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The Impact of Externalities: Rethinking Funding, Research Projects, and the Global Body of Knowledge
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The Impact of Externalities: Rethinking Funding, Research Projects, and the Global Body of Knowledge
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Segment:0 .
Good morning, everyone. Last call for a cup of coffee before we get started, we're just a minute or two away. Hang with us. Yeah my gosh. I better be brilliant.
Yeah there you go. OK good morning, everyone. Thank you so much to everyone in the room for joining the SSP fall seminar. New directions in scholarly communications, both in person in the room and online. Shout out to our virtual attendees as well. My name is Leddy Conrad. I am an independent researcher, consultant and Jack of all trades.
I have had the privilege of being the group lead for organizing our new direction seminar this year. So really excited to share with you what we've planned. I do want to let everyone know right up here at the top that we are not going to talk about open access today and we are not going to talk about large language models. Don't laugh. We're not going to talk about peer review and blowing it up and opening it up.
And we're not going to talk about research integrity. We're not going to talk about fraud in research. We're going to talk about all of it. And everything else that may be on your mind. Any area of change or disruption, however minor in the niso plus forum yesterday, we had a couple of folks say that artificial intelligence, quote unquote, could be a paradigm change for our industry.
Some changes could be small. All of these changes are impacting each of us and each of our organizations. So we're here today to talk about those disruptions and how we respond to them, how we cope with them. And yeah, I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on these topics. Before we get started, I've got the usual housekeeping, so bear with me.
I would like to share the land acknowledgment. To start, SSP acknowledges that this event is hosted on the traditional territory of Anacostia an Nacotchtank. Hicks got away. I should have practiced all of these before. Pumunkey peoples our Thanks to the native peoples on whose ancestral lands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native communities who make their homes here today.
May we honor their past and care for this land. A shout out to our incredible volunteers and our organizing committee. Matt cannon. Jane Carvalho. Do Amaral. Jaime Devereaux. John gerstell. Janie Herbert.
Avi Charite. Jordan Schilling. Lillian solonik. Heather Rowland Staines Walker Swain. Simone Taylor. Sophie rice. Jeff Lang. And a huge Thanks to the SSP staff. Melanie, Susan Patton, everybody who has helped make this possible.
We also want to Thank our event sponsors Mercia access innovations, Cadmore media, DCL data conversion laboratory and Silverchair and wily partner solutions. The housekeeping password among various housekeeping items. If you haven't seen on the table should be cards with the Wi-Fi password. That's welcome to net 0% AG is an incredibly green building, as you'll see as you wander the halls.
So net zero is our keyword there. The Twitter hashtag is hash SSP and 2023. That probably works in other platforms of your social choosing as well. Please do remember to silence your devices as a courtesy to our speakers and fellow attendees, and we will have closed captions enabled for all sessions. If you haven't checked it out already. Our meeting app is the Whova app.
Our virtual attendees, of course, we welcome you as well. Thank you for joining us today. Our goal is to host an interactive and engaging event. So please use the window on the right of the video viewer in Whova to chat or to ask questions Among our organizing committee, we have volunteers watching both remotely and in the room to ensure that everything is working as it should. If you can't see or hear, you can't log in.
Please indicate that in the meeting app and we will get to you just as soon as we can. Onsite in room attendees. Please remember that you can also use those features as well on the Whova app. If you'd like to connect with fellow attendees there or enter a question there. If you need technical assistance, anyone needs technical assistance at any time, you can use the Ask the organizers feature under the community board in the Whova app, or you can email us net.org. Recordings of the presentations.
Most presentations. There will be a few snippets that are left out, but recordings of most of the presentations will be posted on the Whova platform within about 24 hours. Once they are posted, they will be available in Whova until the end of December of this year. I also wanted to mention just a bit about SSP. For those who may not be members or who this may be your first meeting.
If so, welcome. SSP is a membership organization that is focused on connecting professionals in our industry to the people, information and professional development resources. You need to succeed in scholarly communications. If you have any questions about membership, there is information about joining at the registration desk or you can go online to SSP net.org for more information.
