Category Archives: 2022 Institute

Equity Toolkit for Disability Inclusion

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This is the third in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2022 and their projects. This one was submitted by Sylvia Hunter.

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What we’re doing and what we hope to achieve

The focus of our project is an Equity Toolkit for Disability Inclusion. Originated by members of our team, this project has been workshopped at the 2022 Researcher to Reader conference and is being carried forward by a larger volunteer team, headed by specific project managers, under the umbrella of the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Publishing (C4DISC), which provides infrastructural and administrative support.

Challenges

There’s no shortage of online resources on the topic of disability inclusion. The challenge is one that’s familiar in scholarly communications: finding the signal amidst the noise, evaluating how reliable each resource is, and wondering what else you might have missed. While modeled on prior C4DISC Toolkits for Equity projects, the Disability Toolkit aims to produce something different: an interactive, easy-to-update online hub providing access to high-quality and accurate resources, curated and vetted by knowledgeable people, that both people with disabilities and those wanting to successfully recruit, hire, and retain people with disabilities can use to help achieve those goals. Like other C4DISC Toolkits, however, the Disability Toolkit would be made available free of charge and would offer good search capabilities, topic and format filtering, and a variety of resource types (text, video, audio) with accessibility affordances.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed both encouraging and difficult truths about both our society and the scholarly communications industry. On the one hand, we’ve been reminded by our industry’s role in vetting and disseminating COVID research how much our work matters; we’ve learned that much of our work can be carried out very effectively via distributed work, and that our organizations are capable of being more flexible, adaptable, inclusive, and compassionate than we previously realized. On the other hand, however, we’ve seen a societal disregard for disabled, immunocompromised, and chronically ill people cast into stark relief. Policies and practices for which disabled people have been advocating for years, and which we were often told were too difficult, too expensive, or just impossible—such as flexible work hours, virtual conferences, more paid sick leave, and remote work—were implemented practically overnight as soon as our non-disabled colleagues also needed them … and are now being abandoned in many places. Part of the work we’re doing is reckoning with these truths.

Opportunities

Meanwhile, more than 15% of people worldwide have some kind of disability—that’s over 1.1 billion people. That means we need the content we publish and the events we host to be accessible to people with disabilities. It also means that as an industry, we need to take advantage of the knowledge, lived experiences, and problem-solving abilities that people with disabilities bring to the workplace! And those needs seem likely to increase as the long-term consequences of COVID play out. As the scholarly communications sector continues to wrestle with ongoing changes in our industry, the internet, and the world, increasing the diversity of our workforce will be key to building flexible, resilient, creative teams that can succeed in a rapidly changing environment.

Photo of a pink sign in the grass, with a wheelchair symbol and reading "step free route"

Working to make scholarly communications more disability confident is also an issue of equity, inclusion, and access: including experiences, voices, and ideas not adequately represented in the past, and giving people equitable access to job opportunities. Thus, part of our work in this project is creating a resource that the whole industry can use in repairing existing inequities and harms, as well as the damage of the pandemic, and in caring for one another as we do so.

The team participating in Triangle SCI includes 4 steering committee members and 2 project managers for the Disability Toolkit. We bring to the project a shared desire to improve equity and inclusion for people with disabilities in our industry, informed by what is collectively a wide range of both disability experiences and scholarly publishing experiences. The larger project team includes several dozen volunteers, bringing a wide range of expertise, who all have an interest in disability inclusion advocacy. Over the next six months, the project team will be researching and collecting resources for possible inclusion in the Disability Toolkit; TriangleSCI will give a subset of the steering committee and project management team time and space to evaluate all of these resources, make decisions about resource inclusion and project priorities, and develop options for structuring and organizing the Toolkit. We will then take these decisions back to the larger group to be reviewed and ultimately ratified.

The steering committee and project managers live and work in several countries on two separate continents, and have been working together for months or years without meeting in person. Having this opportunity to work together in a concentrated, focused way will put us several steps closer to making the Disability Toolkit a concrete and usable reality that can make a difference in our industry.

How we plan to share our work

The Toolkit will be an online resource focused on signposting high-quality sources of information and best practices as well as providing actionable insights for disabled employees, managers, and allies working in scholarly communications. Our goal is to create an accessible, flexible resource that can be updated in response to community needs over time.

