Category Archives: 2023 Institute

Photo of Chetham's Library reading room. The library is one of the oldest public libraries in Britain. Located in Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, UK.

Trust and the Archive: New Methodologies for Inclusion

Posted on by

This is the third in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2023 and their projects.

The Issue

US-and UK-based archives have historically excluded people of color both within the historical materials deemed worthy of preservation and as users of those documents. Many archives, in fact, were founded on the notion of exclusion. Joseph Quincy Adams, the first director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, for instance, celebrated its opening in 1932 with a speech that praised the library as a repository of the “Anglo-Saxon” culture that would serve as a bulwark against immigration and miscegenation. Additionally, cataloguing and archival guides were often constructed when race was not deemed a worthy topic of research, a practice that often still curtails deep engagement with archival holdings. There is also a startling lack of diversity among those who maintain the archives: 82% of the archivists currently working in the United States are white. As a result, regardless of intent, the archive is primarily an edifice of whiteness that reflects its desired users. Sculptures, paintings, portraits, photos, statues, busts and friezes, pamphlets and brochures, maps, catalogs, as well as the faces of staff, and other researchers signal to people of color that the archive is a place designed by and for white users.  All of this impacts both who has access to the archives, their experience working with staff and leadership, and how they use its materials (see Ashley Farmer “Archiving While Black”).  Generations of archival researchers have been excluded, shamed, and made to feel unwelcome in spaces that need their expertise and unique points of view.  One casualty of their experience is trust.

Despite these challenges, it is important to consider that archives are both “vital active sites of social justice and injustice” and they “both constitute and enact injustices but also are central to justice” (Saucier and Wallace, Archives, Recordkeeping and Social Justice). In this especially urgent political moment when the study of the past, especially as it relates to race, is under assault from various sources, upholding the value of ethical archival methodologies, making those methodologies more transparent, and inviting new publics into archival communities is essential. While brick and mortar repositories can sometimes function as mausoleums (indeed, have sometimes been designed to serve this purpose), they also have the capacity to serve as anchor institutions, spaces that support efforts at connection, meaningful exchange, and community building.  For legacy institutions in particular to engage in this work “archive” must become synonymous with “access,” “equity,” and with “open source,” and must balance sober reverence with joy and play.   Trust in archives as open and available must be earned and built: by acknowledging and making visible the invisible barriers designed to restrict access; through transparency about process so that the unwritten rules of the archive are legible to new users; and by destabilizing the fictions of ownership (provenance) that haunt its catalogs.

This diverse, international team of art historians, curators, historians, and literary scholars proposes a project on trust as both verb and noun–acting to build it with new readers especially those it has historically excluded, and to reimagine the archive as a community trust with a binding relationship of shared responsibility. In the first instance we assert the need for intentional practices that require time and sustained resources, and in the second, the clear articulation of how trustee institutions will serve the beneficiary public. Our work attends to our shared goal of addressing practices of exclusion and is rooted in the belief that meaningful work that disrupts exclusionary systems and practices happens when specialists apply their experiences and expertise to a common problem. We know that trust is key to ensuring that new practices offer sustainable interventions that can become embedded in every archival mechanism rather than just quick ‘tick-boxing’ exercises.

Project Team

Our team represents experts with various vantage points on the archives and how they shape the way we understand the past. We all work with both professional and public communities to bring new, diverse voices into traditional institutions. We are a multicultural, cross-institutional, international group of scholars, teachers, and leaders. Some of us are charged with maintaining archives and making them accessible to a diverse community (Patricia Akhimie and Karin Wulf). We interpret the archives for the public in various mediums (Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth and Patricia Matthew), and we lead initiatives that develop new ways to disseminate analyses (Kim F. Hall, Ayanna Thompson, and Karin Wulf). Several of us are faculty at Minority Serving Institutions (Patricia Akhimie, Patricia Matthew, and Ayanna Thompson). In particular, we have worked with children and young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds in London, across the UK, and in the US to show that everyone deserves access to the archive, its history and its potential as a tool for public engagement. This has included object-handling sessions, re-making sessions and co-curated exhibitions (Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth and Kim F. Hall). Our projects are international in focus with particular attention to transatlantic cultural history and representations of race.