A couple of notes about SSPs core values. Reminder that we are focused on community adaptability, integrity and inclusivity. And finally, a reminder of our code of conduct. A quick note here on SSPs code of conduct that applies to today's meeting as well as all of our events. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct.
We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. For more information on the SSP code of conduct and how to report a violation, please see the code of conduct tab in whova, which you can find under logistics. I believe it's also on the SSP website. And with that, let me introduce Jenny Herbert, who will be moderating our first session.
Welcome. Thank you. And I'm going to try to not scream at you at 10:00 AM into this microphone. Can I call up the other panelists as well, please. OK good morning.
Thank you so much again for joining us at New directions this year. We're really excited to have all of you. And I don't know how much you read the description of how new directions was laid out this year, but we're doing it in order of the research life cycle. So the session this morning is on the preparation stage. So what kind of research questions are people asking. Where is funding coming from and what are we even calling research.
So the point of this session right now is to really stretch your brains. We'll be talking about Indigenous knowledge with Rachel. Rachel sorry, I'm also a little nervous if I'm being honest. With Rachel pizhma then we'll be talking about research funding with Dr. Susana Ramirez, who's joining us remotely, and then we'll be talking about the politicization of knowledge with Ben Goodrich.
And the purpose here today is to really question what it is that we actually call research and how it is that research is created so that when we're thinking about a second ago, because I muted it as publishers or librarians, as we can think a little bit more critically about what that really means to it seems OK to me. It would not only do I'm going to hand it off to my panelists who have much more interesting things to say than we'll have time for questions at the end.
But I clicked the switch to Zoom and it's working fine that way, so maybe have them switch to Zoom. So Your elevator music.
There you go. Thank you. You're welcome.
Hello, everyone. My name is Rachel pietersma and I'm a journal development specialist at Canadian science publishing. I'm honored to join you today on the lands of Nestor and Scully peoples space in Ottawa, Canada, which is the unceded and traditional territory of the Algonquin, Anishinaabe peoples. And the work I'm going to talk about today has really made me think about my own relationship with the land and the people who were there before me.
So at Canadian science publishing, we publish 22 different science journals. Over the years, we've received an increase in inquiries on or sorry, we've received an increase in submissions with Indigenous led and co-produced work. And with that, there's also been an increase in inquiries on how to respectfully and responsibly report this work in a manuscript. So from that we've started to develop some tools and resources for our authors, as well as hosting a couple of workshops with one of our editors with different Indigenous groups on how we can potentially make the publishing process more inclusive and engaging.
So this morning I'm going to share some of the initial steps we took in order to make our improve our publishing policy. I just wanted to also there's always more that we can do and we'll continue to do as things change and the needs of our authors and communities change. But there's a lot we can do to promote equitable and diverse participation research. One of the biggest things we found from this research is it really takes a lot of time, like way more time than you think.
You need to really build relationships, get to know people, take the time to listen and learn. And of course, there's a lot of diversity both between groups and within groups. So it's really important to be flexible or have some flexibility in your policies to accommodate different needs and preferences. So I hope that the case study I'm going to share this morning leaves you thinking of ways you can make your own policies and practices more inclusive.
So a couple of years ago, we received a request for a more than human entity to be listed as the leading author of a paper submitted to our journal facets. So this was masunoyama, which roughly translates to all my relations in Mi'kmaq. The corresponding author, Karen Beasley, is filling the rationale.
Consistent with Indigenous worldviews. All people, language and knowledge come from the land and are inseparable from the land. In storytelling and story listening, people are just the conduit. We would similarly like to acknowledge and honor the collective source of knowledge. It also helps break down the hierarchies, dichotomies and privilege that are encountered in lead and co-author listings.
So this is a new concept for us and it led to a lot of research and outreach. We did look to see if other publishers had published papers with more than human author in the byline. There were a few at different publishers, but at the time there weren't any policies or notes about the decision to include this more than human author. So we began reaching out to a different scholarly organizations, funding agencies, mostly in Canada, other publishers around the world, but especially Australia and New Zealand, Indigenous organizations.