Team members will highlight our participation at the Scholarly Communications Institute ‘live’ via LinkedIn and Twitter. Once the Toolkit is finalized, we will work with C4DISC member organizations to get feedback and raise awareness, as well as organizing conference panels for industry-wide conferences like SSP (The Society for Scholarly Publishing) and ALPSP (Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers), among others. Two of our team members work in roles specifically focused on disability inclusion at large publishers, which offers another potential avenue for both input and dissemination.

The team will begin their work in advance to ensure maximum use of their time together at the institute. Publishing Enabled and C4DISC have recently kicked off a series of planning meetings for the Toolkit, which includes the Team alongside a larger body of volunteers. As part of that planning process, the Team will meet once a month between June and October to agree our goals for attending SCI and to align those goals with the overall project plan.

Team members

Karen Stoll Farrell is the Head of Scholarly Communication at Indiana University, Bloomington. They lead a team responsible for a library publishing service with over 50 open access journals, the institutional repository and data repository, data and GIS services, open educational resources programs, and research impact. Their current research is focused on the academic hiring process for autistic librarians, and on distributions of power and diversity in library collections. They serve as a co-project manager on the C4DISC Disability Toolkit project, bringing their own lived experience as an autistic person.

Kimberly Gladfelter Graham is the Office Manager for NISO (National Information Standards Organization), managing the organization’s systems and administrative functions. She works closely with all members of the organization to adhere to strategic goals, realize projects and programing, serve the association membership, and support association work. Kimberly serves as executive support for Board-related communications and meetings; she was intimately involved in the NISO NFAIS merger and serves on the Board of Directors Finance Committee. Kimberly comes to NISO from the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries and Art Museum community), having worked as the Director and Art Consultant for Hemphill Fine Arts and adjunct professor of curatorial practice at MICA, Baltimore, MD. She is an independent art consultant and curator, advising private collections and producing such exhibitions as Dedicated: A Tribute Exhibition in Honor of Betty Cooke and Bill Steinmetz, and Laying-by Time: Works by William A. Christenberry. Kimberly is keenly interested in using her organizational and relational skills to support projects related to DEIA, food insecurity, and women’s reproductive health. She currently serves as a co-Project Manager for the CDISC Toolkit for Disability working group.

Simon Holt is Disability Confidence Manager and Senior Publisher at Elsevier. Registered blind, he works to make the publishing industry more inclusive and equitable, with a particular focus on disability inclusion. He sits on several committees with SSP, ALPSP, and the Publishers’ Association, and contributes articles to Scholarly Kitchen as part of Publishing Enabled, a group that aims to further disability inclusion within the publishing industry. He was awarded the 2020 Emerging Leader award by the Society for Scholarly Publishing. Simon brings to the Disability Toolkit project his expertise in disability and wider inclusion policy, particularly around self-identification, psychological safety, and workplace adjustments as they apply to the scholarly communications industry on a global level.

Sylvia Izzo Hunter is Marketing Manager at Inera and Community Manager at Atypon, responsible for content marketing, social media, and community-building activities such as interest groups and user meetings. Prior to these roles she worked for over 20 years in university press journal and book editorial, production, and digital publishing. Sylvia is a past member of the SSP Board, a current member of SSP’s DEIA and Education committees, and the author of three historical fantasy novels published by Ace Books. She brings to the Disability Toolkit project her expertise in writing and editing; her own experience of living and working with anxiety and depression; a long-time interest in digital content accessibility; and the experiences of family members, friends, and colleagues with disabilities.

Erin Osborne-Martin is Executive Partnership Manager and Analytics Manager at Wiley, responsible for market insights and data analytics that inform business development strategies. Prior to that, she has worked for more than 15 years in society-focused scholarly communications, primarily at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, where she led the flip of their publishing portfolio to Open Access. After sustaining a spinal cord injury in 2017, Erin became active in disability advocacy through the BackUp Trust, a spinal injury charity, and Transport for All, a group that works for more accessible public transportation.

