College & Research Libraries News vol. 79, no. 4 (April 2018) C&RL News April 2018 176 In 2016, the Collections Directorate of the MIT Libraries convened a Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (DISJ) Task Force to explore ways to manifest DISJ values in our daily work. Eight staff from archives, technical services, preservation, scholarly communication, and collections strategy focused on this question: How can we operationalize the values of diversity, inclusion, and social justice in our policies, routines, and processes? Inspired by discussions involving every member of the directorate, as well as work done by other libraries and archives, the task force developed more than 40 recommenda- tions in four categories: The Scholarly Pub- lishing and Academic Library Marketplace; Representation of Marginalized Perspectives; Community Inclusion and Outreach; and Building Organizational Infrastructure for Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice. The task force released a preliminary report in November 2016 and the final version in February 2017.1 The report argues that broad, historically rooted, and global forces structure econom- ics, culture, and society, including higher education and the library profession. These forces include neoliberalism, an economic and political ideology that is expressed, in part, in the commercialization of scholarly publishing and in the “increasing reliance by academic libraries on corporate solutions for many of our basic functions.”2 Structures of social power are also at work, including “systems of oppression and privilege that disempower or elevate people according to social and cultural categories such as race, gender, religion, sexual orien- tation, gender expression, class, and ability.” In addition, we are “situated within global structures of power that have their origins in histories of racialized imperialism, war, and economic exploitation.”3 However, our professional values (such as ALA’s Core Values of Librarianship and SAA’s Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics) place us in opposition to these systems. This fundamental argument—that we must apply our professional values to the reality of struc- tural inequity to guide our actions—shaped the report’s recommendations. These recommendations spanned the work of the Collections Directorate, includ- ing perspectives from each department, and a number of them are currently in progress. For example, the Collections Strategy and Assessment team has a project underway to update the GOBI approval plan to more efficiently build inclusive collections. We are also compiling proposals to present to GOBI to facilitate inclusive collection-building across their library customer base (for ex- ample, by adding awards, review sources, and publishers that reflect DISJ values to the book profiling process). A review and revision Michelle Baildon is collections strategist for arts and humanities and science, technology, and society librarian at MIT Libraries, email: baildon@mit.edu © 2018 Michelle Baildon Michelle Baildon Extending the social justice mindset Implications for scholarly communication scholarly communication mailto:baildon%40mit.edu?subject= April 2018 177 C&RL News of collection development policies in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and management to better include works by and about diverse groups and voices will begin later this spring. Understanding scholarly communication through the DISJ lens Below I share reflections about possible im- plications from the antiracist and anticolonial position suggested by the DISJ Task Force Report for scholarly communication discus- sions and initiatives. These are my own re- flections as a task force member and not an official representation of MIT Libraries’ views or policies. Expanding access to consumption and participation The task force embraced the Open Access (OA) movement as social justice work, but also cautioned us to be aware of the limi- tations of OA within our DISJ framework. The report takes note of the “danger of fo- cusing on access but not participation. Our goal should be equitable global scholarly exchange rather than a one-way bestowal of knowledge from the Global North to the Global South.”4 This argues for consistent ap- plication of our critique of power disparities not only to external actors and long-standing professional practices, but also to new solu- tions we devise. The social justice imperative for North American and European OA initiatives is clear: OA is one of our most powerful tools to dismantle a global system of informa- tion privilege. These initiatives liberate the scholarship of Global North institutions for consumption in the Global South. But what about scholarly production? Easier flow of publications from North to South can also, in fact, increase publication opportunities for Global South scholars, simply by making the latest high-profile scholarship available for these scholars’ use. Yet there are limitations to an approach that leaves in place structural power imbalances.5 Dwai Banerjee of MIT’s Program in Sci- ence, Technology, and Society described, in a recent email exchange, the problem of “prestige asymmetry” between North and South. Banerjee observes that many American scholars are aware of scholarship coming from India, “but choose not to use it, be- cause academia does not value scholarship from other places. This plays into citational politics, not out of ignorance of work done elsewhere, but as a matter of academic con- vention.” He sees Global South scholarship being treated as “data” by North American