A lot of researchers, both Indigenous researchers and researchers who have a lot of experience working with Indigenous communities as well as individual consultants. Overall, no one was really aware of any specific guidelines, but they were broadly supportive of including this authorship. Many of the Indigenous scholars we consulted agreed that it made sense in an Indigenous worldview or in an ontology. One said as an Anishinaabe person, it is part of our language way of being and knowing.
For me there is really no separation. If you were to look at the world through an Indigenous lens. Many also agree that there wouldn't be one specific approach. They said we should encourage coauthors to provide information on the land itself and to use Indigenous language to express the territory and explain the meaning. So equipped with this feedback and having published the fastest article listing masunoyama as lead author, we realized we needed to update our authorship policy.
So we want to be respectful of different knowledges and knowledge holders while being transparent about collaboration processes. We realized that we needed to be flexible because a lot of standard academic definitions of authorship don't account for the diverse contributions in community engaged research and research involving Indigenous knowledges. So we did a lot of research into the potential types of authorship we could offer and the metadata behind them.
And then from there we are proud to add a few more inclusive authorship options for policy, including group authorship and more than human authorship. So in the context of Indigenous research or community, engaged research, authors may include a more than human author in the author. Byline if there is evidence that the group they're working with approves of this.
We also require that the authors describe how the more than human contributed to the paper in the actual manuscript itself. And we require that at least one individual author must be named. Who can take responsibility for the work. So previously we didn't allow group authorship, so we added two different group authorship options. Collaborative group authorship and collective group authorship. They're fairly similar, but in collaborative group authorship, the individual member names are actually included in the manuscript and metadata, whereas in collective, the members aren't identified, though some may be included in the acknowledgments if they desire.
So this will be familiar. This is fairly common in medical journals with patient groups and consortia, but we're also seeing a lot with different communities and associations and community groups such as hunters and trappers associations. Another output from this research was our community engaged research guidelines.
So while throughout this research, we found there are a lot of guidelines for how to conduct this type of research. There weren't there was a gap when it came to actually how to report this research in a manuscript. So we want to provide the tools and information for our authors to be inclusive in their manuscripts and also to normalize disclosing this work.
So it becomes more common for other authors to also disclose because it's really important all the relationship building and community building that they do throughout the research process. Many researchers also expressed their gratitude for partners, and they wanted to be able to share their contributions in a meaningful way. So while these guidelines are about transparent reporting, they're also about creating the space to honor the relationships, learning and real world impacts.
We've also developed a few blog series about community engaged research. So a lot of it includes non academic peer review and specific like authorship practices, data sovereignty and data practices. And there's also some case studies and photo diaries, and we'll continue to listen and learn and create new resources as things evolve and the needs of our authors change.
So I hope this encourages you to consider your own policies and norms and think about how you could perhaps be actively excluding people who could otherwise make meaningful contributions. There's always more room for inclusivity and accessibility. And again, publishing is always changing. So your policy right now might look different than a few years and in a few years later.
And I'd like to Thank all of the CSB editors for their input on the guidelines and also throughout the research process, especially Lisa lozito, all the researchers, elders and community members we consulted with and provided feedback, and my Canadian science publishing colleagues, especially Melanie Slavik, for all the endless discussions and support.
Natalie sopinka for crafting the thoughtful blog series and Judy Delaney and Katie Yancey for helping implement the new workflows. So thank you so much. I'm really looking forward to the discussion and of course I'm available by email. If you have other questions or you'd like some links or resources or anything else.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Now we're going to hear from. Great now we're going to hear from Dr. Ramirez. Who is joining us virtually. Hi good morning. I think I'm supposed to share slides, but I can't yet.
There we go. OK great. Good morning. So thank you so much for having me today. I'll be talking about how research funding exacerbates health disparities and what scholarly publishers can do to avoid being part of that system of inequity and. OK can you.
