue from the end of the process to the start of the process. And now those without funder fees are disenfranchised. And it's important for us to understand, that that requires that we begin to think in different ways about the ways that we proceed in creating equity and open access. Reggie Raju is fond of pointing out the example of unconscious and conscious bias in the gate keeping function of science, that is he tells the story, or he actually often invites this researcher to tell her own story; African horticulturalist, who could not get published in the prestige journals published in the 60 percent global north science journals, because they regarded the crops that she was describing as weeds.
And her research is now being adopted by local communities to provide food security and suddenly is garnering attention because it... she took other channels and has shown impact. So it's our bias that prohibits and extends inequity. Prohibits equity and extends inequity, and open access is a model hopefully for implementing an indigenous-led, socially just, and equitable knowledge dissemination sphere.
Cheryl: Sorry, Joshua. I want to interject for just a moment and say, I second everything that Joshua said, but I'm also aware that there's probably people on this call who do not function from an open access model. And so what I want to clarify is that while that is definitely our bias that we are coming with, the concept of open access, as it's related to openness, is what we're striving for in communicating what these documents are about, right? They're about opening your processes to be more transparent, opening your peer review to be aware of the biases that are present within them, that often reinforce a white supremacist or colonialist approach to research. So if you happen to be an access editor or publisher, and you're here, stay tuned, because we're not... The things that we're going to talk about are not solely for open access publications, even though Joshua and I wish that they would all be open access.
Joshua: Thank you for having a grounding moral voice in opposition to my radicalism, Cheryl. I appreciate it. Okay. So, we're going to move on specifically to some of the documents that we hope to talk about today. And before we do that, I should note that it is the idea of binary answers; yes or no and of once-for-all solutions is a very white and, or white supremacist value. And so documents are created and they then begin to recede in time as to their usefulness and new documents need to overtake them. So some of these documents are brand new or in the process of being renewed. Some have stood for some time, some are works of constant progress. And that approach to anti-racist documents is actually a counteraction to a white value. So that's something to keep in mind as you're engaging with these documents, anti-racist documents in library publishing.
So, the first document we want to talk about is the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing. This is a resource of the Library Publishing Coalition, and it was conceived at the membership meeting in 2017. I don't know if you can think back before two years of pandemic, but there were an awful lot of incredible social upheavals happening in 2017 as well; 2016-2017, that have impact. And I think the library publishing community was reeling under the consideration of those social realities and felt that the time was right to begin to interrogate our own values and inscribe them into a framework for library publishing. So it's the preamble to the framework highlights the importance of library values and our responsibility as library publishers to center our publishing practice around them.
And so a working body developed ad hoc and was contributed to in a number of different forums by varying members of the community to come up with a document that would create a framework. It pulls together existing codes of ethics, think COPE, for instance, along with resources from a number of related fields and contextualizes them for library publishers. One of the top level headings in the framework, which itself is, hold on just a second...divided into a number of sections is diversity, equity and inclusion. And it sits in the same level with publishing practice, accessibility, privacy and analytics, and academic intellectual freedom.
But I'm focusing on this section; diversity, equity and inclusion, because I feel like it's a good introduction to the ways in which the ethical framework can help you think about your own construction of anti-racist documents, policies and practices in whatever your sphere is. So, the section is specifically helpful in a collation of resources relating to things like editorial and peer review, contribution to research impact, organizational culture - DEI in an organizational culture, that can help you begin to do your own learning regarding how to approach DEI in your organization. And I think that those resources are helpful, but they're followed then by a vision for new resources that we might need.
And I find this useful because, for instance, one of the resources that it advocates for is a guide for peer reviewers on judging submissions from non-native English authors. And that document is beginning to emerge. The document suggests; the ethical framework suggests that sample educational materials on building diverse editorial boards are needed, that case studies and reports from library publishers which demonstrate a commitment to equity is needed. And so these visions of the future, of the kinds of resources that are needed to build up this area are really helpful for us to begin to think about what we might need in creating anti-racist practice and policy in our own organizations.
And then the section ends with a number of recommendations that give us concrete steps that we can take towards implementing DEI in our contexts, leading off with creating a diversity statement for your publishing program. And that list of recommended actions is also a good place to bookmark as you're beginning to think about, how do I approach DEI in my context? The Ethical Framework was released in 2018. So that's a good three years; three, four years ago now. And it's currently in a working group to iterate to a version 2, and we're pretty excited to see what comes out of that working group in terms of an updated framework for ethics in library publishing.
The second document we want to talk about is C4DISC's Toolkits for Equity. You may already be aware of C4DISC's work. Hopefully you are. Excuse me. This is the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication. And it's a member organization of trade and professional publishing organizations that has come together initially to hold a set of values towards equity and to create a joint statement of principles that partners and members can sign on to, to begin to spark action and commitment to diversity and inclusion in scholarly communication. Some number of members. I'm certain you're familiar with bodies like NASIG and OASPA, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, the Association of University Presses. These are all members. The Library Publishing Coalition is a member of C4DISC, as is Crossref.
And so one of their early and incredibly impactful projects are these Toolkits for Equity. They follow from C4DISC's joint statement of principles which is a fairly comprehensive set of commitments with references. And they attempt to operationalize those in really incredible detail in various contexts. There are currently two published toolkits: an anti-racism toolkit for allies and for organizations. They're working on a couple more, one for disability equity and a toolkit specifically for black, indigenous, and people of color. The toolkit for allies is specifically for white people, they say, because white supremacy grants unearned advantages to whites. And because recognizing these advantages and actively resisting racism is the most crucial work that white people can embrace in order to create meaningful change.
And then the toolkit for organizations backs up a little bit and goes broader to help any individual in an organization implement inclusive policies, procedures and norms. I want to focus on that toolkit for organizations as we talk about this. It's really useful because it helps us create strategy around culture transformation, metrical analysis and supporting staff. And the toolkit itself includes an extensive resource list. So it provides a bibliography for self-study that can be really helpful to organizations hoping to enter into this work. It's completely CC licensed under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. And so, it embraces many of the five Rs, and it builds from the foundational concepts in the toolkit for allies. It's also incredibly comprehensive. And so you could do well to work your way through the toolkit for organizations as you're considering anti-racist policy or practice in your own efforts, because it's likely that you're building on thought that's gone before you from people who are dedicated to transforming the scholarly communications sphere.