SCI will enable us to deepen the impact of the projects we develop and to bring them back to our different disciplines and institutions, here and abroad (the group includes international participants). Although some of us have done research at repositories in the South, being together at SCI will help us decenter our own primary locations. It will be a geographic prompt that helps us consider how the Black, Indigenous and local repositories in the South are deeply, but perhaps differently, affected by the issues we are raising.   

We all work with an understanding that social media’s various platforms can amplify the work of scholars of color, lead to community building, and make important social challenges transparent to a cross-section of academics and the public. Our team:

  • focuses on pre-1900 transatlantic culture, arts, and politics
  • interrogates archival practices
  • roots its methodologies, critical framework, and analyses in Critical Race Theory
  • navigates the exclusionary practices we plan to address in our project
  • engages with a broad public, beyond the academy, speaking to different industries about the role of humanities in society

Team member profiles:

  • Patricia Akhimie is Director of the Folger Institute, the scholarly hub of the Folger Shakespeare Library, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of early modern books, manuscripts, and other rare materials. Through innovative scholarly programs and fellowships, she works to increase access to the Folger’s resources, broaden the scholarly conversations that the library sponsors, and connect humanities scholars with the public. Her research has been supported by the NEH and Ford Foundation as well as archives including the Folger, National Sporting Library, and John Carter Brown Library. Akhimie is also Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she received the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (2018), and editor of Othello for the Arden Shakespeare 4th series and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, both forthcoming. Akhimie’s public facing work includes projects with Reconstruction.us, an online education company; the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival; Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company; the Public Theatre; and the PBS series Great Performances. She also serves as Director of the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network, which supports an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars at various career stages studying race in the premodern era (antiquity to the 17th century).
  • Kim F. Hall is Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College where she teaches courses in Critical Race Studies, Black Feminist Studies, and material culture. Her book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, helped create the field known as premodern critical race studies.  She has written on the racialization of the archives and has taught and lectured widely on questions of race and culture to everyone from Black sororities to middle and high school teachers to college communities. Additionally, she has taught art practices in programs for placed-at-risk students, quilt guilds, and senior centers.  The Barnard College Library named her their first “Faculty Partner of the Year,” and she led the effort to acquire the Ntozake Shange Collection at Barnard College which has helped renew the college archive as a feminist space. Diverse Issues in Higher Education named her one of “25 Women Making a Difference in Higher Education and Beyond” largely based on her “Digital Shange Project” in which undergraduates use digital tools and archival research to learn about Shange’s work and legacy. She has won several prestigious fellowships, including a National Humanities Center Fellowship; a Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; an NEH fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago; and an ACLS fellowship.  HBCU and other Black archives play a large role in her current project, Othello Was My Grandfather’: Shakespeare and Race in the African Diaspora.
  • Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is an art historian and curator specialising in the visual and material cultures of early modern Europe. She is Lecturer in French and British History of Art c.1650-1900 at the University of Edinburgh. Caroline was previously Curator of 1600-1800 Ceramics & Glass in the Department of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She is Co-Investigator on the pioneering science heritage public engagement CapCo Project Making London Porcelain funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council with the V&A, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and Newham Borough in London. She is currently writing two books, one on the art collector and philanthropist Lady Charlotte Schreiber for Lund Humphries (2024), and a monograph entitled Sèvres-mania: The Craft of Ceramics Connoisseurship for Bloomsbury Academic (2025). Caroline regularly acts as an advisor for museums and ceramics collections, including: the Victoria & Albert Museum, Art UK Ceramics Strategy, Doddington Hall, Winterthur Museum and Bristol Art Museum.
  • Patricia A. Matthew (team leader) is associate professor of English at Montclair State University and a specialist in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She has edited and co-edited journal issues (Romantic Pedagogy Commons, European Romantic Review, and Studies in Romanticism); the edited volume Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and is co-editor of the new Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has written about Regency, race, and popular culture for The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement. In 2020-2021 she was a Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo, and in 2022-2023 she was the Anthony E. Kaye Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her forthcoming work includes the Wondrium/audible.com lecture “Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century.” She is currently writing a book about Britain’s sugar boycott, gender, and abolitionist visual culture for Princeton University Press and editing Mansfield Park for The Norton Library.
  • Ayanna Thompson is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). In 2021, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thompson is the author of numerous books, including Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach, co-authored with Laura Turchi (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), and Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011). As a supporter of collaborative endeavors, she founded the RaceB4Race symposia and networking series for scholars who specialize in premodern critical race studies. Through this collective, she has worked closely with several important archives to host the symposia, including the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Newberry Library. She also organized the Huntington Library’s conference, “Imagining Shakespeare in 2050: Performance/Archives,” which invited the leading artistic directors and Shakespeare librarians to think about their entwined futures. Thompson is also known for her public facing work with theater companies. Thompson serves as a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York, and currently serves on the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Parks Arts Foundation, and Play On Shakespeare. She is a past-President of the Shakespeare Association of America.
  • Karin Wulf is Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director & Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library, and Professor of History at Brown University.  A historian of “Vast Early America,” from 2013 to 2021 she was the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Professor of History at William & Mary.  She is finishing Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in 18th Century British America for Oxford University Press and is under contract to complete Genealogy: a Very Short Introduction, also for OUP.  She was the academic co-director for the Georgian Papers Programme, was appointed by Governor Ralph Northam to the Virginia 250 commission, is a board member for the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation Inc., and is a co-founder of Women Also Know History.  At the JCB, a library of the early Americas, she is leading a Welcome and Access Plan that prioritizes programming, staffing, and transparency about stewarding legacy collections in a library of colonialism, and that is focused through renovations of its physical and digital space on how the library can invite and welcome the broadest group of researchers and visitors.