and European researchers rather than a true part of the academic conversation. Entering that conversation requires publication in the “right” (North American or European) journals, which is impossible without access to the most recent scholarship from those same journals. Consumption access can thus translate into participation access by making it easier to gain publication in journals from the North, which then yields recognition in the form of citation by academics in the North.6 This North-to-South flow of scholarship can thus contribute to some subsequent South- to-North flow. The overall effect, however, is not to create a more equitable system, but rather to improve the chances of a Global South scholar participating effectively within a colonized system. April Hathcock writes about the “colonial- ism of scholarly communication,” noting that most conversations about scholarly commu- nication are “centered around, directed by, and saturated in the values and ideals of the white North American and Western European, neoliberal researcher.”7 This colonialism is demonstrated by pressure on Global South researchers to cite North American and Euro- pean rather than local scholars, as well as in- stitutional incentives to publish in high-profile Western journals. Meanwhile, publications by and for the Global South—many of which cover regionally relevant topics neglected else- where—remain undervalued and underused. This problem could, ironically, be exac- erbated by the growth of OA in the Global North. Laura Czernowicz, director of the Uni- versity of Cape Town’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, referring to new C&RL News April 2018 178 OA policies in the UK and EU, argues that the “danger of this more ubiquitous avail- ability is that without similar national and regional policies in the developing world, and without resources being made available to actively support open dissemination in these countries, many types of research from the developing world will be rendered even more invisible.”8 The possibility of decolonization and a healthy global scholarly communica- tion system How, then, to foster a truly global scholarly communication system founded on equi- table knowledge exchange? A possible first step would be to devote more resources to supporting the flow of OA from South to North, in addition to efforts to support OA for our own authors through institutional repositories, publication funds, etc. This might include contributing funding to OA initiatives originating in the Global South, such as SciELO or Redalyc, or contribut- ing to efforts that explore means other than APCs to fund OA publication. Keeping in mind structural barriers to participation in the traditional publishing stream, we might also pay attention to alternative formats. Czernowicz notes that research from the Global South, especially on development issues, can skew towards the (often less- valued) “grey literature” of working pa- pers, technical reports, and policy reports. We must take care to pursue these ven- tures with a spirit of true partnership. As Ha- thcock puts it, “Those of us from the global north need to acknowledge the harm our neoliberal colonizing has done to scholar- ship around the world and take responsibil- ity. Then, we need to step back and listen.”9 As Hathcock suggests elsewhere in her blog post, if we listen, we might find that OA isn’t the only answer for researchers in the Global South. If we intend to support (financially and access-wise) publications by and from the Global South, and if we are vigilant about not imposing our values, we might find that this support most readily consists of subscriptions to paid-access journals, possibly including print publications. Com- prehensive OA for scholarly publications from the Global South might be the ideal, but assuming that achievement of the ideal isn’t imminent, we might consider other means to offer material support for these publications and to make them available to our researchers. One such model is that of African Journals Online (AJOL), which hosts a combination of OA and paid-access jour- nals. AJOL offers libraries a prepaid article download account, the income of which is used in cost-recovery by AJOL and returned to the originating journals.10 Missing voices: Is scholarly communi- cation enough? If we acknowledge, as the DISJ Task Force report suggests, that white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy are pervasive and affect all stages of scholarly and sci- entific production, where does that train of thought take us? Not only librarianship, but also the publishing industry, our vendors, and higher education itself exist in these structures of power that operate both glob- ally, as discussed above, and within North American and European contexts. Because of these inequities, people are squeezed out at every possible point of participation in educational and scholarly communica- tion systems. What about the voices that never even made it into the system? A genuine commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social justice prompts us to seek these missing voices. Disparities in access and representation are still all too common in higher education—in particular in STEM fields—and in the media.11 Some of the voices excluded from science and engi- neering might be found in other disciplines. Those excluded from higher education might be found in fiction, music, or other cultural expression. Those excluded from mainstream commercial cultural expression might be found in self-published or alter- native publications. And some will only be recorded