As a blind Mathematics graduate, Stacy Scott has both the lived experience and professional vantage point from which to understand the challenges faced by learners with a print-disability, and is forever committed to breaking down barriers and improving the availability of accessible education—and enhancing independent study—for all. She has been professionally involved in the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) education sector, forming the basis for her career, beginning as a university advisor and following a trajectory through a diverse and rewarding career. In prior roles, Stacy worked in Bangladesh, in India, and across several countries in Africa on making education more inclusive, which saw her involvement in a vast array of diverse, illuminating, and extremely meaningful and challenging projects. She then headed the RNIB Bookshare Service in the UK, working with over 1,100 publishing partners to bring their content onto the RNIB Bookshare platform, to be used by students with any print-disability for free. The platform grew rapidly and currently provides over 760,000 free eBooks in a variety of accessible formats. Moving closer to accessibility challenges in academia, Stacy is now Accessibility Manager for Taylor & Francis, where she aims to provide a clearer, more cohesive strategy on accessibility across the company, building on the wonderful, award-winning work T&F has already achieved. She can often be found in the “accessibility community,” speaking at events or hosting/attending panels. She also chairs the Accessibility Action Group for the Publishers Association, a group which brings publishers, vendors, stakeholders, and end users together to break down barriers to accessing any and all published materials—something that still remains Stacy’s raison d’être!

[ Images by Elizabeth Woolner and Yomex Owo used under Unsplash Free License ]

A Post-Pandemic Reckoning: Improving Metadata for Better Accessibility to Scholarly Archives for People with Disabilities

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This is the second in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2022 and their projects. This one was submitted by Dene Grigar.

Photo of computer screens with glasses on a table in front of them

The title was innocuous enough: “Poesiataca,” by Clement Padin. One of the 299 works of born-digital works of art displayed in The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That, it is accessible via the museum’s Collection at ELO’s The NEXT. Visitors simply click on the link to view it––yet as soon as visitors do, frenetic flashing begins, far above the three times per second limit recommended to avoid causing seizures. Ideally, a warning to visitors that alerts them to this danger would accompany “Poesiataca,” but conventional metadata schemas do not include fields for this kind of information. In fact, metadata fields that address the needs for people with a wide variety of physical, cognitive, and neurological disabilities are needed for the many digital archives offered by The NEXT, a virtual museum/library created for the Electronic Literature Organization, as well as other GLAM institutions.

This is the problem our team plans to address during the Scholarly Communication Institute’s 2022 Triangle SCI. Because The NEXT collects and hosts a wide variety of interactive media pertaining to digital art and writing––the bulk of which it makes freely available for access and download in their original formats or in formats that have been preserved through migration and emulation––its schema both utilizes and extends the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) maintained by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress. Called “ELMS” (Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema), the framework provides a common understanding of the highly complex, interactive, digital artifacts held in its collections. The added taxonomies developed for extending MODS include, among many others, Software Dependency(ies), Authoring Platform(s), Hardware Dependency(ies), Peripheral Dependency(ies), Computer Language(s), Digital Quality(ies), Sensory Modality(ies), and Genre(s). Since its introduction in May 2021, The NEXT has seen over 25,000 national and international visitors and was awarded the 2022 Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.

While The NEXT is built in semantic mark-up language and ARIA so as to enable navigation via assistive technologies, its metadata schema needs further refining so that visitors with disabilities have better and more specific information about accessing a work and the work’s content. When accessing Jason Nelson’s award-winning net art, “Game, Game, Game, and Again Game,” for example, visitors who have seizures would need to know in advance that the work contains potential triggers. Even works that require an action as simple as using a mouse, like Jody Zellen’s “Fragments,” may preclude visitors who cannot manipulate peripherals from experiencing the work as the artist had intended. The NEXT contains thousands of such examples, and so our team plans to spend the time provided at Triangle SCI to 1) identify and define specific metadata needed for people with disabilities who seek to interact with the kind of born-digital objects found at The NEXT and other repositories hosting similar material, 2) add the necessary fields and vocabulary to the schema, and 3) prepare a visual model that can be shared. Thus, the output of our week’s collaboration will be a more complete metadata schema that addresses the needs of people with disabilities, one that can be shared widely with galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM).

Photo of a painted wall with an accessible entry sign

Project Team


Dene Grigar, PhD, who serves as the lead for the project, holds a Louis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professorship at Washington State University and is a Professor and the Director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture program. In 2011 she founded the Electronic Literature Lab, where she leads a team of 10 scholars, designers, programmers, and digital preservationists to restore, reconstruct, document, and exhibit works of born–digital art and literature. She is also co–founder, Managing Director, and Curator of ELO’s The NEXT, built by members of her lab and in continued development and management by them. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Electronic Literature Organization and was its President from 2013–2019. Grigar has published nine books and 67 articles, most of which focuses on digital storytelling and poetics, digital preservation, and curation.

