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

Inequalities in Publishing

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Microagressions: Small Actions that are a Big Deal

“Microaggressions” refer to those brief occurrences and encounters that subtly reinforce systems of power and privilege. Libraries and information organizations are not immune to these microaggressions. They exist in our library catalogues, archives, research, professional organizations and interpersonal interactions. The authors explore biases in librarianship, particularly in bibliographic metadata, then present tools to engage librarians as well as faculty and graduate students

Agents of Diversity and Social Justice: Librarians and Scholarly Communication

This chapter considers diversity broadly to mean a variety of perspectives, whether grounded in race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic status, or disciplinary study. It begins with a description of the current environment of scholarly communication, looking at the demographics and state of affairs in academia, publishing, and librarianship, including how biases present in all three fields affect scholarly communication. It then moves to a consideration of how librarians and library publishing programs can transform scholarly communication. By adopting a social justice perspective--actively working against ignorance and indifference to reduce systematic biases and injustice in academia, publishing, and librarianship- academic libraries can make their collections and products more reflective of the breadth of knowledge and experiences found in society and make their processes more welcoming to a diversity of participants

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

A Holistic Approach for Inclusive Librarianship: Decentering Whiteness in Our Profession

This paper traces the published literature on whiteness in libraries, identifying major themes in that literature, and then highlights the importance of decentering whiteness for moving the information professions forward. Engaging a dialogic ethnographic methodology, this paper was borne of conversations between librarians of color who worked in the same predominantly white library. The salient themes from those dialogues were the many ways that adherence to whiteness in libraries has had deleterious affective and career implications for librarians of color. The authors argue that to decenter whiteness in libraries and other information centers, it is crucial to center the experiences and well-being of librarians of color; diversify the ranks of librarians through bold initiatives, significantly increasing the numbers of librarians of color; and make large-scale incisive structural change at organizational levels. The paper concludes with an invitation for all information professionals to participate in inclusiveness initiatives by moving from microaggressions to microaffections

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