I want to say here at the end of these two documents, that I am involved in the development and the continuance of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, but that I have no connection to the anti-racist toolkits that C4DISC is creating. C4DISC has an extensive credits list for the people who have worked on these documents, and you should avail yourself to that as you're considering it. I'm going to pass it over to Cheryl to talk about a couple more of these resources that are particularly useful.
Cheryl: Great. Thank you, Joshua. So, the next one that we want to bring to your attention is the Library Publishing Coalition's Roadmap to Anti-Racist Practice. And Joshua and I served on the diversity and inclusion task force of the LPC which was the originating task force that created this roadmap. But there's a new committee that has superseded that task force that is working on updating this roadmap. And I know at least one of those committee members, Angel Peterson, is in this call and perhaps others are as well. So we are presenting you a message of the current document with the understanding that this document is in the process right now of being updated in a very similar manner to the one that this one was created, which was through a community call with the library publishing members in 2019.
The task force pitched several questions to the community and they collected all the responses to this through the community call, and through consolidation of those answers were able to come up with this roadmap. And one of the quotes that I like from the anti-racist roadmap introduction is, "Above all, the Library Publishing Coalition needs to envision the landscape of scholarly publishing that we want to exist and devise the mechanisms we need to take us there." And this roadmap is one of the ways to do that. So, these are the questions that were used in that community call which are really getting at the heart of matters and asking the community to respond, not only with helping them think through how individual members can think about their anti-racist practice, but how the organization can.
So one of the ways that we've been thinking about this document internally, within the Wayne State library publishing system, for instance, is how we can use this roadmap as a way to think about mapping out our own practices, right? And Kairos, the journal that I edit, also uses this document in a similar way, thinking about how do we need to create as an organization an anti-racist publishing venue, and how do we involve the community in doing that? And I love the fourth question. It's very important, right? What does accountability look like? Going back to Joshua's statement earlier that these documents shouldn't just be written and then filed away with a check mark next to, oh, we have our anti-racist statement, right? That doesn't do anybody any good if we're not continually reviewing, assessing and revising as needed, and putting our goals in to actual action items.
So the roadmap was developed through using these four questions. And then I want to skip the next slide, Joshua, because I already talked about that and go to the structure. Thank you. The roadmap is very cool think because it lays out publicly in six months to a year and continuing big ideas within each of these six sections or themes, like what the action is that needs to be taken and who is responsible for that action within the LPC community, whether it's the LPC board, whether it's the membership, whether it's a particular committee within the LPC organization, et cetera. So again, I mentioned that this document was structured with time based goals in mind. And now that it's been almost a year since the first iteration of this came out, right, those first six months were completed by the time the task force finished its duties last July, which was fantastic.
And so now the new committee is revising what the next six months or what the next roadmap will look like. And they’re having a community call, maybe Angel can pop in the chat and let us know when that community call might be happening if it's been scheduled. I can't remember right now. So then from there we go on to the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices document. And this was a document that was created by a set of independent scholars in technical and professional communication. In light of all of the trauma happening in the black and Indigenous and the communities of color last year, these scholars got together and decided to write their own set of guidelines independently. And people in writing studies tend to do things on their own as a DIY effort anyways.
There's not a lot of guiding organizations for this kind of work within it, like the Library Publishing Coalition or C4DISC or other organizations might offer. So they just ad hoced it and came up with this review heuristic, which includes in the organization what the document is, how to use it. And specifically focusing on academic review processes and how they re-inscribe racism. The scenarios and stories in this document are if you haven't already been following along things like the Guest Post in the Scholarly Kitchen on racist practices in university presses and things like that, the scenarios here will be very enlightening to you if you identify as a white person. The scenarios will be probably unfortunately very familiar to you if you identify as something other than white. And those are meant to be illustrative, right, to say, here's what actually goes on.
And even if you think this isn't happening at your own publication, it probably is because we can't all micromanage every single editor, reviewer, et cetera. And so then the bulk of this document is spent with this heuristic guide, which is just simply a set of questions that go through how to recraft your scholarly reviewing practices for different audiences. And here's some of the guidance that it offers, right? Recognizing that there's a range of expertise and encouraged citation practices that represent that expertise and the different epistemological foundations on which research can be built that doesn't always come from within the discourse communities of academia. Also to recognize and intervene and to prevent harmful scholarly work in the publication process and in published scholarship. And there's been plenty of examples, unfortunately In the last couple of years, of scholarship that has gotten to print that has been incredibly harmful just to certain communities simply because a traditional, double anonymous peer review process may or may not have been used.
And so things get through the system. So how can we reevaluate our own guidelines to prevent that? You can read the rest of these here. And that is an extensive part of the document, and I encourage everyone to go check that out. You can sign on to this document if you support it. And many individuals, as well as institutions or organizations or publishers, a couple of publishers have signed on to say that they co-sign everything that's happening in this statement in a set of guidelines. It's been used at several journals in writing studies. And I don't know about beyond that, but I'd be curious to find out, to evaluate our own peer review heuristics to figure out how we can better create peer review guidelines that are fundamentally anti-racist.
And that's been to good effect in the last year, which has been nice. I will also note that this is the document on which the second of these co-sponsored workshops will be focusing and that one's in February. Fortunately/unfortunately that workshop has already reached capacity of 50 people, because we're going to be doing some hands on looking at your peer review guidelines to reassess and revise them. And we only had space for a certain number of people to do that with just to keep it manageable, but that doesn't mean that you can't do it in your own venues, and I'm happy to talk people through that process if they want, outside of the scope of that workshop. So that brings us to our last section, which is about using these resources. And we've talked a little bit about how we're doing that individually in our own venues or our own units. And Joshua, I'm going to turn it back over to you to go through these with everybody.
Joshua: Sure. It might be important to point out a couple things as a side note, before we talk broader picture about using these resources. One is that anti-racist actions in a sphere tend to overlap. And so for instance, the heuristics in anti-racist reviewing that Cheryl just described serves as a response, maybe not intentionally, but it does to the needed list that was in the ethical framework. It was pointed out at that time that we needed some anti-racist peer review guidance and that document is being created. Another thing to point out about all of these, including arguably the toolkit, but especially the ethical framework, the anti-racist roadmap and the reviewing heuristics are tools that we didn't have that we needed for our context.
And so they are folks getting together and creating what they need in order to proceed in an anti-racist fashion. And that that's an important principle for the kind of work that you are hoping to do with these documents. That is that you have a context and that you need to move forward in it, and other people's documents will help prompt you, but they won't get you all the way there. Ultimately you're going to see a gap that you need to fill and that your forward action in your context is going to create some new paradigm that can work against the status quo of white supremacy and racism.
