Towards Curing the Predatory Publishing Malady in the South: Community of Practice Approach to Developing Local Strategies and Toolkits

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

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This project will examine predatory publishing practices in the global south, exploring how to mobilize community led strategies that center on locally generated ideas/knowledges, and knowledge sharing strategies designed to curb predatory publishing and enhance ethical and regionally relevant scholarly communications practices.

An international consensus definition of predatory journals and publishers is that “Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices” (1). According to the report from Inter Academy Partnership (IAP), predatory academic journals and conferences are motivated by profit rather than scholarship, soliciting articles and abstracts that prey on researchers’ desire to publish and present their work (2). The notable features of predatory publishing practices according to the report include rapid pay-to-publish or pay-to-present models without rigorous peer review, fake editorial boards, fraudulent impact factors, and aggressive spam invitations soliciting articles and abstracts, including outside of a researcher’s own expertise.

Despite the huge global interest in predatory or unethical publishing practices, predatory publishing has reached alarming levels in the global south as the number of predatory journals and publishers is growing at an accelerated rate. Consequently, researchers, especially early career and students continue to fall prey of predatory publishers with the attendant repercussion on loss of good scholarship in some instances by unsuspecting authors (3) or rather proliferation of bad scholarship in other cases thereby corrupting the scholarly communication landscape with unverifiable literature (4). The reason for this may be related to lack of awareness of the issue by young scholars. Alternatively, the controversial nature of the predatory publishing concept itself may generate apathy from stakeholders in the global south who are aggrieved for being on the receiving end of a global north-led label.

This controversy notwithstanding, predatory, or unethical publishing practices do exist, and varying measures have been proposed to eradicate them. IAP stated three drivers of predatory practices which are (a) the monetisation and commercialization of academic research output (b) research assessment/evaluation and (c) challenges and deficiencies in the peer-review system (2).

While numerous strategies have been proposed to address these factors, such as checklists and decision tree approaches like ‘Think.Check.Submit’ and ‘Think.Check.Attend’, questions remain whether these recommendations and campaigns are enough for research communities to overcome these practices. Are the researchers aware and following these platforms? Are predatory publishing and measures to curb them share the same level of perception in the global south as in the north? In these circumstances, research institutions, and tertiary education institutions in the global south need to develop their own community- led strategies to avoid predatory publishing practices.

Illustration of stacked books with one open and illuminated by a starBy engaging with community led strategies and initiatives we aim to end the barrier that has sidelined the global south’s scholarship to the periphery of global scholarship. We will work on a prototype CoP design that will address predatory publishing by utilizing and mobilizing locally generated ideas/knowledge. The strength of a CoP model is that it integrates social learning, knowledge sharing, and stakeholder needs and values to meaningfully enhance complex problem solving. Our work at Triangle will focus on three thematic areas of a CoP development:

  • Discover: Consolidate best practices and develop a forum for the exchange of information and best practice in ethical scholarly publishing and anti-predatory publishing.
  • Demonstrate: Support the adaptation of internationally recommended approaches such as the Think.Check.Submit and other principles, regulations or policies through the creation and support of a collaborative space such as Slack, Weblog, Google group/drive.
  • Mobilise: Through peer-to-peer physical/virtual mentoring programs and training sessions promote the discovery and adoption of practices/toolkits/knowledgebase to avoid predatory publishing practices.

Team Engagement and Output Plan

Our international team is uniquely composed to undertake this project and includes expert practitioners variously positioned throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem, including researchers, scholars, librarians and experts in stakeholder engagement and community of practice development. The team’s participation will result in an actionable research and implementation agenda to address predatory publishing in the global south, as well as potential stakeholders to help refine, develop, and implement the agenda as part of the inquiry central to the community of practice model. This includes identifying best practices, the research areas needed to flesh out the benefits, costs, and opportunities of successfully addressing predatory publishing, factors such as researchers’ needs, and obstacles to successful adoption of existing initiatives to address the problem.

Outcomes of this work will contribute in important ways to existing global strategies that often overlook the perspectives of local researchers in the global south. The major deliverable of our work at Triangle will be recommendations supporting the development of a continuously evolving CoP. This includes a proposed plan for regional CoP, and recommendations for developing a topical and regionally specific knowledge base, and suggestions for developing toolkits, local resource hubs, and other knowledge sharing formats, to enhance stakeholder learning and action to address predatory publishing and disseminate ethical practices in scholarly communications.

After the institute these recommendations will be further developed and shared as part of the design strategy supporting the ‘discover,’ ‘document,’ ‘mobilise’ work of community building, and to ultimately inform the development of local toolkits. Development and dissemination of institute outcomes will further support the iterative development of these materials with CoP stakeholders and is a necessary step in producing locally relevant and meaningful materials supportive of community building.  We will employ a broad approach to share the outcomes of our participation leveraging both offline and online platforms, sharing our work in related conferences or seminars, and through the design and organization of community building activities related to the development of the community of practice. Team members’ personal blogs/websites will be used to share with the international and regional communities we belong to, venues such as the Scholarly Kitchen, as well as peer-reviewed venues to report our project and its progress.

Our Team

Idowu Adegbilero-Iwari (Nigeria) is the first scholarly communications librarian in Nigeria with over 12 years of experience in academic librarianship. He is currently the Science/Scholarly Communications Librarian of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria. Idowu is an active member of international and local scholarly communication discussions and projects, including work in FORCE11, a global group of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and research funders, and most recently the Sloan-funded Reimagining Educational Opportunities for Open (REPO), exploring open science virtual training and community development in response to the COVID-19 public health crisis… He is also an active contributor to the FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI) where he has participated as both a student and facilitator. Regionally, Idowu is a member of the LIBSENSE group that is facilitating research and discussion on the adoption of Open science in Africa. He participates in its Infrastructure, Policy, and Training Working Groups. He also participates in the Eko Konnect project, a leading Nigeria national research and education network that is driving the adoption of open science in Nigeria. The team will benefit from his current research on predatory publishing and his general experiences in scholarly communication issues especially in the region under focus.

