The anniversary of an academic journal is always an important moment, for the publication itself, for its editorial committee, and for the community of researchers and professionals that has formed around it and that thrives on the texts it publishes. Such a milestone allows us to take a step back and appreciate how much has been achieved, the work that is currently underway, and what remains to be done.
L’anniversaire d’une revue savante est toujours un moment important. D’abord, pour la revue et son comité éditorial, mais aussi pour la communauté scientifique et professionnelle qui est fédérée autour du titre et qui se nourrit de ses contenus. C’est un point d’étape qui permet de faire un pas de côté pour appréhender ce qui a été réalisé, ce qui est en cours de réalisation et ce qui reste toujours à accomplir.
This article argues that the ways in which scholarly electronic publishing is currently carried out is inherently a climate injustice as it unnecessarily hinders participation by people from the Global South in the climate science discourse, which is further exacerbated by the reliance of publishers on PDF-oriented system architectures. We argue that mega-publishers and societies are responsible for the state of electronic publishing and hence for the resulting climate injustice. A new publishing model for electronic publishing is proposed, informed by the semantic web, hypermedia, and the software system designs of earlier technological visionaries who built and promoted global access to knowledge through granular indexing and linking. This new type of publishing remains unsupported in mainstream scholarly publishing, which renders the knowledge it contains almost unnavigable, especially in complex, fast-moving research domains such as climate science. We are members of the #semanticClimate open research group, led by young Indian scientists, and together we are working to implement this new model for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate reports. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) is the most authoritative summation of climate change scientific knowledge and influences the acknowledgment of climate justice globally in policy for addressing climate change. As do other research bodies, the IPCC uses conventional electronic publishing workflows (centered on the PDF), but this holds back its potential wider reach. Our research intends to demonstrate how such reports could be made more accessible. The research we present in this article includes a semi-automated literature search on the topic of “climate justice” and asks the following questions: What does the open access scholarly corpus know about this topic, and what is the shape of the discourse as it exists in this literature? In which papers and journals has the topic appeared, and reaching back several decades, how often have the term and related terms been mentioned? We will also demonstrate the open-source tools that we will use for future work to create the Climate Knowledge Graph (ClimateKG), which aims to make the IPCC report globally accessible. The research presented in this article covers an experiment carried out by the #semanticClimate team, which focused on searching and computationally retrieving the open access scholarly research corpus from Europe PubMed Central (6.9 million open access papers) as well as all 70 chapters of the AR6 held on GitHub as HTML with IDs. The outcome of this experiment is a first-round scoping exercise to create the Climate Justice Dictionary, which represents terms associated with climate justice collected from this open scholarly corpus over 20 years as well as from the IPCC report.
The use of English as a lingua franca for scholarly publishing has created inequities and is leading to a social justice movement to develop a more multilingual scholarly publishing ecosystem. However, implementing multilingualism is complex, and researchers and publishers are investigating the potential of AI translation tools for supporting linguistic diversity. At the same time, the climate justice movement is beginning to reveal some of the environmental and human costs associated with AI tools, which are embedded in an extractivist supply chain. This paper examines the intersection of multilingual scholarly publishing and AI translation tools to consider the benefits and drawbacks of this application of AI through the lenses of social justice and climate justice. Finally, I put forward the position that, in the pursuit of the ideal situation where no language is left behind in the scholarly publishing ecosystem, the climate costs currently outweigh the social benefits.
This article interrogates the environmental consequences of our dependence on platforms, which increasingly includes higher education and the ways in which we share and disseminate scholarly research. We make a case for a minimal computing–inspired, back-to-basics approach to web design as a strategy to push back against the hegemony of big tech and adopt more reflexive, slow, and eco-conscious forms of knowledge production. At the same time, we are open about the trade-offs of deplatforming a scholarly project, using the authors’ experience creating the University of Alberta SpokenWeb website as a case study. The University of Alberta is part of the SpokenWeb Network, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)–funded network that aims, among other things, to showcase local collections of literary sound. The University of Alberta’s own archive, which dates back to 1957, features sound performances, interviews, lectures, and radio shows made by visiting authors and captured on reel-to-reel and cassette tape. When creating the project website, the team wanted to take a more hands-on approach, using a lightweight, static site design, which was inspired by the “needs-based” critical praxis of minimal computing (Risam and Gil 2022, 6). The challenge, as we found, was in how to negotiate sustainability in terms of carbon cost and the long-term maintenance and care of the archival materials, which for us meant finding ways to bridge between our digital project website and the existing University of Alberta library infrastructure. Along these lines, some of the key questions our article engages with are: How do you measure the carbon impact of a digital project? What practical steps can researchers take to design (or redesign) a website to minimize the energy cost? How might moving away from platforms to static sites change the labor distribution, in terms of how sites are maintained, updated, and preserved?
