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?