That's important to note about these documents. So how can you use these and the other resources you will no doubt stumble across as you begin to survey this landscape? Well, most importantly, as the preamble to the anti-racist toolkit for allies said, you need to affect your own education, that you have work to do for yourself and that this toolkit is a way of helping you get there. You perhaps need to develop your own research agenda. And these prompts can help with that.
Develop your own research agenda. So what don't you know that you need to know and how can these documents prompt you in that way? They’re almost certainly, these various documents are going to prompt you to interrogate and change your own personal practice. That is that all of us are steeped in a culture of white supremacy. And so it's inevitable that we are operating in ways that uphold the status quo, and we will find aspects of our own practice that we want to challenge and change. These documents are helpful to that kind of work.
The documents help you create spaces for anti-racist engagement. That is you're in a particular context in a particular community. And the actions, policies, paradigms that you engage with in these documents are going to create spaces for engagement. I think specifically of the peer review document, that suddenly opens up an entire space for anti-racist engagement in the conduct of peer review. And so that's a place where you can do actual work that pushes against the status quo. The documents are especially helpful to help you advocate for organizational change. That is, they can give you a framework for beginning to analyze and then change the systems that... and recording. Somebody is going to ask you to do that in your context.
And so these can help you know what can constitute assessment for success, for failure and how do I report those things. Engaging with these documents is going to give you tools for holding yourself and others accountable. That is, once you know, you can begin to develop the structures that give you ways of being accountable to each other. And I think this is really important. That is, that we don't move forward without mutual accountability, but is that in a space, let's say like scholarly communications or library publishing. Unless we have a set of colleagues with which we are moving forward and for whom which we're lifting up accountability, we can very easily just begin to reinscribe practices of disequity. Use these documents to help you hold yourself and others accountable.
And finally, in my final suggestion is that the documents give you prompts to rehabilitate your infrastructure. That is, are you counting on tools and/or systems that reify the status quo, and are there ways that you can begin to adopt new tools, new systems, new technologies of practice that can move you in an anti-racist direction? So as you engage with these and other documents, I encourage you to keep these prompts in mind to think about ways in which they might affect your own practice. Look at that. It's the final slide, and we do have some time for questions. This is our program email address, and that will get first to Cheryl and then to me. And these citations refer to the big orange quotations in the OA as a moral issue section that we reported on earlier.
Cheryl: So we're happy to hear about any questions or comments that you might have. As well as, I noted in the chat that if you know of, or have created any other documents or resources that you're using for anti-racist practices in your own publishing units, we'd be very happy to know about those either here or through email.
Joshua: We're seeing some thank you so muches, and a couple of these are going to be useful resources, and that is an excellent outcome for a presentation like this.
Cheryl: One of the ways that we have used these documents has been in our internship onboarding with our publishing unit which, actually, we have our very first meeting with them in 10 minutes. So I'm excited about that. So we end up talking quite a bit about library publishing of the disciplines and sets the context that the interns are working within. And then how the values of library publishing intersect with anti-racist practices.
And then we can draw on these documents to talk about not only how the two of us approach our editorial and publishing work through the unit and through the organizations that we're affiliated with, but how the students might think about using these kinds of frameworks for engaging with other organizations or work events, work situations that they might come across in their own futures. And we've gotten feedback from them that they're surprised and delighted and find it helpful as well. So we're glad to be able to pass that information on to those who are still learning.
So we have a question from Abby: Do you have any, besides the citations here, authors or teams whose work you find to be particularly impactful for discussing equity in publishing, not just frameworks, but discussions and research? Yes, Joshua is smiling.
Joshua: Abby, I do want to commend you to Martin Eve’s recent compilation, Reassembling Scholarly Communications. It's sitting at the bottom of this slide. It is a very broad reaching consideration of scholarly communications as it stands now from a anti-racist perspective. And it's an excellent place to start. It also is a sort of bibliography of bibliographies for the moment in terms of the kinds of research into anti-racist practice in scholarly communications and the research and implications. I think you could do worse than starting here. It's from MIT Press and there is a open version available at that publisher. That would be my go-to at the moment. It incorporates many of the voices that you would find atomized elsewhere in one volume. And so that can be really helpful.
Cheryl: Joshua, what would you say? Because when I first saw this book come out, I was like, oh, this book feels very white and male to me. So how would you respond to that?
Joshua: Well, Martin is white and male, and so is Gray, but the content of the book is anything but. And so research from across the globe, from across a range of identities and focusing on a range of understandings that push against the status quo narrative of white supremacy. That would be my, sort of, don't judge the book by its cover. It would be my take on that.
Cheryl: Right. Thank you. In addition, I would recommend work by Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, she's an Inuit scholar in technical and professional communication, and she's written quite a bit on multi-marginalized authors and citation practices. I'll pull up her website here momentarily, and she has co-authored a bunch of stuff with Rebecca Walton, who's a professor at Utah State University. Cana is at Virginia Tech now and they are editor and managing editor. Rebecca's the editor of Technical Communication Quarterly and Cana was managing editor for a while.
So they've done quite a bit of research and Cana has published, and her dissertation work was also on this. Hopefully she's turned it to a book on the intersection of representation, community knowledge, Indigenous knowledge citation practices, publishing that kind of work. And that's in addition to the many articles that Harrison Inefuku and Charlotte Roh have published, and Emily Drabinski, that we've quoted here that you see.
Karen: Thank you for the questions and the conversation and chat. And thank you both for your recommendations and guidance through these documents. Since we are nearing the end of our time together, I will go ahead and invite you to join us in thanking our co-presenters, Cheryl Ball and Joshua Neds-Fox, as well as the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Library Publishing Coalition for co-sponsoring this workshop with the Open Education Network. We look forward to seeing many of you soon, and until then we send our best wishes.
Joshua: Thanks everybody.
Cheryl: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Good to see you all.
- END OF VIDEO -
I'm going to start with a few housekeeping details. Live transcription should be enabled. If you don't see it, please let us know. We are committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment for all attendees. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. We will be recording this first session only, which will shortly be available on our YouTube channel soon.