Dan Paul O’Donnell (Canada) is a Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge. He has nearly twenty years in establishing and leading community-based approaches to problems in research and teaching. He was the founding chair of the Force11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI, 2017-) and founding chair or director of the Communities of Practice Digital Medievalist (SSHRC-funded, 2004-), Global Outlook: Digital Humanities (SSHRC, 2012-), Reimagining Educational Opportunities for Open (Sloan, 2020-2021), and Humanities Data Inquiry (SSHRC, 2021-). For several years he has been active in working on projects that bridge network gaps among researchers in the Global South and North, including GO: DH, the Lagos Summer School in Digital Humanities, and co-presenter (under the leadership of Barbara Bordalejo) of workshops on implicit bias and EDI at the Digital Humanities conference (2016- ). He will bring to the institute his cross-border experiences and especially his community-building expertise to bear on the team with useful contributions of northern perspectives as well.

Basiru Adetomiwa (Nigeria) is a Certified Librarian of Nigeria (CLN) and a Member of the Nigerian Library Association (NLA), and currently Head of the Circulation Services, Redeemers University Library. A seasoned Librarian, he has many years of experience in library automation, reference source and services and acquisition of library resources. His innovativeness and professional proficiency have helped modernise the Redeemer’s University Library services. He has trained more than forty libraries in library automation and digitization, developed, and implemented innovative professional services at the Redeemer’s University Library, and published broadly in high impact local and international formats. Dr Adetomiwa is passionate about open access, technologies in the library and the modernisation of the library environment. Adetomiwa is a 2019 Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Fellow, IFLA ARL Attendance grant winner from Africa 2019, 2018 Young Investigators Award Recipient, Seattle, USA. FORCE16 fellow and recipient of the 2015 Northwest Interlibrary Loan (NWILL) Scholarship award. The institute and the team will benefit from his experiences with scholarly communication issues and technologies plus his ongoing research in predatory publishing.

Shaharima Parvin (Bangladesh) is Assistant Librarian at East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh with more than 10 years’ experience in information science and library management. Her current role includes managing the acquisitions life cycle of electronic resources including subscriptions, access, troubleshooting, usage analysis, and budgeting. She obtained a BA and MA in Information Science and Library Management from University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Shaharima is an independent researcher with interests in Open Access, Open Education, Creative Commons, the Open Science Framework and Open Data. She has held numerous diverse positions including SIG-USE Recruitment/Membership Officer of Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), Country Ambassador of The Center for Open Science, USA, Country Ambassador of CORE, UK, and Country Ambassador of International Librarians Network (ILN). She is enthusiastic about travel, reading and writing. She loves working with diverse groups of people and appreciates taking on new challenges and exploring unique experiences such as would be provided by this work. Shaharima brings tremendous contextual perspectives from Asia to the group and the institute.

Samir Hachani (Algeria) is a Professor of Library Science at the School of Library and Information Science, Algiers University 2.  He holds a PhD from Algiers University 2 and a MSLS from University of Southern California. A specialist on scholarly communication and open access in the global south, his work actively addresses issues related to peer review, and the influence of open access on the peer review process. He has extensively published on issues related to open access and the global south such as digital divide, and disseminated this work broadly at conferences, and as an instructor at the Force11 Scholarly Communications institute (FSCI). Samir is a member of the editorial Board of The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (Iowa State University Press) and an associate member of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Dr. Hachani adds a Middle Eastern perspective to the work of the team at Triangle, drawing on his extensive research and experience in the region’s scholarly communication landscape.

Nathan D. Woods (Canada & U.S.A) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Lethbridge where he is currently studying research data infrastructures in the humanities and heritage sectors. He is an anthropologist and information scientist whose interdisciplinary work focuses on the intersection of research and practice on issues related to the production, dissemination, use, and stewardship of science, scholarship, and the cultural record. This work contributes to conversations in scholarly communications in multiple ways, including previous experience working with diverse stakeholders to address the continued citation of retracted research. His larger research agenda considers the complex and dynamic socio-technical relationships between knowledge, the design of institutions, and the organization of expert work. Ongoing projects explore the changing organization of scholarship; the science-policy interface; and the democratization of knowledge production. Dr. Woods specializes in the study, design and development communities of practice and will bring this perspective to the Triangle Institute, along with his knowledge of participatory design processes, and experience mapping stakeholder issues in the scholarly communications ecosystem.

References

  1. Grudniewicz A, Moher D, Cobey KD, Bryson GL, Cukier S, Allen K, et al. Predatory journals: no definition, no defence. Nat 2021 5767786 [Internet]. 2019 Dec 11 [cited 2022 Apr 29];576(7786):210–2. Available from: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03759-y.
  2. IAP. Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences [Internet]. 2021. Available from: https://www.interacademies.org/publication/predatory-practices-report-English.
  3. Xia J, Harmon JL, Connolly KG, Donnelly RM, Anderson MR, Howard HA. Who publishes in “predatory” journals? J Assoc Inf Sci Technol. 2015;66(7):1406–17.
  4. Laine C, Winker MA. Identifying predatory or pseudo-journals. Biochem Medica. 2017;27(2):285–91.

[ Images by Lucas George Wendt and 愚木混株 cdd20 used under Unsplash Free License ]

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.

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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 ]