Author: Nora Almeida

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Editor’s Choice: What We Know and What They Know: Scholarly Communication, Usability, and Unusability

This excerpt, from an article by Dylan Burns, originally appeared on the ACRLog

Over the past handful of years, a lot of digital ink has been spilled on library responses to #icanhazpdf, SciHub, and, most recently, the #Twitterlibraryloan movement. This hit home in my life because  in recent discussion with students at my University, we found that students told us outright that they used SciHub because of its ability to “get most things.”

[…]

Faculty are not cynical monsters who actively search for ways to be “anti-library,” but make rational choices that fit what they need. They aren’t very often knowledgeable about the inner working of collection development or the serials crisis but they are knowledgeable about what they need right now in their academic careers.

This brings me back to the issues surrounding SciHub and #Icanhazpdf. The important thing to remember about our users is that they spend much less time than we do worrying about these things. For them, the ease of use of a for-profit profile or a pirated pdf warehouse is an issue of access and not a preference towards profits or not-profits. While each choice we make as actors is political, I do not believe that our faculty who use these platforms are willfully ignorant or disloyal to their institutions, libraries, or librarians. They just want what they want, when they want it.

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The FCC Net Neutrality Rollback and Open Education

Save the Internet Protest in front of White House
Image Credit: Stephen Melkisethian, CC BY-NC 2.0

In the flurry of the news cycle this week, I’ve tried to carve out some time to really understand the impending FCC Net Neutrality rollback and what it means for librarians and social justice advocates. A lot of the reporting on this issue has seized on the potential impact of the ruling on small businesses and a growing controversy over fake public comments. For librarians and activists, the FCC ruling isn’t just another issue that we’ll fume over for a couple of weeks after our efforts (sitting on hold with congressional reps and signing petitions–at least in my case) don’t stop the FCC from gutting the regulations that currently check the power of ISPs.

This ruling has significant (and potentially dire) implications for libraries, universities, and social justice advocates, particularly in relation to the open education movement. This is because FCC rollback will ultimately threaten the “open internet” and undercut core library values that promote open and equal access to information online.

Without an “open internet” the open education movement will be irreparably compromised.

Here’s why:

  • If regulations are rolled back, ISPs may start charging institutions more for content that they host and create like OERs, streaming content, online classes, and locally hosted open access scholarship
  • In a pay-to-play model, institutional and nonprofit publishers and hosting platforms may have to compete with commercial monoliths
  • ISPs may start charging commercial academic publishers more and these costs will likely be passed along to libraries
  • Increased financial burdens on libraries and institutions will worsen information access gaps between larger, well funded institutions and smaller, public institutions
  • The net neutrality rollback will also worsen the digital divide and dis-proportionally disadvantage low income communities and people of color

This FCC ruling would certainly effect CUNY, which has finally made large strides in building university wide OER and Open Scholarship initiatives in spite of budget cuts. I’m not optimistic about congressional intervention but I’m also not willing to accept the rollback sitting down.

What can we do?

Sign (more) petitions!

Call your congressional reps

Attend a protest

Learn more:

A Lump of Coal in the Internet’s Stocking: FCC Poised to Gut Net Neutrality Rules

Keeping up with….Net Neutrality

The Importance of Net Neutrality to Research Libraries in the Digital Age

Net Neutrality Rollback Concerns Colleges

Why #netneutrality Matters to Higher Ed

Here’s Why the Broadband Debate Matters for You

 

 

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Public Scholars Under Attack

At a recent book talk and discussion of public scholarship, the subject of fear came up in relation to the risks of forgoing traditional publishing venues in favor of open access alternatives. Jessie Daniels, a sociologist and expert on race and technology, responded with this reminder:

It’s usually not the thing that you’re afraid of that will get you.

As we delved deeper into the implications (and risks) of public scholarship, it became apparent that the really frightening thing that academics–particularly academics who engage with audiences or form online communities on social media platforms–have to contend with are trolls. I was marginally aware of trolls and even know a few librarians who had been harassed online to the extent that they had quit using social media. However, I was surprised to learn that online trolls who engage in misogyny, threats, and hate-speech are not just rogue individuals with personal vendettas. Trolls operate as part of a “well funded, systematic attack on progressive academic ideals”  and exploit institutional tendencies to distance themselves from controversy. In her article, Faculty Under Attack, Sociologist Abby L. Ferber describes how “the Right [uses] social media to purposefully advance their political agenda” and how strategic attacks on faculty often pay off since a public outcry, even a coordinated one coming from trolls, might put faculty jobs at risk, erode academic freedom, and even implicitly control academic curricula. Despite the increasing prevalence of these coordinated attacks, conversations about trolling haven’t received the attention they should in scholarly literature or institutional environments, likely because the preferred discourse of trolls “is heavily laced with expletives, profanity and explicit imagery of sexual violence: it is calculated to offend, it is often difficult and disturbing to read, and it falls well outside the norms of what is usually considered ‘civil’ academic discourse.”

What, then, should public scholars do to mitigate risks associated with sharing their work?

How should our institutions respond to attacks on members of their faculty?

Abby Farber suggests that faculty should:

  • Talk to local and campus police.
  • Forward threatening messages to police and federal authorities.
  • Save every message.
  • Deny trolls the response they seek.
  • Seek support from their community.

And that institutions should:

  • Be proactive, not reactive. Have a protocol in place.
  • Put safety first. Then ask faculty members what they need.
  • Publicly condemn the form of the attack itself. Support civil dialogue by naming abuse and harassment for what it is.
  • Provide faculty members with resources for help and information about what they might experience next.
  • Honor professors’ wishes about being kept in the loop or not.
  • Do not individualize the problem.

Perhaps the best way to begin is to have conversations with your colleagues, support those who are targeted, and work collectively to raise institutional awareness of this important issue.

Further Reading: 

Campbell, E. (2017, September). ” Apparently Being a Self-Obsessed C** t Is Now Academically Lauded”: Experiencing Twitter Trolling of Autoethnographers. In Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Vol. 18, No. 3).

Daniels, J. (2017, October). “Twitter and White Supremacy, a Love Story.” Dame Magazine. https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/10/19/twitter-and-white-supremacy-love-story

Ferber, A. L. (2017). Faculty Under Attack. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 39, 37-42.

Jane, E. A. (2014). ‘Back to the kitchen, cunt’: speaking the unspeakable about online misogyny. Continuum, 28(4), 558-570.