So during the hour we have together today, we will get oriented to several anti-racist documents in digital publishing, so that we can consider how they might be adapted for OER, journal and scholarly publishing organizations. Our goal is to offer a proactive foundation for authors, reviewers and editors to develop strategic anti-racist and anti-oppressive initiatives within their own spheres of influence. Now I'd like to introduce our co-presenters and turn things over to them. We are joined today by Cheryl Ball, director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University, as well as Joshua Neds-Fox, coordinator for digital publishing at Wayne State University. And I'm going to hand things over to Joshua now.
Joshua: Thank you, Karen, and welcome everybody. I see a number that represents you all, but I'm delighted that you're here. I'm going to start by acknowledging that Cheryl and I are coming to you from the Metro Detroit area and Wayne State University, and that Wayne State itself rests on Waawiyaataanong, the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Three Fires Confederacy, which is the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi and Wyandot nations, and that Wayne State affirms indigenous sovereignty and honors all the tribes with the connection to Detroit. And I specifically note that we advance our educational objectives here in Detroit on a foundation of colonial violence and erasure for which this acknowledgement does the absolute bare minimum of reparation.
If you're ready to begin doing your own learning, I urge you to engage with the students involved either in your university or in ours; Native American student organizations. Our organization helped advocate for the original text of this land acknowledgement, which I have adapted today to remove the implicit assertion that the 1807 treaty of Detroit justifies the engines of genocide. I'm also going to link to two organizations in the chat that you might consider supporting; The International Indigenous Youth Council, which grew from the Standing Rock indigenous uprising of 2016 to protest the Dakota access pipeline and is establishing indigenous activism for future generations. And the NDN collective, which is an indigenous-led organization dedicated to building the collective power of indigenous peoples and creating sustainable solutions on indigenous terms.
All of that being said, welcome. This is anti-racist documents in digital publishing for journals in OER. And as Karen said, I'm Joshua. And my co-presenter today is Dr. Cheryl Ball. This session is going to outline the mission of open access publishing within libraries with focus on anti-racist and DEI efforts. And we're going to discuss how anti-racist and equity statements and guidelines of the various organizations where we're talking about today offer a proactive foundation for authors, reviewers and editors to develop strategic anti-racist and anti-oppressive initiatives in their own spheres of influence.
We want to talk a little bit from our own context about library publishing and open access values. So we're library publishers. We coordinate digital publishing in a university library. And we want to think before we jump into documents; anti-racist documents, what is the moral case for OA as an equity issue? I'm going to pass it over to Cheryl Ball to start here.
Cheryl: Thanks Joshua. We know not everybody's coming from a library publishing perspective, and Joshua and I both, as you said, work within library publishing and also with an independent publishing that's not affiliated with an organization or institution, but we do look to the Library Publishing Coalition for a lot of our values and guidelines in the work that we do. And since not everybody may be familiar with that organization or with library publishing, we wanted to start with that basic definition, talking about a set of activities that support the creation, dissemination and curation of scholarly creative and educational works. So, the journal work that we do, that we all probably do, and the OER work that many of us do can fall within this definition. Further, within that, we work within the Library Publishing Coalition's set of five basic values that underpin all of the work and the mission that we strive to achieve.
We start with professionalism. And professionalism helps us, the organization as a whole, helps to seek, to improve the quality and sustainability of library publishing through advocacy, professional development and shared best practices, and openness, which we will talk a little bit more about today. We believe firmly that the products and the processes of scholarly communication should be as open as possible, thereby increasing the reach and impact of scholarship worldwide.
Third, diversity as a value is incredibly important to us in that we recognize that... and we recognize that library publishing has a unique opportunity to amplify underrepresented voices in scholarly communication. And through the work that we do there, we strive to promote inclusivity in all of our professional activities. And this is both at an organizational level and in our publishing unit at Wayne State specifically in alignment with these particular values.
And fourth, we strive for collaboration and working towards leveraging our collective knowledge and resources to enhance our own publishing efforts and to support each other through this work. And that's a big part of what we're talking about today. We're bringing you some resources that we are familiar with, that we've come across in different avenues to be able to share and leverage that collective knowledge for other's benefit.
And then finally, in terms of innovation, we continue to evolve as much as we possibly can and to explore and engage with new technologies and new modes of publishing. And a lot of this is done within the context of, in library publishing, it's almost exclusively done within the context of open access. So I'm going to turn it over to Joshua to give you a little bit more about that.
Joshua: Thank you, Cheryl. I'm assuming that many of you are already familiar with this dichotomy between the status quo in scholarly and other publishing and the vision and concept of open access. But I want to talk about it explicitly for a minute, because as I said earlier, it's good to establish the moral case for open access as an equity issue. We see the vision of open access as the idea that the means of production is distributed, the means of delivering material is distributed. It's not one copy, one person, but that the internet allows us to make infinite copies of a thing for relatively cheap. We have the possibility of freeing material to go anywhere, and that's allowed us to dream about a larger context for openness.
That is the well known five Rs of open content that we would further open material, so that it's free of any restrictions on use as well as free of restrictions on access, that we would be able to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the materials that we work with that's the foundation of open educational materials. We acknowledge that open access is a continuum based on the level of engagement of the creators of open materials from barely open to widely open, to fully open, that is the public domain; materials that have absolutely no intellectual restrictions and are freely available online. And we acknowledge that it's free, as in free puppy, that open access takes work, and that that labor is generally undertaken in varying degrees of acknowledgement, and that for an item to remain open, you gotta continually water and feed it and probably walk it and et cetera. It's over and against the idea of rights management or intellectual property with restriction that closed or toll access is kind of like a closed door.
And you might think about the university library's big deal in this category. For instance, five publishers in three countries represent 60 percent of scholarly publishing at the moment. And that 60 percent is intensely monetized and highly restricted in the framework of intellectual property. And while much of that material, it may sit somewhere on the spectrum of "open access", it actually constitutes a force for the status quo and against equity to continue to have materials siloed in gate keeping commercial publishers against access, both to contribute to and to access that research.
The moral argument, the medium of the internet and of research, demands access. The moral argument is straightforward. Research is a public good, and everyone should have access to it, particularly when it's paid for with public money. And this argument can be furthered by pointing out that OA is a social justice issue, and that approaches to open access can either lessen or exacerbate inequities. So, current access is inequitable. Reggie Raju and others argue that open access needs to be situated in social justice in order not to simply replicate the status quo. So in an unequal publishing system, equality can consolidate uneven distribution of power, can continue marginalization or disenfranchisement. And before we reach equality, equity is necessary. To put it another way, you could say that some of our interventions into open access can exacerbate the scholarly communications divide for the global south or for marginalized communities in the global north. For instance, transformative agreements.
