Scholarly Communication and Diversity

An overview of diversity issues in scholarly communications, this presentation looks at scholarly publishing at the intersection of academia, publishing, and librarianship and explores gatekeepers that prohibit a diversity of voices from being included in the scholarly record

Scholarly Publishing Education for Academic Authors: Reframing the Library’s Instruction Role

Scholarly publishing has made great strides in fulfilling the vision of open access, with more journals and papers now freely available to read and reference on the Internet. Yet that achievement falls short of a truly global open, trusted, and reuseable scholarly record. What are the next steps in openness and the pain points in providing completely open scholarship? Education about the publishing process is still developing, particularly when the publishing infrastructure includes the same colonial systems and biases in academic research and publishing that persist throughout academia. These biases influence what gets published, who gets tenure, what research gets funded, and what scholarship and knowledge is prioritized in the world. The University of San Francisco has an explicitly social justice mission, and addresses its scholarly communication efforts directly at the intersection of social justice and scholarly communication. To address this intersection, librarians can work to help researchers build new competencies to understand and evaluate the diversity of innovative authoring and publishing choices and requirements; choose those that best meet their needs; and implement the changes required in other parts of their work. At Caltech, efforts are made to make research more transparent, reusable, and repeatable through the Author Carpentry program, a campus researcher training initiative focusing on 21st century authoring and publishing skills, practices and tools. Adapted from the highly successful and globally-engaging Software and Data Carpentry researcher training program, Author Carpentry develops, maintains, and delivers high-quality lessons and training sessions for researchers that offer high impact, interactive learning opportunities for researchers at all career stages

Opening talk: What is access? Thinking beyond online availability to a more just scholarly communication system

We\u27ve come so far with the open access movement on the institutional, state, federal, and even international level. It\u27s fair to say that the open access movement has in fact changed the landscape of scholarly publishing. But there are also things that haven\u27t changed, and injustices that remain, that we need to consider in how scholarly knowledge is traditionally constructed

Librarian Engagement and Social Justice in Publishing

Countless studies and personal narratives have demonstrated that cultural, racial, and gender bias influence important aspects of academia, including in traditional book and journal publishing. Scholarly communications and LIS publishing can challenge the traditional modes of publishing both in format and content. Presenters will discuss their work in this area, addressing topics like race, culture, sexuality, and gender in formats like print books, online journals, and institutional repositories. Presenters will also talk about how to talk to faculty and graduate students about the entire scholarly communication lifecycle, and how they can intervene to circumvent cultural bias and injustice

Inequalities in Publishing

No abstract

A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Approach to Collection Development in a University Library

University of the Pacific’s objective in a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) audit of library collections was to examine the voices and subjects represented and reveal diversity gaps. During Spring 2021, in collaboration with library employees, eight student interns determined the methodology, assessed print and eBook collections, and provided recommendations on closing identified collection gaps. Initial results from auditing ~4,000 representative titles indicated University of the Pacific\u27s library book collections lack the diversity to adequately reflect racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of students and their expectations for assignments and research. This paper documents the audit process and its impact on collection development decisions and policy

The old and the prudish: an examination of sex, sexuality, and queerness in Library of Congress Classification

Despite the fact that scholarship and knowledge about sex and sexuality have grown enormously in the last century, these topics in the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) schedules have remained stagnant, particularly in the HQ schedule (a classification subclass), entitled “The Family. Marriage. Women.” In this schedule, multiple structural issues in organization and placement of topics demonstrate a deeply sex negative attitude that has seen relatively little change in over a century. This article takes a deep dive into the negative attitudes toward sex and sexuality in the LCC HQ schedule, analyzing the ways in which sex negativity manifests structurally in LCC, and is informed by a thematic review of schedule editions between 1910 and 2020. It turns critical efforts that are traditionally applied to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in critical cataloging literature, to the deeper underlying structure of LCC. Though critiques and shortcomings of both LCC and LCSH on the treatment of LGBTQIA+ topics are well noted in the literature, very few examine the underpinnings of LGBTQIA+ marginalization as informed by sex negativity. This article examines some major issues in the HQ schedule with an eye toward providing a roadmap for future revisions. We aim for readers to realize what it means for structural inequity to exist in LCC, the harm that that structural inequity can impart, and to take a critical eye to the foundational classification used within numerous libraries, beyond the subject headings overlaying and masking that classification