if we seek them out, through oral April 2018 179 C&RL News history, ephemera, or community archiving and post-custodial collections. As libraries increasingly do the necessary work of making our own institutions’ publica- tions open, we should also acknowledge that these institutions are themselves structured by inequity. They exist in a context of global power disparities, and, in the case of elite institutions, have historically reflected privi- lege and oppression. A focus on OA limited to elite research outputs risks reproducing structures of power. Conclusion The approach of the DISJ Task Force Report is to tie top-level concepts and fundamental assumptions to practical, local actions. We intended first to recognize and articulate sys- tems of injustice, and then identify on-the- ground ways to counteract, resist, dismantle, and redress them. Our focus was also hu- man-level—including the current condition of real people (in our workplace and the MIT community)—and not only on abstractions and large-scale systems. If we take this framework of diversity, inclusion, and social justice as our funda- mental approach, what are the implications for how we approach problems in scholarly communication? Fixing the broken scholarly communication system is certainly one aspect. However, the DISJ Task Force framework sug- gests that we take a broad view of (or beyond) scholarly communication in order to include all voices in our collections. If we focus on the needs of real people, right now, we must remain flexible with our proposed solutions. The critical self-reflection of DISJ conscious- ness requires that we keep sight of the role of academic libraries as cultural heritage—and not just scholarly communication—institutions. Notes 1. Michelle Baildon, et al., “Creating a Social Justice Mindset: Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice in the Collections Directorate of the MIT Libraries,” (February 14, 2017) http:// hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108771. 2. Ibid., p. 4. 3. Ibid., p. 5. 4. Ibid., p. 11. 5. The MIT Future of Libraries Task Force Report recognizes the promise of global ac- cess to MIT research for a truly robust ex- change of ideas, including those previously excluded from the conversation due to lack of access. It also acknowledges the risk of paternalism in this approach, recommend- ing sharing not only content, but also tools for collaboration, Institute-Wide Task Force on the Future of Libraries, Preliminary Re- port (October 24, 2016): 11, https://future-of -libraries.mit.edu/. 6. Dwai Banerjee, email message to author, January 31, 2018. 7. April Hathcock, “Making the Local Global: The Colonialism of Scholarly Com- munication,” At the Intersection: Blog About the Intersection of Libraries, Law, Feminism, and Diversity (September 27, 2016), https:// aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2016/09/27 /making-the-local-global-the-colonialism-of -scholarly-communication/. 8. Laura Czernowicz, “Inequitable Power Dynamics of Global Knowledge Produc- tion and Exchange Must Be Confronted Head On,” LSE Impact Blog (April 29, 2013), http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences /2013/04/29/redrawing-the-map-from -access-to-participation/. 9. Hathcock, “Making the Local Global.” 10. “How Librarians Can Use AJOL,” African Journals Online, https://www.ajol.info /index.php/ajol/pages/view/how-librarians -can-use-AJOL, accessed February 26, 2018. 11. Mica Estrada, et al., “Improving Un- derrepresented Minority Student Persistence in STEM,” CBE Life Sciences Education, 15, no. 3, (Fall 2016): 1-10; U.S. Department of Education, Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education: Key Data Highlights Focusing on Race and Ethnicity and Promis- ing Practices, November 2016, www2.ed.gov /rschstat/research/pubs/advancing-diversity -inclusion.pdf. See also Annenberg Inclusion Initiative reports on media representation, http://annenberg.usc.edu/research/aii, ac- cessed March 5, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108771 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108771 https://future-of-libraries.mit.edu/ https://future-of-libraries.mit.edu/ https://aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2016/09/27 /making-the-local-global-the-colonialism-of-scholarl https://aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2016/09/27 /making-the-local-global-the-colonialism-of-scholarl https://aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2016/09/27 /making-the-local-global-the-colonialism-of-scholarl https://aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2016/09/27 /making-the-local-global-the-colonialism-of-scholarl http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/04/29/redrawing-the-map-from-access-to-particip http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/04/29/redrawing-the-map-from-access-to-particip http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/04/29/redrawing-the-map-from-access-to-particip https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajol/pages/view/how-librarians-can-use-AJOL https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajol/pages/view/how-librarians-can-use-AJOL https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajol/pages/view/how-librarians-can-use-AJOL http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/advancing-diversity-inclusion.pdf http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/advancing-diversity-inclusion.pdf http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/advancing-diversity-inclusion.pdf http://annenberg.usc.edu/research/aii