What is guaranteed in a transformative agreement is profit for publishers. The pay to publish model shifts the accessibility issue from the end of the process to the start of the process. And now those without funder fees are disenfranchised. And it's important for us to understand, that that requires that we begin to think in different ways about the ways that we proceed in creating equity and open access. Reggie Raju is fond of pointing out the example of unconscious and conscious bias in the gate keeping function of science, that is he tells the story, or he actually often invites this researcher to tell her own story; African horticulturalist, who could not get published in the prestige journals published in the 60 percent global north science journals, because they regarded the crops that she was describing as weeds.
And her research is now being adopted by local communities to provide food security and suddenly is garnering attention because it... she took other channels and has shown impact. So it's our bias that prohibits and extends inequity. Prohibits equity and extends inequity, and open access is a model hopefully for implementing an indigenous-led, socially just, and equitable knowledge dissemination sphere.
Cheryl: Sorry, Joshua. I want to interject for just a moment and say, I second everything that Joshua said, but I'm also aware that there's probably people on this call who do not function from an open access model. And so what I want to clarify is that while that is definitely our bias that we are coming with, the concept of open access, as it's related to openness, is what we're striving for in communicating what these documents are about, right? They're about opening your processes to be more transparent, opening your peer review to be aware of the biases that are present within them, that often reinforce a white supremacist or colonialist approach to research. So if you happen to be an access editor or publisher, and you're here, stay tuned, because we're not... The things that we're going to talk about are not solely for open access publications, even though Joshua and I wish that they would all be open access.
Joshua: Thank you for having a grounding moral voice in opposition to my radicalism, Cheryl. I appreciate it. Okay. So, we're going to move on specifically to some of the documents that we hope to talk about today. And before we do that, I should note that it is the idea of binary answers; yes or no and of once-for-all solutions is a very white and, or white supremacist value. And so documents are created and they then begin to recede in time as to their usefulness and new documents need to overtake them. So some of these documents are brand new or in the process of being renewed. Some have stood for some time, some are works of constant progress. And that approach to anti-racist documents is actually a counteraction to a white value. So that's something to keep in mind as you're engaging with these documents, anti-racist documents in library publishing.
So, the first document we want to talk about is the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing. This is a resource of the Library Publishing Coalition, and it was conceived at the membership meeting in 2017. I don't know if you can think back before two years of pandemic, but there were an awful lot of incredible social upheavals happening in 2017 as well; 2016-2017, that have impact. And I think the library publishing community was reeling under the consideration of those social realities and felt that the time was right to begin to interrogate our own values and inscribe them into a framework for library publishing. So it's the preamble to the framework highlights the importance of library values and our responsibility as library publishers to center our publishing practice around them.
And so a working body developed ad hoc and was contributed to in a number of different forums by varying members of the community to come up with a document that would create a framework. It pulls together existing codes of ethics, think COPE, for instance, along with resources from a number of related fields and contextualizes them for library publishers. One of the top level headings in the framework, which itself is, hold on just a second...divided into a number of sections is diversity, equity and inclusion. And it sits in the same level with publishing practice, accessibility, privacy and analytics, and academic intellectual freedom.
But I'm focusing on this section; diversity, equity and inclusion, because I feel like it's a good introduction to the ways in which the ethical framework can help you think about your own construction of anti-racist documents, policies and practices in whatever your sphere is. So, the section is specifically helpful in a collation of resources relating to things like editorial and peer review, contribution to research impact, organizational culture - DEI in an organizational culture, that can help you begin to do your own learning regarding how to approach DEI in your organization. And I think that those resources are helpful, but they're followed then by a vision for new resources that we might need.
And I find this useful because, for instance, one of the resources that it advocates for is a guide for peer reviewers on judging submissions from non-native English authors. And that document is beginning to emerge. The document suggests; the ethical framework suggests that sample educational materials on building diverse editorial boards are needed, that case studies and reports from library publishers which demonstrate a commitment to equity is needed. And so these visions of the future, of the kinds of resources that are needed to build up this area are really helpful for us to begin to think about what we might need in creating anti-racist practice and policy in our own organizations.
And then the section ends with a number of recommendations that give us concrete steps that we can take towards implementing DEI in our contexts, leading off with creating a diversity statement for your publishing program. And that list of recommended actions is also a good place to bookmark as you're beginning to think about, how do I approach DEI in my context? The Ethical Framework was released in 2018. So that's a good three years; three, four years ago now. And it's currently in a working group to iterate to a version 2, and we're pretty excited to see what comes out of that working group in terms of an updated framework for ethics in library publishing.
The second document we want to talk about is C4DISC's Toolkits for Equity. You may already be aware of C4DISC's work. Hopefully you are. Excuse me. This is the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication. And it's a member organization of trade and professional publishing organizations that has come together initially to hold a set of values towards equity and to create a joint statement of principles that partners and members can sign on to, to begin to spark action and commitment to diversity and inclusion in scholarly communication. Some number of members. I'm certain you're familiar with bodies like NASIG and OASPA, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, the Association of University Presses. These are all members. The Library Publishing Coalition is a member of C4DISC, as is Crossref.
And so one of their early and incredibly impactful projects are these Toolkits for Equity. They follow from C4DISC's joint statement of principles which is a fairly comprehensive set of commitments with references. And they attempt to operationalize those in really incredible detail in various contexts. There are currently two published toolkits: an anti-racism toolkit for allies and for organizations. They're working on a couple more, one for disability equity and a toolkit specifically for black, indigenous, and people of color. The toolkit for allies is specifically for white people, they say, because white supremacy grants unearned advantages to whites. And because recognizing these advantages and actively resisting racism is the most crucial work that white people can embrace in order to create meaningful change.
And then the toolkit for organizations backs up a little bit and goes broader to help any individual in an organization implement inclusive policies, procedures and norms. I want to focus on that toolkit for organizations as we talk about this. It's really useful because it helps us create strategy around culture transformation, metrical analysis and supporting staff. And the toolkit itself includes an extensive resource list. So it provides a bibliography for self-study that can be really helpful to organizations hoping to enter into this work. It's completely CC licensed under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. And so, it embraces many of the five Rs, and it builds from the foundational concepts in the toolkit for allies. It's also incredibly comprehensive. And so you could do well to work your way through the toolkit for organizations as you're considering anti-racist policy or practice in your own efforts, because it's likely that you're building on thought that's gone before you from people who are dedicated to transforming the scholarly communications sphere.