Photo of an old book in an archive

Future Projects

The projects that emerge from the SCI will offer those engaged in archival work–those who maintain them and those who use them–new languages, tools, and ideas that can lead to more openness and access and a more nuanced understanding of how to work with its materials.

To facilitate this, the first project will be a virtual symposium that reexamines Cheryl Harris’ landmark essay “Whiteness as Property.” Given that the materials that archives hold in trust often either originate as or become white property, Harris’ thinking has particular salience to the communities we hope to reach.

The Harris symposium will be used as the foundation for the second project –a white paper about trust and the archives. Following the model of a similar essay about academic gatekeeping published by the RaceB4Race Collective (led by Ayanna Thompson), this white paper will offer practical advice for inclusion but also reflect on the necessity of reading against archival structures.

Based on the philosophical and ethical discussions sparked by the “Whiteness as Property” symposium and the praxis proposed in our white paper, our future projects will bring students, creatives, and independent researchers into ongoing conversations about legacies, access, and trust. Relatedly, we plan to provide tools for institutions wishing to build trust with previously disenfranchised communities.  These tools will help institutions think about resources they can make available to the neighborhoods they inhabit (or have displaced). Other activities will include:

  • A collaborative project at Brown University and the John Carter Brown Library on “Monumental Archives.” This project would explore how the spaces of archives have often echoed the colonial and imperial hierarchies of their holdings with a specific focus on trust that explores how the critical archives turn in scholarship and the work of librarians and archivists in critical archives studies can and should (but have not regularly) learn from and enhance one another.
  • A research proposal workshop that brings junior scholars, artists, or others and consults together in an archive like the Folger Library to create a list of potential archives and related residential fellowships for which the proposed project might be appropriate.
  • A public engagement workshop working with key local community groups including school children, targeting 15-18-year-olds, to consider what young people can and should access from archives. We will do an object-handling session and ask participants to interpret these objects by considering the opportunities offered from holding a piece of history in their hands.

[ Photo of Chetham’s Library reading room by Michael D Beckwith used under CC-BY license.  Photo of archival book by Patricia Matthew, used by permission. ]

Photo of satellite dish at dawn

Investigating the potential of open peer review on trust and diversity in scholarly communication

Posted on by

This is the second in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2023 and their projects.

Research integrity and open science practices promise to build trust in scholarly work, within academia and society-at-large. Scholarly peer review, as the main quality assurance mechanism for knowledge production, is increasingly embracing these principles. Various forms of Open Peer Review (OPR) have been proposed, ranging from the disclosure of reviewer identities, to the publication of review reports, and the involvement of wider audiences in the peer review process.

These models of peer review have the potential to contribute to the trustworthiness and validity of processes and publications in diverse ways. For example, transparency of review reports enables scrutiny of review processes, while disclosing reviewer identities aims to leverage accountability of reviewers leading to more constructive, kind and reliable review reports. Inclusion of a wider set of stakeholders through allowing not only invited experts to comment on articles, has the potential to diversify reviewer pools and subsequently lead to higher trustworthiness. Therefore, combined, these models could contribute to diversity, equity, inclusion and integrity of the review and research process, potentially leading to trust and trustworthiness. However, recent research shows the efficacy of OPR is still largely unknown (Ross-Hellauer & Horbach 2022). Therefore, it is unclear whether OPR is achieving these aims.