See my slides now. We saw them for a brief instant. I think that they're working on it in our room. If you have them, it might be easier to just do that. I can. I can just tell you to advance the slide.
So I'm on the second slide. But so, so I think that I'm going to stick out like a fish out of water in this meeting. So I want to start by defining health disparity and if you can be on the next slide, please. So there are a lot of different definitions for health disparity, but the one that I'm going to use today comes from the CDC, who defines health disparities as preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or in opportunities to achieve optimal health experienced by socially disadvantaged racial, ethnic and other population groups and communities.
Whoa that's a mouthful. But I did want to get that definition out so we're all on the same page. And if you can move to the next slide, please. This slide shows an example of a health disparity that you're probably familiar with because it's been in the news for the last few years. But you can see that Native Americans have the highest COVID 19 mortality rates in the United states, and that's nearly double the death rate of white Americans.
Once you adjust for the age distribution there, the Indigenous mortality rate is the top yellow bar and then Pacific Islander black and Latino populations also have higher age adjusted mortality rates when compared with white and Asian-Americans. And if you can move to the next slide, please, it's really important to keep in mind that health disparities, as much as we've been hearing about them, and particularly race based disparities, that they're both preventable as we saw in the definition, and that they're the result of social, political and economic structures and systems that affect ethnic and racial minority populations in distinct ways throughout the life course.
And I really want to underscore this, that health disparities are not related to biological differences. Next slide, please. And this is a graphic by the Kaiser Family Foundation that illustrates the ways in which social and economic inequalities drive health disparities. So the columns indicate the category of inequity.
For example, on the far left, you see that inequities in economic stability include employment, income expenses, debt. Et cetera. And running across all of the columns are the distinct are the experiences of racism and discrimination, both as they're experienced personally by members of marginalized groups and built into the policies, laws, systems and structures of society.
Next slide, please. And this slide just is one example of this type of statistics that illustrate the inequities that contribute to health disparities. It really dramatically illustrates the inequities and economic stability that white families, the bar on the left, the blue bar, have nearly double the wealth of all other families of all other ethnic backgrounds combined.
And so that's one of the ways that health disparities are created. So next slide. So I care about health disparities because I think health is a social justice issue. To me, there is no justification for someone dying early because of the color of their skin. But there is research that says even if you don't care about social justice, health disparities matter because they hurt you, too.
And research finds that citizens of societies with greater inequities fare worse overall. And then there are economic consequences that affect everyone in the community. Next slide, please. So I'm going to make a provocative argument that the US National Institutes of Health contributes to health disparities. The NIH has a budget of more than $40 billion.
And as such is the largest single public funder of Biomedical and behavioral research in the entire world. And money equals power. So the work that the NIH funds, the way that it spends our money, is really a statement about priorities. And so I'm going to make the case for this provocative statement through four distinct mechanisms.
Next slide, please. So first, the organizational structure of the NIH itself makes it difficult to obtain funding for primary cause research and buy primary cause. I'm talking about the structures and systems that exist outside of individual human bodies that contribute to poor health and disproportionately affect racial minorities. Next slide, please. So the National Institutes of Health is an umbrella organization encompassing 27 distinct institutes and centers that each have their own specific research agenda.
Most of these institutes and centers focus on either a specific disease like the National Cancer Institute or a body system like the National heart, lung and Blood Institute. So they're all somewhat different, but they're similar in that they're focused on specific diseases or body systems, makes it difficult to get funding for things that affect multiple systems or diseases.
So an obvious example is nutrition. There's no National Institute of food and nutrition, even though we all know that food and nutrition are essential aspects of health. But it's hard to get funding to do nutrition research unless you can articulate a very specific link between a food or a dietary pattern and a disease outcome. And then the Institute that sort of owns that disease has to be interested in the kind of nutrition research that you want to do.
So let's think about neighborhoods, which is slightly less obvious than nutrition. We know that where people live impacts their health. There's studies upon studies that have shown that certain zip codes within the same cities have dramatically different life expectancies. And not surprisingly, these are zip codes where many Black people, immigrants and other marginalized populations live.