I want to say here at the end of these two documents, that I am involved in the development and the continuance of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, but that I have no connection to the anti-racist toolkits that C4DISC is creating. C4DISC has an extensive credits list for the people who have worked on these documents, and you should avail yourself to that as you're considering it. I'm going to pass it over to Cheryl to talk about a couple more of these resources that are particularly useful.
Cheryl: Great. Thank you, Joshua. So, the next one that we want to bring to your attention is the Library Publishing Coalition's Roadmap to Anti-Racist Practice. And Joshua and I served on the diversity and inclusion task force of the LPC which was the originating task force that created this roadmap. But there's a new committee that has superseded that task force that is working on updating this roadmap. And I know at least one of those committee members, Angel Peterson, is in this call and perhaps others are as well. So we are presenting you a message of the current document with the understanding that this document is in the process right now of being updated in a very similar manner to the one that this one was created, which was through a community call with the library publishing members in 2019.
The task force pitched several questions to the community and they collected all the responses to this through the community call, and through consolidation of those answers were able to come up with this roadmap. And one of the quotes that I like from the anti-racist roadmap introduction is, "Above all, the Library Publishing Coalition needs to envision the landscape of scholarly publishing that we want to exist and devise the mechanisms we need to take us there." And this roadmap is one of the ways to do that. So, these are the questions that were used in that community call which are really getting at the heart of matters and asking the community to respond, not only with helping them think through how individual members can think about their anti-racist practice, but how the organization can.
So one of the ways that we've been thinking about this document internally, within the Wayne State library publishing system, for instance, is how we can use this roadmap as a way to think about mapping out our own practices, right? And Kairos, the journal that I edit, also uses this document in a similar way, thinking about how do we need to create as an organization an anti-racist publishing venue, and how do we involve the community in doing that? And I love the fourth question. It's very important, right? What does accountability look like? Going back to Joshua's statement earlier that these documents shouldn't just be written and then filed away with a check mark next to, oh, we have our anti-racist statement, right? That doesn't do anybody any good if we're not continually reviewing, assessing and revising as needed, and putting our goals in to actual action items.
So the roadmap was developed through using these four questions. And then I want to skip the next slide, Joshua, because I already talked about that and go to the structure. Thank you. The roadmap is very cool think because it lays out publicly in six months to a year and continuing big ideas within each of these six sections or themes, like what the action is that needs to be taken and who is responsible for that action within the LPC community, whether it's the LPC board, whether it's the membership, whether it's a particular committee within the LPC organization, et cetera. So again, I mentioned that this document was structured with time based goals in mind. And now that it's been almost a year since the first iteration of this came out, right, those first six months were completed by the time the task force finished its duties last July, which was fantastic.
And so now the new committee is revising what the next six months or what the next roadmap will look like. And they’re having a community call, maybe Angel can pop in the chat and let us know when that community call might be happening if it's been scheduled. I can't remember right now. So then from there we go on to the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices document. And this was a document that was created by a set of independent scholars in technical and professional communication. In light of all of the trauma happening in the black and Indigenous and the communities of color last year, these scholars got together and decided to write their own set of guidelines independently. And people in writing studies tend to do things on their own as a DIY effort anyways.
There's not a lot of guiding organizations for this kind of work within it, like the Library Publishing Coalition or C4DISC or other organizations might offer. So they just ad hoced it and came up with this review heuristic, which includes in the organization what the document is, how to use it. And specifically focusing on academic review processes and how they re-inscribe racism. The scenarios and stories in this document are if you haven't already been following along things like the Guest Post in the Scholarly Kitchen on racist practices in university presses and things like that, the scenarios here will be very enlightening to you if you identify as a white person. The scenarios will be probably unfortunately very familiar to you if you identify as something other than white. And those are meant to be illustrative, right, to say, here's what actually goes on.
And even if you think this isn't happening at your own publication, it probably is because we can't all micromanage every single editor, reviewer, et cetera. And so then the bulk of this document is spent with this heuristic guide, which is just simply a set of questions that go through how to recraft your scholarly reviewing practices for different audiences. And here's some of the guidance that it offers, right? Recognizing that there's a range of expertise and encouraged citation practices that represent that expertise and the different epistemological foundations on which research can be built that doesn't always come from within the discourse communities of academia. Also to recognize and intervene and to prevent harmful scholarly work in the publication process and in published scholarship. And there's been plenty of examples, unfortunately In the last couple of years, of scholarship that has gotten to print that has been incredibly harmful just to certain communities simply because a traditional, double anonymous peer review process may or may not have been used.
And so things get through the system. So how can we reevaluate our own guidelines to prevent that? You can read the rest of these here. And that is an extensive part of the document, and I encourage everyone to go check that out. You can sign on to this document if you support it. And many individuals, as well as institutions or organizations or publishers, a couple of publishers have signed on to say that they co-sign everything that's happening in this statement in a set of guidelines. It's been used at several journals in writing studies. And I don't know about beyond that, but I'd be curious to find out, to evaluate our own peer review heuristics to figure out how we can better create peer review guidelines that are fundamentally anti-racist.
And that's been to good effect in the last year, which has been nice. I will also note that this is the document on which the second of these co-sponsored workshops will be focusing and that one's in February. Fortunately/unfortunately that workshop has already reached capacity of 50 people, because we're going to be doing some hands on looking at your peer review guidelines to reassess and revise them. And we only had space for a certain number of people to do that with just to keep it manageable, but that doesn't mean that you can't do it in your own venues, and I'm happy to talk people through that process if they want, outside of the scope of that workshop. So that brings us to our last section, which is about using these resources. And we've talked a little bit about how we're doing that individually in our own venues or our own units. And Joshua, I'm going to turn it back over to you to go through these with everybody.
Joshua: Sure. It might be important to point out a couple things as a side note, before we talk broader picture about using these resources. One is that anti-racist actions in a sphere tend to overlap. And so for instance, the heuristics in anti-racist reviewing that Cheryl just described serves as a response, maybe not intentionally, but it does to the needed list that was in the ethical framework. It was pointed out at that time that we needed some anti-racist peer review guidance and that document is being created. Another thing to point out about all of these, including arguably the toolkit, but especially the ethical framework, the anti-racist roadmap and the reviewing heuristics are tools that we didn't have that we needed for our context.