In fact, concerns have been raised about the extent to which OPR runs the risk of having the opposite effect. There are, for example, concerns over potential repercussions for junior scholars if they are identified as the authors of negative reports, or the tacit reluctance to criticise powerful members of the scientific community. If such effects are actually at play within OPR models, this will hinder participation from members of vulnerable groups, including women, early career researchers and members of epistemic or cultural minorities. In addition, these concerns might make reviewers, especially those in vulnerable positions, dilute their critiques. Both concerns could consequently lead to a less diverse reviewer pool or a reduced capacity of the review system to deliver valid or trustworthy research. We argue that both consequences go hand-in-hand: a failure to engage a diverse and wide set of reviewers will inevitably lead to an inefficient review system and reduced trustworthiness of science among researchers and potentially also society at large. It is therefore important not only to diversify voices in review, but also to empower wider communities to shape the format and conditions of the review process.

Similarly, while transparency of review reports is thought to contribute to trust, such openness can also lead to public awareness of controversy and uncertainty within the scholarly community, which could potentially undermine public trust in research and review.

As OPR increasingly gains traction, it is urgent to investigate the implications of the dynamics described above for perceptions of ability, integrity and benevolence (the three constitutive factors of trust), for the quality of published research, and for diversity and inclusion in review.

Challenges to be addressed

Despite the high expectations of OPR, the evidence-base on which its promises rest, is thin. In particular, we think three challenges should be addressed:

(i) there is still minimal information on the fundamental question of the extent to which OPR impacts the quality and trustworthiness of publications and review processes. We consider this the most pertinent open question. Addressing it is complicated by the lack of a general understanding of what quality means and how it can be measured in diverse epistemic and cultural contexts. Our team will therefore first work on a framework to conceptualise and assess quality and trustworthiness, based on three main components: products, processes and people. The framework allows to select specific sites to study individual components and their relations, including cases with direct public policy impact, cases with highly visible research actors like the covid pandemic, or cases involving minority communities where trust was broken or never established like the aftermath of the Tuskegee Syphilis study.

(ii) implications of OPR elements for reviewers, authors and other stakeholders involved in the review process are unknown. Inequalities in peer review have long been studied, but hitherto not in the context of OPR. To address this, we aim to assess whether and how Open Identities affect the diversity and composition of the reviewer pool, and more generally how OPR elements affect power imbalances and dynamics like homophily and cronyism.

(iii) we aim to better understand how the diversity of reviewer pools affects trust in review processes and products. In particular, we aim to focus on initiatives that attempt to introduce different perspectives in the authorship and peer review process, especially the perspectives of those being studied, including groups that have been historically kept out of science. Increasingly, those being studied are offered to contribute to peer review (e.g. patient review, or initiatives to combat parachute science), but the implications for trust are unknown.

Photo of an open book on a table

Team and Action plan

To address these challenges, we will convene a diverse core group of researchers and publishers at TriangleSCI. We propose diversity to be not only a main object of study, but also centre-stage in our approach to studying it. Building on insights from STS and feminist studies, we therefore gather a team that is diverse in terms of gender, seniority, and epistemic, cultural, institutional and geographical background. This allows us to be sensitive to the different aspects and dynamics potentially impacting trust. In addition, the team members are well-connected to a large variety of communities and stakeholders across the globe, allowing solicitation of further perspectives and opportunities to roll out planned experiments. TriangleSCI is therefore a unique opportunity to bring together this highly diverse and newly-formed team that would otherwise not be able to collaborate so intensively.

The group will map issues of equity, diversity and trust in OPR, aiming to

(i) begin work to study the efficacy of OPR models in terms of diversity and perceptions of trustworthiness in peer review’s process, people and products,

(ii) create a detailed and actionable roadmap for future research, and

(iii) develop and initiate community-awareness activities about the benefits and limitations of OPR models to foster diversity and trust in review.

This should ultimately lead to informed recommendations about how to organise the system to foster both diversity and trustworthiness in research.

Call for Community Input

To include a wide variety of perspectives in our work, we are eager to learn about your views on the way in which OPR models can contribute to diversity and trust in review. Please share your thoughts about potential benefits and risks of such models through this very brief form.