Erika Fülöp, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Lancaster University (UK) whose research interests lie mainly in two broader areas: the impact of digitization and the internet on culture, and literature in particular; and the modern and contemporary novel, especially metafiction and self–reflexive phenomena, and the narrative theoretical and philosophical issues these raise. Her recent work has focused on born–digital literature produced by French and Hungarian writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In that vein she is collaborating with Grigar to develop a node of The NEXT at Lancaster University in order to expand it into Europe and across languages with the mission to build collections of works by European artists.

Jarah Moesch, PhD and MFA, serves on the grant as the Lead for critical access of/to born–digital work, namely to design and create a metadata schema that describes and incorporates the embodied experiences of disabled people and commits to making them accessible from a disability justice perspective, recognizing that disabled people have intersecting embodiments that include race, class, gender expression, sexuality, and mental health, as well as one’s relationship to colonization, and that these identities are part of a disability justice framework. Moesch will focus on articulating a schema that creates accessible pre–downloading/viewing information, so disabled people can know what to expect and how they might experience the works, but also to choose whether or not to engage in the first place. Moesch is currently a core member of the Critical Design Lab, a multi–disciplinary and multi–institution collaborative drawing on critical and interrogative design, intersectional feminist design theory, and crip technoscience to create open–access protocols for disability access that are generated from disability culture and that serve as alternatives to accessibility checklists to support and transform disabled people’s everyday life experiences. Moesch is a lecturer in Science & Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Richard Snyder, PhD, is the Charles Blackburn Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington State University and Associate Director for the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL). As a digital humanities scholar, Richard works at intersections of word and image in both traditional and born–digital works of art and literature. In his role as Metadata Specialist for ELO’s The NEXT, he has worked to develop and implement several different iterations of the Electronic Literature Metadata Schema (ELMS) with an eye to the specific, and often undescribed, qualities of digital media. Working with physical and digital items alike for collections and exhibitions, and in discussion with the ELL team, Richard has continued to update ELMS with accessibility in mind. Working with exhibitions of artworks such as “Filter Insta–Zine: Instagram Storytelling and Zine Culture” at The NEXT, he has continued to reimagine the next steps in creating a metadata structure that suits born–digital artworks for the next generation of artists and scholars.

[ Featured images by Kevin Ku and Daniel Ali used under Unsplash Free License ]

Building a contextual alternative to scholarly journal un/safelists

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This is the first in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2022 and their projects. This one was submitted by Matt Ruen.

orange sheets of paper lie on a green school board and form a chat bubble with three crumpled papers.

Concerns about “predatory” or questionable journals have led many academics to seek out simple checklists of safe or unsafe journals, which reflect a real need among researchers to quickly make sense of an ever-increasing range of publication options. But the “safe/unsafe” approach obscures the contextual and constructed nature of authority in information, instead valuing the prestige of a small group of commercial entities. Existing lists tend to hold open access journals to different standards than subscription based journals, and view new or smaller publications more critically than large commercial publishers. In turn, these lists and discussions often overlook exploitative or problematic aspects of traditional subscription publishing. They also replicate biases against certain forms of research, such as those from non-anglophone countries who have been historically and intentionally excluded from the prestige economy of scholarly conversation. We want to reckon with these issues through a transparent evaluation process that seeks to address both the labor of evaluation and the bias inherent in the existing system.

Our group came together to try to address this problem with Reviews: the Journal of Journal Reviews (RJJR), a scholarly publication that will invite peer-reviewed evaluations of journals, both open and paywalled, from across the world. Our vision is to create a place for authors to find and share useful information about unfamiliar journals in a format that emphasizes the subjective, nuanced nature of this challenge. Our goal is to not create another set of “safe” or “unsafe” journals, but to provide authors with enough information in an easily digestible format to allow them to make their own decisions based on their needs. As RJJR publishes reviews, authors interested in a potential journal could look to RJJR for evaluations already completed. Even when a particular journal has not been reviewed, the collection of reviews can demonstrate ways to carry out a thoughtful, nuanced, subjective analysis. We conceive of this as an iterative process which allows for open feedback and updates. At the same time, it gives librarians and others who regularly perform this often unseen work a peer-reviewed means of recognition of their labor and creates efficiencies for other librarians who need to investigate the same journal.

Biases are not eliminated in this style of review, but instead we ask each reviewer to provide justifications and context for their judgments. We anticipate that there will be room for a conversation, an evolution of journal practices, and the reporting of those practices as they are critically evaluated in a transparent way. Academic publishing is not a stagnant activity, nor should our evaluation mechanisms be.