And so they are folks getting together and creating what they need in order to proceed in an anti-racist fashion. And that that's an important principle for the kind of work that you are hoping to do with these documents. That is that you have a context and that you need to move forward in it, and other people's documents will help prompt you, but they won't get you all the way there. Ultimately you're going to see a gap that you need to fill and that your forward action in your context is going to create some new paradigm that can work against the status quo of white supremacy and racism.
That's important to note about these documents. So how can you use these and the other resources you will no doubt stumble across as you begin to survey this landscape? Well, most importantly, as the preamble to the anti-racist toolkit for allies said, you need to affect your own education, that you have work to do for yourself and that this toolkit is a way of helping you get there. You perhaps need to develop your own research agenda. And these prompts can help with that.
Develop your own research agenda. So what don't you know that you need to know and how can these documents prompt you in that way? They’re almost certainly, these various documents are going to prompt you to interrogate and change your own personal practice. That is that all of us are steeped in a culture of white supremacy. And so it's inevitable that we are operating in ways that uphold the status quo, and we will find aspects of our own practice that we want to challenge and change. These documents are helpful to that kind of work.
The documents help you create spaces for anti-racist engagement. That is you're in a particular context in a particular community. And the actions, policies, paradigms that you engage with in these documents are going to create spaces for engagement. I think specifically of the peer review document, that suddenly opens up an entire space for anti-racist engagement in the conduct of peer review. And so that's a place where you can do actual work that pushes against the status quo. The documents are especially helpful to help you advocate for organizational change. That is, they can give you a framework for beginning to analyze and then change the systems that... and recording. Somebody is going to ask you to do that in your context.
And so these can help you know what can constitute assessment for success, for failure and how do I report those things. Engaging with these documents is going to give you tools for holding yourself and others accountable. That is, once you know, you can begin to develop the structures that give you ways of being accountable to each other. And I think this is really important. That is, that we don't move forward without mutual accountability, but is that in a space, let's say like scholarly communications or library publishing. Unless we have a set of colleagues with which we are moving forward and for whom which we're lifting up accountability, we can very easily just begin to reinscribe practices of disequity. Use these documents to help you hold yourself and others accountable.
And finally, in my final suggestion is that the documents give you prompts to rehabilitate your infrastructure. That is, are you counting on tools and/or systems that reify the status quo, and are there ways that you can begin to adopt new tools, new systems, new technologies of practice that can move you in an anti-racist direction? So as you engage with these and other documents, I encourage you to keep these prompts in mind to think about ways in which they might affect your own practice. Look at that. It's the final slide, and we do have some time for questions. This is our program email address, and that will get first to Cheryl and then to me. And these citations refer to the big orange quotations in the OA as a moral issue section that we reported on earlier.
Cheryl: So we're happy to hear about any questions or comments that you might have. As well as, I noted in the chat that if you know of, or have created any other documents or resources that you're using for anti-racist practices in your own publishing units, we'd be very happy to know about those either here or through email.
Joshua: We're seeing some thank you so muches, and a couple of these are going to be useful resources, and that is an excellent outcome for a presentation like this.
Cheryl: One of the ways that we have used these documents has been in our internship onboarding with our publishing unit which, actually, we have our very first meeting with them in 10 minutes. So I'm excited about that. So we end up talking quite a bit about library publishing of the disciplines and sets the context that the interns are working within. And then how the values of library publishing intersect with anti-racist practices.
And then we can draw on these documents to talk about not only how the two of us approach our editorial and publishing work through the unit and through the organizations that we're affiliated with, but how the students might think about using these kinds of frameworks for engaging with other organizations or work events, work situations that they might come across in their own futures. And we've gotten feedback from them that they're surprised and delighted and find it helpful as well. So we're glad to be able to pass that information on to those who are still learning.
So we have a question from Abby: Do you have any, besides the citations here, authors or teams whose work you find to be particularly impactful for discussing equity in publishing, not just frameworks, but discussions and research? Yes, Joshua is smiling.
Joshua: Abby, I do want to commend you to Martin Eve’s recent compilation, Reassembling Scholarly Communications. It's sitting at the bottom of this slide. It is a very broad reaching consideration of scholarly communications as it stands now from a anti-racist perspective. And it's an excellent place to start. It also is a sort of bibliography of bibliographies for the moment in terms of the kinds of research into anti-racist practice in scholarly communications and the research and implications. I think you could do worse than starting here. It's from MIT Press and there is a open version available at that publisher. That would be my go-to at the moment. It incorporates many of the voices that you would find atomized elsewhere in one volume. And so that can be really helpful.
Cheryl: Joshua, what would you say? Because when I first saw this book come out, I was like, oh, this book feels very white and male to me. So how would you respond to that?
Joshua: Well, Martin is white and male, and so is Gray, but the content of the book is anything but. And so research from across the globe, from across a range of identities and focusing on a range of understandings that push against the status quo narrative of white supremacy. That would be my, sort of, don't judge the book by its cover. It would be my take on that.
Cheryl: Right. Thank you. In addition, I would recommend work by Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, she's an Inuit scholar in technical and professional communication, and she's written quite a bit on multi-marginalized authors and citation practices. I'll pull up her website here momentarily, and she has co-authored a bunch of stuff with Rebecca Walton, who's a professor at Utah State University. Cana is at Virginia Tech now and they are editor and managing editor. Rebecca's the editor of Technical Communication Quarterly and Cana was managing editor for a while.
So they've done quite a bit of research and Cana has published, and her dissertation work was also on this. Hopefully she's turned it to a book on the intersection of representation, community knowledge, Indigenous knowledge citation practices, publishing that kind of work. And that's in addition to the many articles that Harrison Inefuku and Charlotte Roh have published, and Emily Drabinski, that we've quoted here that you see.
Karen: Thank you for the questions and the conversation and chat. And thank you both for your recommendations and guidance through these documents. Since we are nearing the end of our time together, I will go ahead and invite you to join us in thanking our co-presenters, Cheryl Ball and Joshua Neds-Fox, as well as the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Library Publishing Coalition for co-sponsoring this workshop with the Open Education Network. We look forward to seeing many of you soon, and until then we send our best wishes.
Joshua: Thanks everybody.
Cheryl: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Good to see you all.
- END OF VIDEO -
Chat Transcripts
00:19:57 Joshua Neds-Fox: International Indigenous Youth Council: https://indigenousyouth.org
NDN Collective: https://ndncollective.org/
00:22:35 Joshua Neds-Fox: Library Publishing Coalition: https://librarypublishing.org/
00:25:35 Sheri Jordan: free puppy! nice analogy
00:30:31 Kelly Smith: Yes! Thank you.
