Lynne Bowker
JournalofElectronicPublishingWe at @JEPub are excited to announce the publication of our new special issue on Publishing and Climate Justice, edited by Janneke Adema @openreflections! https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/issue/386/info/ [1/n]
This important collection captures urgent and critical research that starts to outline the challenges the climate emergency poses to the publishing sector. The issue asks: What is the role and responsibility of the publishing industry in tackling climate change? [2/n]
The contributions to this issue all share a desire to further the dialogue about climate (in)justice in scholarly publishing. But they also offer real examples of how scholars, publishers, libraries, universities and infrastructure providers can start to make meaningful change in this context [3/n]
The issue includes the following contributions: [4/n]
Editor Janneke Adema @openreflections opens the issue with ‘Editor’s Gloss. Publishing and Climate Justice: Dialogue and Action,’ in which she outlines the questions the issue asks while introducing the contributions and the ways in which they offer real examples of meaningful change: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7801 [5/n]
In ‘Multilingual Scholarly Publishing and Artificial Intelligence Translation Tools: Weighing Social Justice & Climate Justice’ Lynne Bowker @lynnebowker weighs these tools potential to aid linguistic diversity with their environmental harm & (non)human costs: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7100 [6/n]
Multilingual Scholarly Publishing and Artificial Intelligence Translation Tools: Weighing Social Justice and Climate Justice
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.
Janneke Adema @openreflections argues in ‘Strategies for Climate Justice in the Academic Publishing Industry: From Pledges to Direct Action’ that the industry needs stronger commitments & climate governance (including legislation & penalties) that go beyond self-regulatory frameworks: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7096 [7/n]
Strategies for Climate Justice in the Academic Publishing Industry: From Pledges to Direct Action
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.
Angus Lyall, Mark Ortiz & Emily Billo’s 'Greenwashing at Elsevier: A Political Ecology of Corporate Publishing' republished from @jpoliticalecology.bsky.social details greenwashing rituals at Elsevier as form of corporate labor governance to immobilize climate activism https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7482 (republished from the Journal of Political Ecology @journalofpoliticalecology) [8/n]
Greenwashing at Elsevier: A political ecology of corporate publishing
The largest science publishing corporations, including Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Sage, are key partners for the oil, gas, and coal industries insofar as they distribute scientific research and data that facilitate fossil fuel exploration, production, and distribution. Critical researchers seldom trace fossil fuels and, in turn, the climate crisis to the publishing corporations that they generally rely upon to distribute their own research. We argue that corporate publishers produce the invisibility of their connections to fossil fuels through changing practices of greenwashing both in the public sphere and within firms. We detail marketing and management practices in the case of the largest science publisher in the world: Elsevier. On the one hand, we examine evolving forms of green marketing. On the other hand, building on recent calls for political ecologies of labor, we highlight the proliferation of 'greenwashing rituals' within the firm – i.e., performative, management-sponsored dialogues and actions regarding climate change. We suggest that researchers continue to expand frameworks for critiquing the fossil fuel industry to include auxiliary industries such as corporate publishing. Les plus grandes sociétés d'édition scientifique, notamment Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer et Sage, sont des partenaires clés des industries du pétrole, du gaz et du charbon dans la mesure où elles diffusent des recherches et des données scientifiques qui facilitent l'exploration, la production et la distribution des combustibles fossiles. Les chercheurs critiques font rarement remonter les combustibles fossiles et, par conséquent, la crise climatique aux sociétés d'édition sur lesquelles ils s'appuient généralement pour distribuer leurs propres recherches. Nous soutenons que les maisons d'édition produisent l'invisibilité de leurs liens avec les combustibles fossiles en changeant les pratiques d'écoblanchiment à la fois dans la sphère publique et au sein des entreprises. Nous détaillons les pratiques de marketing et de gestion dans le cas du plus grand éditeur scientifique au monde: Elsevier. D'une part, nous examinons l'évolution des formes de marketing vert. D'autre part, nous nous appuyons sur les appels récents en faveur d'une écologie politique du travail en soulignant la prolifération des "rituels d'écoblanchiment" au sein de l'entreprise, c'est-à-dire des dialogues et des actions performatifs parrainés par la direction concernant le changement climatique. Nous suggérons aux chercheurs de continuer à élargir les cadres de critique de l'industrie des combustibles fossiles pour y inclure des industries auxiliaires telles que l'édition d'entreprise. Las mayores empresas editoriales científicas, como Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer y Sage, son socios clave de las industrias del petróleo, el gas y el carbón en la medida en que distribuyen investigaciones y datos científicos que facilitan la exploración, producción y distribución de combustibles fósiles. Los investigadores críticos rara vez relacionan los combustibles fósiles y, a su vez, la crisis climática con las empresas editoriales de las que suelen depender para distribuir sus propias investigaciones. Argumentamos que las editoriales corporativas producen la invisibilidad de sus conexiones con los combustibles fósiles a través de prácticas cambiantes de greenwashing tanto en la esfera pública como dentro de las empresas. Detallamos las prácticas de marketing y gestión en el caso de la mayor editorial científica del mundo: Elsevier. Por un lado, examinamos la evolución de las formas de marketing verde. Por otro lado, nos basamos en los recientes llamamientos a favor de las ecologías políticas del trabajo al poner de relieve la proliferación de "rituales de lavado verde" dentro de la empresa, es decir, diálogos y acciones performativos patrocinados por la gerencia en relación con el cambio climático. Sugerimos que los investigadores sigan ampliando los marcos de crítica de la industria de los combustibles fósiles para incluir industrias auxiliares como la editorial corporativa.
Simon Worthington @mrchristian et al., in ‘Climate Justice in Electronic Publishing: Supporting Global South Participation in Climate Science Through Semantic Publishing’ present a model to open up & make the IPCC climate reports more accessible, beyond the constraints of the PDF: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7206 [9/n]
Climate Justice in Electronic Publishing: A New Approach Supporting Global South Participation
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.
Chelsea Miya & Geoffrey Rockwell @geoffreyrockwell argue in ‘Platitudes: The Carbon Weight of the Post-Platform Scholarly Web’ for a minimal computing–inspired approach to web design to push back against the hegemony of big tech & adopt more eco-conscious forms of knowledge production: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7247 [10/n]
Platitudes: The Carbon Weight of the Post-Platform Scholarly Web
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?
In ‘Sustainability and Resilience: A Critical Review of Sustainability Literature & Implications to Resilience of U.S. Academic Libraries, Archives, and Information Systems’ Kaitlyn Rich imagines community-engaged decentralized paths based on academic-archival collabs: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7211 [11/n]
Sustainability and Resilience: A Critical Review of Sustainability Literature and Implications to Resilience of U.S. Academic Libraries, Archives, and Information Systems
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.
Finally, Maddalena Fragnito reviews Anne Baillot’s @anne_baillot book From Handwriting to Footprinting, published by Open Book Publishers @OpenBookPublish in her book review ‘Rethinking Textuality in the Climate Crisis’: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7637 [12/n]
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Anne Baillot@JEPub @OpenBookPublish Thank you very much for this thoughtful review. I had feared that the book would lose relevance after a couple of years. I'm happy to see it's not the case.
@OpenBookPublish @anne_baillot Thanks Anne! We are very happy that we have been able to include a review of your important book in this special issue.