Your input will be invaluable for us to widen our understanding of the topic, to prepare for SCI and to bring community rather than individual perspectives to the Institute. If you are interested in joining our efforts and/or collaborating on experiments, please leave your contact details at the end of the form, so we can get back to you.

Our Team

The team brings together a group of researchers and scholarly communication professionals from across the globe. Team members have diverse backgrounds, particularly bringing expertise and experience with open science: peer review practices: research integrity: public trust in science: and diversity, equity and inclusion. While specifically selected to bring complementary expertise to the team itself, the diversity in team members’ backgrounds closely related to TriangleSCI’s 2023 theme and objectives, will allow the team members to contribute to wider discussions at the Institute. Moreover, as team members represent a broad range of communities, they will bring the voices of these communities to the discussions at the Institute. The team members are:

  • Gowri Gopalakrishna – Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Maastricht University; Senior Research Fellow, Amsterdam University Medical Center, Netherlands
  • Serge P.J.M. Horbach – Postdoc, Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Aarhus University, Denmark
  • Veronique Kiermer – Chief Scientific Officer at PLOS (Public Library of Science), United States of America
  • Tony Ross-Hellauer – Group Leader, Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science, TU Graz, Austria
  • Sonia Vasconcelos – Associate Professor, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • Simine Vazire – Professor, Melbourne School of Psychological Science, University of Melbourne, Australia

[ Photos by Donald Giannatti and Aaron Burden used under Unsplash free license ]

Photo of newspaper printing machine

Trust and pre-truth science: The case of preprints

Posted on by

This is the first in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2023 and their projects.

Preprints in journalism: Challenges and opportunities for (public) trust

This project brings together a group of scholars and journalists to investigate questions and tensions surrounding the use of preprints. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought attention to how, whether, and under what circumstances research that has not been peer reviewed should be shared with public audiences. Preprints have also renewed debates about the value and equity of peer review.

While the role of the media in the trust relationship between science and society is important, public engagement in and perceptions of science are also influenced by changes in the scholarly communication landscape. Research is increasingly driven by technological advances and exogenous pressure to publish more, and to do so at speed.

Enter the preprint – an increasingly accepted scholarly publication format, shared openly and without having undergone peer review. Promoted as a method to increase the pace and accessibility of scholarly communication, preprints demonstrated their value during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, preprints lack the journal-centric cues that scholars and journalists have traditionally used to evaluate credibility, such as journal reputation and peer-review status. This raises questions about how to decide whether preprints are reliable sources (Soderberg et al., 2020), as well as how the media and attentive publics interpret and (re)communicate the claims published in preprints. It also invites consideration of new approaches to scholarly publishing, including experimentation with peer review (e.g. eLife).

Despite evidence that preprint-based journalism is becoming a “new normal” (Fleerackers et al., 2022b), and the emergence of some guidelines (Van Schalkwyk & Dudek 2022), journalists as intermediaries between science and the public lack evidence-based best practices for reporting from preprints. Moreover, the institutionalization of preprints in the science communication system draws attention to both the benefits and risks of open science more broadly, and raises questions about the impact of more transparent science on public trust in the institution.

We will bring together a team of emerging scholars and established journalists who have been paying attention to the use of preprints. We will come together for the first time to better understand the societal value and risks of preprints beyond the pandemic. Specifically, we will work together to examine the heuristic cues that journalists use for assessments of research credibility and identify strategies for making credibility judgements while acknowledging the news value dimension of preprints. Equally important is how publics receive and interpret media cues regarding the provisional nature of scientific findings and how the communication of “pre-truth” science can be conveyed to preserve public trust in science.

Unpacking and preventing problematic evaluations of preprints in journalism is an essential step for meeting the promise that preprints hold for opening and accelerating scholarly and public communication of science. It could also help to mitigate risks that are commonly associated with media coverage of preprints, such as the potential to spread flawed research and misinformation. More broadly, developing guidance to verify and evaluate preprint knowledge raises larger philosophical questions about how to assess ‘quality’ in science; when findings can truly be considered confirmed; the veracity and fairness of peer review; and what this means for the evolving trust relationship between science and society. In pursuing these questions, the team hopes to inform future research and practice at the intersections of scholarly communication, journalism, and science communication.