00:30:50 Kelly Smith: The transformative agreement movement is a profit/power grab
00:33:41 Kelly Smith: Good clarification. Thank you, Cheryl.
00:35:06 Cheryl Ball: Ethical Framework for Library Publishing: https://librarypublishing.org/resources/ethical-framework/
00:40:15 Cheryl Ball: These are also typical discussions we have on the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Listserv. You can find more about CELJ, one of this workshop’s co-sponsors, at http://celj.org.
00:41:11 Cheryl Ball: C4DISC Toolkits: https://c4disc.org/toolkits-for-equity/
00:44:52 Cheryl Ball: Https://c4disc.pubpub.org/antiracism-toolkit-for-organizations
00:47:30 Joshua Neds-Fox: LPC Roadmap to Anti-Racist Practice https://bit.ly/lpc-anti-racist-roadmap
00:51:55 Joshua Neds-Fox: Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic
00:51:59 Angel Peterson: February 4th
00:52:05 Joshua Neds-Fox: Thank you Angel!
00:52:17 Angel Peterson: welcome!
00:58:58 Cheryl Ball: And if you know of or have created other documents/resources that you use for instilling anti-racist practices at your unit/press/venue, please let us know here or via email!
01:00:43 Cheryl Ball: I love that Joshua shows how the pandemic has encroached on our spaces and our work-from-home scenarios. It reminds us daily about balance and self-care and priorities.
01:01:10 Emily Stenberg:
01:01:28 Megan Lowe: A great observation, Cheryl!
01:01:47 Cheryl Ball: I learned it from Joshua himself!
01:02:16 Megan Lowe: Nice
01:02:19 Emily Stenberg: My officemates tend to get louder whenever I’m on a call
01:02:30 Megan Lowe: Like cats knowing when you're on camera LOL
01:02:38 Cheryl Ball: ^^ true!
01:02:39 Sheri Jordan:
01:05:48 Megan Lowe: This was BRILLIANT
01:05:56 Megan Lowe: And so USEFUL! Many many thanks!
01:05:57 Sheri Jordan: I don't have questions but thank you SO much for all these resources!
01:05:59 Kathy Essmiller: Thank you so much.
01:06:03 Amy Hofer: Thank you for all of the links!
01:06:11 Kelly Smith: Agree. This is extremely helpful!!
01:07:32 Abbey Elder: Question: Do you have any (besides the citations here) authors or teams whose works you find to be particularly impactful for discussing equity in publishing? Not just frameworks but discussions and research?
01:10:02 Melanie Smith: Open access version: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.001.0001
01:11:42 Cheryl Ball: https://www.itchuaqiyaq.com/
01:11:46 Cheryl Ball: ^ Cana’s website
01:11:52 Cheryl Ball: With a name pronunciation guide.
01:12:03 Ally Laird: Thank you both, excellent presentation!
01:12:06 Lisa Maruca: Thank you! Great to see you again, Joshua and Cheryl!
01:12:08 Rachel Schrauben Yeates: Thank you!
01:12:11 Stacy Katz: Thank you!
01:12:15 Cara Lee: Thank you!!
NDN Collective: https://ndncollective.org/
00:22:35 Joshua Neds-Fox: Library Publishing Coalition: https://librarypublishing.org/
00:25:35 Sheri Jordan: free puppy! nice analogy
00:30:31 Kelly Smith: Yes! Thank you.
00:30:50 Kelly Smith: The transformative agreement movement is a profit/power grab
00:33:41 Kelly Smith: Good clarification. Thank you, Cheryl.
00:35:06 Cheryl Ball: Ethical Framework for Library Publishing: https://librarypublishing.org/resources/ethical-framework/
00:40:15 Cheryl Ball: These are also typical discussions we have on the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Listserv. You can find more about CELJ, one of this workshop’s co-sponsors, at http://celj.org.
00:41:11 Cheryl Ball: C4DISC Toolkits: https://c4disc.org/toolkits-for-equity/
00:44:52 Cheryl Ball: Https://c4disc.pubpub.org/antiracism-toolkit-for-organizations
00:47:30 Joshua Neds-Fox: LPC Roadmap to Anti-Racist Practice https://bit.ly/lpc-anti-racist-roadmap
00:51:55 Joshua Neds-Fox: Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic
00:51:59 Angel Peterson: February 4th
00:52:05 Joshua Neds-Fox: Thank you Angel!
00:52:17 Angel Peterson: welcome!
00:58:58 Cheryl Ball: And if you know of or have created other documents/resources that you use for instilling anti-racist practices at your unit/press/venue, please let us know here or via email!
01:00:43 Cheryl Ball: I love that Joshua shows how the pandemic has encroached on our spaces and our work-from-home scenarios. It reminds us daily about balance and self-care and priorities.
01:01:10 Emily Stenberg:
01:01:28 Megan Lowe: A great observation, Cheryl!
01:01:47 Cheryl Ball: I learned it from Joshua himself!
01:02:16 Megan Lowe: Nice
01:02:19 Emily Stenberg: My officemates tend to get louder whenever I’m on a call
01:02:30 Megan Lowe: Like cats knowing when you're on camera LOL
01:02:38 Cheryl Ball: ^^ true!
01:02:39 Sheri Jordan:
01:05:48 Megan Lowe: This was BRILLIANT
01:05:56 Megan Lowe: And so USEFUL! Many many thanks!
01:05:57 Sheri Jordan: I don't have questions but thank you SO much for all these resources!
01:05:59 Kathy Essmiller: Thank you so much.
01:06:03 Amy Hofer: Thank you for all of the links!
01:06:11 Kelly Smith: Agree. This is extremely helpful!!
01:07:32 Abbey Elder: Question: Do you have any (besides the citations here) authors or teams whose works you find to be particularly impactful for discussing equity in publishing? Not just frameworks but discussions and research?
01:10:02 Melanie Smith: Open access version: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.001.0001
01:11:42 Cheryl Ball: https://www.itchuaqiyaq.com/
01:11:46 Cheryl Ball: ^ Cana’s website
01:11:52 Cheryl Ball: With a name pronunciation guide.
01:12:03 Ally Laird: Thank you both, excellent presentation!
01:12:06 Lisa Maruca: Thank you! Great to see you again, Joshua and Cheryl!
01:12:08 Rachel Schrauben Yeates: Thank you!
01:12:11 Stacy Katz: Thank you!
01:12:15 Cara Lee: Thank you!!
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