So if you're a researcher who's interested in neighborhoods and health, where do you go. There's no Institute of life expectancy, so you have to pick a disease outcome. Or maybe you focus on a particular type of mechanism for how neighborhoods might affect life expectancy, the air quality, for example. But that's a really specific type of hypothesis that you're sort of forced into because of funding.
And that hypothesis might not only be incomplete, but also possibly obscure other factors like redlining that created segregated neighborhoods. And to be clear, this work does get funded to a certain extent, but not nearly as much as is needed. Next slide, please. The second mechanism through which the NIH contributes to health disparities is the funding model.
Next slide, please. In fiscal year 2022, just 10 institutions accounted for 20% of all NIH monies that were awarded. And these are the logos of the top 10 funded institutions. You can see Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, Duke. These are not institutions that are well known for their diverse faculty and student bodies. Next slide, please. And the mechanism through which grants are ranked, through which grant applications get scored and ranked and ultimately funded privileges.
These rich institutions, which makes it easier for them to continue to get a disproportionate share of the funding pie. The specific mechanism is called the facilities and other resources. So there's an opportunity for applicants to describe how their institutional resources are leveraged to support the specific grant. And of course, rich institutions are going to have more resources than less wealthy ones.
Next slide, please. And it's not just that the NIH grants disproportionately go to Rich white institutions. The NIH funding also disproportionately goes to white researchers. White researchers are twice as likely as Black scholars to get major research project funding, a statistic that has held steady for over 20 years.
Next slide, please. And the fact that white scholars are more likely to get funded is true even when it comes to issues of diversity and equity. During the early part of the COVID 19 pandemic, when the disparities became apparent and we were at a time of racial reckoning with police brutality as another epidemic that was recognized, there was a lot of attention paid all of a sudden to health disparities.
And funders, including the NIH, found money for health disparities research which incentivized many white scholars to shift their focus accordingly. Lett and colleagues coined the term health equity tourism, which they define as the practice of investigators without prior experience or commitment to health equity research. Parachuting into the field in response to timely and often temporary increases in public interest and resources.
And this kind of intellectual tourism is highly problematic. Next slide, please. Because though the way that problems and questions are framed really differ based on your positionality. And white researchers frame problems in ways that do not necessarily reflect the needs, the goals, or the perspectives of people from marginalized communities that they propose to study. And I would argue that this misalignment of problems and solutions might happen even when people have the very best of intentions.
And so in the spirit of intellectual humility, to illustrate this issue, I was I'll share a quick personal example of a project that I was involved in. Next slide, please. So you may have heard of the issue of food deserts, which is where it's hard to access healthy food options. Where I live in the Central Valley of California, we have a number of low income, largely Latino, largely immigrant populations who live in areas that are characterized as food deserts.
And when I first got there, I was approached by this very lovely couple that you see in this picture who had an idea for how to solve the problem of food access. They had gotten a donation of a refrigerated semi truck and then they got some seed funding to create a mobile farmer's market. The truck was painted, the intervention was launched and the truck went around and sold produce to food desert communities.
Long story short, it was a huge failure and is not operating any longer. It turns out that the people who live in these food deserts are economically vulnerable. They did not need, nor did they want this kind of access intervention. The physical lack of access to a grocery store was not the problem. It was financial.
There were a host of implementation related challenges that showed the mismatch of cultures. And so the takeaway that I offer you with the humility of saying, this is my project, I don't want to point fingers at other people, but but it's that when we don't engage with the people that we claim we want to help, we end up designing interventions that don't meet the needs of the community and they don't get used.
And then the further danger of this kind of failure is that it ends up providing ammunition for people who would claim that those people just don't want to be healthy. And yet, this kind of project is intuitively appealing, isn't it that is beautiful. And then who can argue with a goal of getting more fresh produce to communities that don't have grocery stores. And so these kinds of interventions are relatively easy to find funding for.