Although our goals may evolve as a result of our participation in Triangle SCI, our collaboration will enable us to develop evidence-based, culturally sensitive, globally relevant, and practical resources to guide reporting on preprints. We also hope to address the important but underexplored questions that arise as preprints become cornerstones of public discourse. We will consider such topics as (1) the value and limits of peer review as a mechanism for ensuring the ‘trustworthiness’ of science, (2) the evolving relationships between science and science communication, (3) the societal challenges brought on by open science, and (4) the usefulness of the criteria traditionally relied on to delineate trustworthy, scientific ‘truths’ from false truth-claims. These questions can form the foundation of a rich research agenda, both for our team and for others interested in the intersections of scholarly communication and public engagement with science.

Photo of microscopes on a table

 

Our expertise on preprints, science communication, and trust

Our topic touches on many dimensions of trust laid out in the call for proposals. It considers trust as part of a larger communication network that includes both academic and public, analogue and (increasingly) digital channels of knowledge dissemination. We will take into account the interconnected nature of scholarly publishing, journalism and “mass self-communication” (Castells, 2009)—systems that are often treated as separate but that, as the public engagement with preprints has revealed, are in fact interwoven. We will also pay close attention to the infrastructures, norms, and power structures within academia, journalism, and social media. In doing so, our team’s work will critically examine key issues related to the integrity of processes of communication.

Our prior research has demonstrated that even experienced science journalists do not feel qualified to vet the trustworthiness of preprints and are concerned about their potential to contribute to misinformation (Fleerackers et al., 2022a; Massarani et al., 2021a). We have also identified how inconsistently journalists cover preprints (Van Schalkwyk & Dudek, 2022; Massarani & Neves, 2022; Massarani et al., 2021; Fleerackers et al., 2022b) and how poorly their audiences seem to understand this term (Ratcliff et al., 2023). Others have investigated the submission requirements, level of transparency, and research integrity considerations associated with different preprint servers (Malički et al., 2020), and proposed steps for overcoming these issues (Tijdink et al., 2020). Triangle SCI would provide an opportunity to bring together insights from our individual lines of inquiry related to preprints to address essential challenges facing journalists and their audiences, as well as scientists and the preprint servers that house their work.

Finally, our team is balanced in terms of gender and geography, bringing together experts from both the Global North and South, from both research and practice. Together, we could contribute diverse and complementary perspectives on issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. An intercultural, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral lens is essential for addressing the challenges and questions laid out above. Specifically, while US-based journalism organizations have recently started to propose guidelines for reporting on preprints responsibly (e.g., Khamsi, 2020; Miller, 2021), these guidelines were formulated with the Global North in mind and may not be appropriate for journalists working in the Global South, whose access to experts, resources, and editorial support often look very different (Nguyen & Tran, 2019). The journalists on our team—based in Brazil and Malaysia—will provide the experiences and reflections needed to ensure that all outputs of our work (but especially the guidelines) adequately consider the lived realities of journalists covering research in diverse reporting contexts.

Preparation and outcomes

Preparation

To prepare for Triangle SCI, our team will meet on Zoom to share current work, lessons learned, and lingering questions related to preprints, peer review, science journalism, and trust in science. We will take notes in a collaborative document throughout these meetings to structure our conversations at SCI. We will also identify and collect existing guidelines for journalists and other stakeholders regarding the use of preprints, building on our prior work (Van Schalkwyk & Dudek, 2022; Malički et al., 2020a). Doing so will help us to establish a sense of shared understanding of the problem space, and identify the challenges that will be most pressing to address during our time at the institute.

Outcomes

  1. Guidelines for journalists: This meeting would enable us to develop media reporting guidelines from an “ecosystem” perspective, drawing together the expertise and prior investigations of each team member to create guidelines that are responsive to the considerations and challenges of each stakeholder group. We intend to draw on our advanced reading, prior research and experiences, and discussions and investigations during the Institute, to develop evidence-based guidelines for journalists covering preprints. With the help of the bilingual members of our team, we will translate these guidelines into Portuguese, Mandarin, and French. We will work to ensure these guidelines are useful to journalists working in a diversity of global settings and contexts. We will also integrate recent research on how preprints and preliminary science are received by the public, in order to recommend approaches for publicly discussing preprint science that are likely to enhance public trust in journalists, scientists, and the scientific process.
  2. Blog posts: We will share recommendations and reflections in blog posts and news articles written by the science writers on the team in collaboration with the other team members. These will be published on the ScholCommLab blog, the Imidibaniso and SCI websites, and, possibly, SciDev.net, as well as being promoted through the team’s social media networks. We will also reach out to outlets such as the London School of Economics Impact Blog, Simon Fraser University’s Radical Access Blog, and Library Journal’s INFOdocket to amplify the reach of our blog posts.
  3. Podcast series: The team may interview other participants of SCI to gather reflections on recent evolutions in scholarly communication, social and news media, and their influence on trust in science. These interviews will be recorded, edited, and published under a Creative Commons license as a special mini-series of Telling Science Stories, a podcast produced and hosted by Fleerackers.
  4. Identify areas for future collaborative research: We hope that participating in SCI will spark conversations between team members, most of whom have not worked together before. These conversations could lead to new collaborations on research at the intersection of journalism and scholarly communication. More broadly, the team could work together to explore potential mechanisms for improving or restoring trust between science, media, and citizens in diverse geographic contexts.