The Books in Browsers conference ran from 2010–2016; JEP published its proceedings in its heyday. In those days -- in the wake of the Kindle's launch and the new EPUB standard -- many of us were hugely enthusiastic about the open field of possibilities; Books in Browsers and JEP reflected much of that enthusiasm. The publishing world, however, unfolded in different ways that we'd imagined.
The essay argues that the study of scholarly communication would benefit from attending to a “modal” sensibility—that is, a self-conscious sensitivity to the differences that different mediums make in understanding published works of scholarship. The essay critiques the unreflective textualism that dominates the conversation on publishing. The claim is that the primacy of text, as the sovereign medium of academic communication, is a largely invisible parochialism. The essay points to examples and traditions of multi-modal publishing as an entry point to taking the medium-specificity of publishing formats as an object of analysis. Such experimentation has followed, sometimes closely, the emergence of new mediums of storage and transmission within the societies that scholars work. The mid-twentieth century birth of the modern medium concept made multi-modality a conceivable, self-conscious project. Even so, the discourse on academic publishing has rarely registered the implications, including for inherited text-based formats. The essay concludes with a call for media scholars, curiously underrepresented in the discourse, to take up this task, with reference to pioneering works in the field.
This article outlines strategies for climate justice as employed by various actors involved in academic knowledge production, from the climate pledges made by publishing conglomerates to the direct actions of science advocacy groups. Taking inspiration from the climate activism tactics used within literary publishing by the campaign group Fossil Free Books, which explicitly positions authors as workers in the publishing industry, this article makes a plea for scholars to similarly position themselves more clearly as workers in the academic publishing industry. The article contends that acknowledging how scholars and their labor are materially embedded in and shaped by systems of knowledge production, and hence recognizing the leverage they have to argue for and demand a more ecologically sustainable publishing system, can benefit their climate justice organizing. I further support this argument by making connections to recent research on ecological governance and knowledge production, especially to theories and theorists arguing for the importance of seeing climate justice principles and practices as integrally connected to issues of labor and social justice in publishing. Based on this, I put forward and discuss various (speculative) strategies focused on reframing ecological governance in knowledge production (ranging from degrowth and the redistribution of wealth under conditions of structural inequity to slow science and situated openness) and explore the potential of disruptive actions and alternative publishing models to re-politicize technocratic approaches to environmental governance in the publishing industry.
The field of Library and Information Science (LIS) is one often associated with sustainability. Sustainability is inherent and embedded in the guiding values of library information science, education, praxis, and theory, as well as two of its main sub-disciplines of human information behavior (HIB) and information communication technology (ICT) systems. Both HIB and ICT are designed with the goal of sustaining information and data access into the future. However, this sustainability traditionally forefronts sustaining material and property into the future versus sustaining the future of the environment: both in terms of the natural environment and natural resource use, but also the social environment of people employed within institutional library environments or for sustaining the resilience and agency of communities neighboring academic institutions and their climate justice efforts. This conceptual paper reviews the existing literature on economic, social, and environmental sustainability in the LIS field and examines the scholarly conversation concerning critical university studies and environmental sustainability in academic libraries and academic information production infrastructures. Using existing LIS environmental sustainability literature and triple bottom line theory as a framework, this article then suggests potential new considerations for expanding United States academic libraries' sustainability in ICT and HIB practices beyond calculating energy use and building emissions. Lastly, this review ends by highlighting case studies and future research opportunities that offer new perspectives on sustainability in academic libraries and theorizes that by first acknowledging that the colonial capitalist neo-liberal forces accelerating the climate crisis are the same forces that underpin and drive U.S. universities' knowledge production and by extension academic libraries, and in facing those implications, we can then begin to imagine more resilient paths forward.
A century ago, Walter Benjamin defined the mode of production of scholarly books as “an outdated mediation between two different filing systems”—the card index of the researcher who wrote it and that of the scholar studying it. The discursive mediation of the codex, in his opinion, no longer created any significant value, “for everything that matters” can be found in the author’s research archive. I explore the implications of this statement through the practices of the fragment in modernity, among which the research archives and notebooks of Benjamin, Giacomo Leopardi, Paul Valéry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Joubert, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis, and suggest that the hermeneutic project of the fragment genre could constructively inform recent initiatives towards processual, slow, and reproducible scholarship, as well as the design of digital editing and authoring workspaces. I juxtapose the compositional processes and editorial challenges of the selected fragment collections and explore their exigency for a digital publication platform that would empower their ethical epistemology, activate their relational networks, articulate their processual form, and support their aspiration towards collaborative knowledge-making. I propose that the design of such digital workspace should not only afford access to the contents of these intellectual projects but also enable the performative engagement with their methodology. The dialectical reception between the epistemic practices of the fragment genre and the theoretical visions for the future of the academic book holds promise for engendering multimodal, process-oriented, performative, and collaborative scholarly discourse.