And that's the next argument. Next slide, please. So the third mechanism through which the NIH contributes to disparities is through the type of research that's prepared, the kinds of science that are most likely to be funded by the NIH are not the kinds that are going to dismantle the systems and structures that perpetuate racism and contribute to disparities.
Next slide, please. And what I mean by that is that the kinds of research that are funded are more likely to be centered on individuals either as the source of a problem or the site of an intervention. Next slide, please. And then finally, the politicization of science and the mercy of scientific funding to political whims contributes to health disparities.
Next slide, please. And an example of this for me personally, I've been following for years the development of an NIH Common Core transformational research program to advance health, communication, science and practice. But in June, on the Eve of the release of the formal opportunity announcement, the NIH quietly announced that the initiative would be paused and the official rationale was the need to reconsider the scope and aims and the context of the regulatory and legal landscape around communication platforms.
But reading between the lines and considering the political pressures relating to the study of misinformation and the politicization of the health information environment we've all witnessed over the last few years. And so in light of that political pressure, I consider this pause a serious threat to the integrity of the scientific process. And it's especially worrisome because the impacts that we are seeing of targeted misinformation efforts, which would have been one of the things studied, is greater among populations that experienced disparities.
Next slide, please. If you've stayed with me up until now, you might be thinking, what does any of this have to do with publishing. Well, you can't publish what doesn't get studied, and you can't publish authors whose work doesn't get funded. Next slide, please. So to wrap up on a positive action oriented note, I just want to give you three and I'm a little bit facetious when I say they're easy, but three things that publishers and editors can do.
These suggestions are adapted from Leite and colleagues recommendations to curb health equity tourism. So first, I would say can actively solicit and support work by scholars from underrepresented groups no matter what kind of research they do, does not have to be health equity because people from marginalized groups can be interested in all kinds of things, but it's important to get their voices out.
And second, you can critically evaluate authorship teams and the way that they put together their studies and who was studied and the kind of consent that was provided and how the voices of the people who were studied are represented. And then finally, I suggest that an editor or a peer reviewer be assigned to audit reference lists because citation is an incredibly powerful tool. And making sure that intellectual contributions are properly credited is very important.
And so next slide, please. Thank you so much for having me and I look forward to the discussion. Thank you so much, Dr. Ramirez. Lastly, we're going to hear from Ben Goodrich, who's going to be talking about the politicization of knowledge.
Everyone It's always a challenge, but I'll try to do my best. Good morning. My name is Ben Goodrich. I'm the Associate director of government affairs and public engagement at the American Political Science association.
Can you hear me now. Thank you again. My name is Ben Goodrich. I'm the Associate director for government relations and public engagement at the American Political Science association. And in my role, I follow all things Congress and policy, especially as it pertains to academic freedom, higher education, which definitely will influence decisions around publishing.
And right now, I wanted to talk about one of the biggest issues impacting academic freedom in the United States is this ongoing trend of educational censorship. First the question must be asked what is educational censorship? I define it broadly as a collection of restrictions on topics and content that are allowed to be taught in educational settings such as K through 12 schools, institutions of higher education or other educational settings such as workplace trainings or public libraries.
Why do we care about educational censorship? Well, because in its current iteration, censorship tends to target content that addresses issues around race, racism, gender, sexuality, and American history. Furthermore, efforts to censor education tend to use very broad terms, and they're frequently hard to define bans that include language banning divisive concepts or broad academic terms like critical race theory.
The use of these broad terms tends to hold a very large swath of content, books and journals liable to bans. And of course, there's been a notable increase in educational censorship efforts since about early 2021. And media coverage of this phenomenon is abundant, if I'm sure you've seen in the news and pulled a few quick statistics about this recent rise of educational censorship in this most recent school year, which is 2022 and 2023, there were more than 3,000 individual cases of books being banned across 33 different states in the United States.
For reference, that's about 10 times more than the running average between the years of 2010 to 2019. And furthermore, there have been state laws passed in 17 different states since 2021 that directly ban content in the classroom. Now, here I've included several examples of educational censorship that we've seen implemented in various forms over the past two years.