Team

  • François van Schalkwyk is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His research interests span higher education studies, science communication, scholarly communication, critical data studies, and open science—all of which fall under the umbrella of an interest in sociology of knowledge production. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature (University of Cape Town), master’s degrees in publishing (Stirling University, UK) and education (University of the Western Cape, South Africa), and a PhD in science and technology studies (Stellenbosch University, South Africa). François has published on preprints in the media (Van Schalkwyk & Dudek, 2022, and currently has a paper under consideration regarding the role of regional preprint servers in countering established information asymmetries in science. He has also studied the use of open science by the anti-vaccination movement (Van Schalkwyk, 2019; Van Schalkwyk et al., 2020), and explored issues of trust in science during the COVID-19 pandemic (Weingart et al., 2022). This research—in addition to the fact that he is a founder trustee of the open access scholarly publisher African Minds, associate editor of the scholarly journal Learned Publishing, and an active participant in the ScholarLed initiative—places him in a favorable position to contribute to the broader discussions at Triangle SCI.
  • Alice Fleerackers is an award-winning researcher and freelance health and science writer. She is a researcher at the Scholarly Communications Lab, a director on the board of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada, and a member of the Scientific Committee for the Public Communication of Science and Technology Network. She holds a master’s degree in publishing, a bachelor’s degree in psychology and English literature, and is pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD on science and health journalism at Simon Fraser University, Canada. As part of the team, she will contribute insights from more than three years of research into journalists’ use of preprints. More broadly, she will inform conversations at SCI about (public) trust in science by sharing knowledge of the norms, practices, challenges, and impacts of science journalism drawn from both professional and scholarly experience.
  • Luisa Massarani is a science journalist with a PhD in science communication and has published several scientific articles and books in this specialty. She has been SciDev.Net’s regional coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean since 2003. As such, she is responsible for managing the independent collaborators of SciDev.Net and other key people and organizations in the region, as well as writing articles. She also coordinates meetings, workshops and other training events on science and scientific journalism dissemination. As part of the team, she can provide a more international perspective on journalists’ engagement with preprints, drawn from her work at SciDev.Net as well as her recent research into the challenges journalists in different countries and regions faced in covering preprints responsibly and effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic. Massarani is also the coordinator of the Brazilian Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology.
  • Chelsea Ratcliff is an assistant professor of health communication in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Georgia. She is the lead of the Communicating Uncertain Science to the Public (CUSP) Lab. A former journalist, her scholarly interests and research pertain to news media presentation of biomedical research; public understanding of science, especially scientific uncertainty; effects of science communication; and metascience. As part of the team, she can provide evidence-based insights into how members of the public understand preprints and how media coverage of these unreviewed papers can influence their levels of trust in science and journalism. More broadly, her practical and scholarly knowledge of science journalism, health communication, and public responses to scientific uncertainty can inform conversations at Triangle SCI about how to transparently and ethically broker science knowledge to the public.
  • Yao-Hua Law is a freelance science journalist based in Malaysia who covers environment and health. He has written for Science, Science News, The Scientist, BBC Earth, Mosaic, and others. He runs Monsoon, a podcast on science stories in Southeast Asia, and co-founded Macaranga, an environmental journalism portal focused on Malaysia. In addition, since 2021, Yao-Hua has been reporting extensively on forest use in his role as a Pulitzer Center Rainforest Investigations Network Fellow. He’s a winner of a Sigma Data Journalism Award (2023) and One World Media Print Award (2020). He brings his extensive expertise as a journalist, editor, and founder of a media outlet to the project to shed light on the constraints, needs, and norms that shape how, when, and why journalists use (or don’t use) preprints in their coverage.
  • Mario Malički is a postdoctoral research fellow at METRICS, Stanford University, where he is focusing on the meta-research of preprints. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Research Integrity and Peer Review journal (RIPR). His research interests include authorship, peer review, duplicate publications, and publication bias. He obtained an MA in Literature and Medicine at King’s College, London, UK, and a PhD in Medical Ethics from the University of Split’s School of Medicine. As part of the team, he can provide essential background context about evolutions in peer review and preprint publishing, with a focus on the challenges and opportunities preprints offer from a scholarly communications perspective. More broadly, his expertise in research integrity and peer review can inform important conversations at Triangle SCI about the evolving publishing landscape and the implications for trust in science.