RJJR rests on a rubric or a model of processes and tools for authors to use when evaluating a journal. A rubric offers a method of evaluation, rather than a checklist of binaries or a simple watchlist of outlets to avoid, and we are providing careful guidance to point at critical questions, rather than expected answers. In line with some of the facets of an ethics of care, we want evaluations to be relational and situated, and to reflect a sense of collective responsibility for our scholarly landscape. The rubric is supported by our values, including: taking a critical approach to prestige, supporting labor not traditionally seen as scholarly work, ensuring an environment inclusive of diverse voices, being transparent about the process, acknowledging nuance in journal evaluation, and accepting that change happens. RJJR represents a much-needed reckoning: with the above values, with the longstanding problem of good/bad lists in scholarly journal evaluation, and with the uncredited intellectual labor of scholarly communication professionals.

Outcomes

During Triangle SCI, we aim to refine and finalize the core processes and documentation for RJJR.

We anticipate the following specific outcomes:

  • a finalized rubric and guide for authors to submit reviews to RJJR
  • instructions for peer evaluation of submitted reviews
  • finalized editorial and publication workflows
  • learn from and collaborate with the institute’s other participants to improve equity across the project

Our stretch goals include:

  • a ready-for-submissions RJJR journal site
  • a process for targeted recruitment of potential peer evaluators and contributors
  • strategies to diversify representation in our team/process

Our team

Joshua Neds-Fox is Coordinator for Digital Publishing at the Wayne State University Libraries in Detroit, Michigan. Joshua’s work at Wayne State over the past 15 years has encompassed digital open access publishing, copyright and scholarly communications, and consultation with the Wayne State community on the very questions that RJJR seeks to address. He serves on the editorial board of the Library Publishing Curriculum and is leading the team developing a revision of the Library Publishing Coalition’s Ethical Framework for Library Publishing. His deep background with open access publishing gives him a familiar perspective on debates about actual and alleged “predatory” publishing and the mechanisms for evaluating appropriate outlets for scholarship. Joshua identifies as a white cisgendered man.

Matt Ruen is the Scholarly Communications Outreach Coordinator for the Grand Valley State University Libraries. As a scholarly communication librarian, his responsibilities include advocacy and education on open access publishing as well as evaluating journals for the library’s open access publishing fund. Matt supports this project with his advocacy experience as well as a strong drive to understand the context of problems. He has long been irritated (and intrigued) by the way scholarly conversations about journal watchlists and “predatory publishing” omit or ignore the way that quality – authority – is constructed and contextual. This frustration, in the form of a Twitter thread, kicked off the group’s collaboration on Reviews: the Journal of Journal Reviews. Matt identifies as a white cisgendered man.

Teresa Schultz is the Social Sciences Librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she leads scholarly communications efforts. This includes educating faculty and students about the complexities of scholarly journals and deciding where to publish, experience which she brings to her role in the project. She is researching how science journalists view and think about the concept of “predatory” publishers. She identifies as a white cisgendered woman.

Brianne Selman is the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian at the University of Winnipeg, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where she leads Research Support for faculty and students interested in publishing. She also does frequent scholarly journal landscape evaluations, and advises faculty on the intricacies of the scholarly publishing ecosystem, as well as author’s rights in copyright and other arenas. She does research on research, particularly looking at the cultural economics behind concentration in ogopolistic markets, and public infrastructure projects that look for transparent alternatives based in communities of care. The research she does on scholarly publishing and the profit motives behind it, as well as her practical experience in conducting thoughtful, needs-based scholarly journal evaluations, will help to shape the parameters of this project. Brianne is a white settler-Canadian, and is cisgender.

Leila Sterman is an Associate Professor and Scholarly Communication project lead at Montana State University where she runs an institutional repository, hosts multiple journals on OJS, and advises authors at her institution on journal selection. Her previous work on prestige in publishing and communication across disciplines inform her practical work developing this platform and her desire to create a journal that encourages the critical evaluation of resources. She identifies as a white cisgendered woman.

Stephanie Towery is the Copyright Officer at the University Libraries at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She adds expertise on copyright, plagiarism, and related topics to this team. Stephanie also teaches Legal Information Resources at the Graduate School of Information at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. Stephanie has a BFA in Acting, a JD, and an MLIS all from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a member of the State Bar of Texas but is not currently practicing. Stephanie identifies as a white cisgendered woman.

[ Featured image by Volodymyr Hryshchenko used under Unsplash Free License ]