References

  • Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. Blackwell.
  • Fleerackers, A., Moorhead, L.L., Maggio, L.A., Fagan, K., & Alperin, J.P. (2022a). Science in motion: A qualitative analysis of journalists’ use and perception of preprints. PLOS ONE, 17(11), e0277769. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277769
  • Fleerackers, A., Riedlinger, M., Moorhead, L., Ahmed, R., & Alperin, J.P. (2022b). Communicating scientific uncertainty in an age of COVID-19: An investigation into the use of preprints by digital media outlets. Health Communication, 37(6), 726–738. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2020.1864892
  • Khamsi, R. (2020). What best practices are you following in covering preprints during the pandemic? [Blog post]. Health Journalism. https://healthjournalism.org/core-topic.php?id=10andpage=sharedwisdom
  • Malički, M., Jeroncic, A., Ter Riet, G., Bouter, L.M., Ioannidis, J.P., Goodman, S.N., & Aalbersberg, I.J. (2020). Preprint servers’ policies, submission requirements, and transparency in reporting and research integrity recommendations. JAMA, 324(18), 1901–1903
  • Massarani, L., & Neves, L.F.F. (2022). Reporting COVID-19 preprints: fast science in newspapers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil. Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, 27: 957–968.
  • Massarani, L., Entradas, M., Neves, L.F.F., & Bauer, M.W. (2021). Global Science Journalism Report 2021 (1st ed.). CABI.
  • Miller, N. (2021). News media outlets vary widely in how they cover preprint studies. The Journalist’s Resource (26 January). https://journalistsresource.org/health/how-media-cover-preprint-studies
  • Nguyen, A., & Tran, M. (2019). Science journalism for development in the Global South: A systematic literature review of issues and challenges. Public Understanding of Science, 28(8), 973–990. DOI: 10.1177/0963662519875447
  • Ratcliff, C. L., Fleerackers, A., Wicke, R., Harvill, B., King, A. J., & Jensen, J. D. (2023). Framing COVID-19 preprint research as uncertain: A mixed-method study of public reactions. Health Communication, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2164954
  • Soderberg, C. K., Errington, T. M., & Nosek, B. A. (2020). Credibility of preprints: an interdisciplinary survey of researchers. Royal Society Open Science, 7(10). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201520
  • Tijdink, J., Malički, M., & Bouter, L. (2020). Are preprints a problem? 5 ways to improve the quality and credibility of preprints. Impact of Social Sciences Blog (23 September). https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/09/23/are-preprints-a-problem-5-ways-to-improve-the-q uality-and-credibility-of-preprints/
  • van Schalkwyk, F. (2019). The amplification of uncertainty: The use of science in the social media by the anti-vaccination movement. In Science Communication in South Africa: Reflections on Current Issues (pp. 170–212). African Minds. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3557217
  • van Schalkwyk, F., & Dudek, J. (2022). Reporting preprints in the media during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public Understanding of Science, 31(5), 608–616. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625221077392
  • van Schalkwyk, F., Dudek, J. & Costas, R. (2020). Communities of shared interests and cognitive bridges: the case of the anti-vaccination movement on Twitter. Scientometrics, 125, 1499–1516. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03551-0
  • Weingart, P., van Schalkwyk, F., & Guenther, L. (2022). Democratic and expert legitimacy: Science, politics and the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Science and Public Policy, 49(3), 499–517. https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scac003

Examples of Guidelines on the Use of Preprints by Journalists

[ Photos by Bank Phrom and Ousa Chea used under Unsplash free license ]