One of the most common methods is, of course, book bans or policies that restrict access to previously accessible books and materials in school classrooms and libraries. And these decisions are mostly made at the school level. I also include in this bucket a common strategy used to ban books. When is when a formal challenge is presented to a specific book which can instigate the book being pulled from schools during a formal investigation period, regardless of whether or not the book is ultimately deemed appropriate or not for an educational setting.
Another familiar face that we might see is a critical race theory restrictions. You may have heard of this before, which in practice are broad restrictions on discussions in the classroom or the teaching of content that addresses race or racism broadly. Most commonly, these are directed towards K through 12 educational settings. Another similar restriction is something that we call educational gag orders.
Now, these are broadly restrictions on content that are considered too controversial or not age appropriate for classrooms. These are frequently phrased as bans on teachings around sexuality and gender identity. The most famous of one of these restrictions is the Don't Say Gay bill that came out of Florida recently. And some common side effects of these types of censorship include punishments for educators, including laws that threaten jail time or revoking teaching licenses for teachers who teach this content.
There are laws that threaten to defund or even close diversity, equity and inclusion offices, especially in institutions of higher education. And laws that challenge tenured faculty positions by removing some of the guaranteed protections under academic tenure. So now let's break down some of the key players in educational censorship battles. I've broken this down into four buckets politicians, education organizations, community members and advocacy organizations.
Now, between each of these buckets, there is a relation. There are relationships in which they work together and they interact with each other and they have a hand in influencing policy decisions, especially regarding education policy. And one main example is when politicians frequently take feedback from education organizations or community members and advocacy groups in writing education policy.
However, I'd like to highlight the role of advocacy groups in this little ecosystem. As in recent years, they've proven to have an outsized role in influencing the tone of educational censorship, both at the local and at the state level. Most notably, there's been a massive proliferation of advocacy groups that advocate for book bans and other restrictions in classroom content.
The largest of which moms for Liberty. You may have heard of them, has chapters in 44 states, and they tend to be very involved at the school board and school district level in influencing decisions on book bans. Now that we know the key players, let's take a look at what level of legislation has actually gotten passed in the past couple of years during this rise of educational censorship.
I'll briefly touch on federal law, because even though there might be news stories about bills being introduced all the time regarding censorship, none of these bills really have any realistic chance of passing through Congress because of the current partisan balance of powers that we have in Congress. However, this is dependent on this partisan control. So in a future congress, if a party flips the presidency or the senate, there is a change.
And this could be more likely. But for now, we should be OK. Moving on to state law. There have been a handful of states that have implemented statewide legislation restricting education Among them are Texas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Georgia, a handful of others. And a common thread between these states specifically is that they tend to be controlled by the Republican party, usually in a trifecta or a majority at the state level.
And it's states like these that have this trifecta that are more likely to be able to pass statewide censorship bills. Furthermore, when a state law is passed at the state level, local censorship can proliferate in those states that pass statewide censorship legislation. So with that in mind, let's move on to local policies. This typically includes school board decisions or decisions that are made at the school district level.
It also can include municipalities and County County decisions. And this is where, again, as we've said, these kinds of restrictions tend to proliferate in states that have already passed statewide laws and advocacy groups tend to be able to influence these local decisions much more directly. And this is where we've seen the highest success rates of educational censorship is at the school district level.
Now, I wanted to share this map to make a point on where we can expect certain policies to pass in the future. Of course, we've already touched on how there's a tendency for educational censorship to be passed more frequently in Republican trifecta states or Republican majority states. They're more likely to then proliferate to the local level.
However, even though we think of these statewide policies happening in deeply conservative or Republican controlled areas, censorship can and does happen everywhere. Now, I wanted to share this map showing the statewide educational gag order laws in the past two years. And this data comes from pen America, which is an advocacy organization that promotes educational and academic freedom.
The dark red states show where educational guide orders are passed. And I want to map this over very cleanly with the previous slide. You will see that a lot of the dark red states are still dark red states from map to map. Now, I also want to take a deeper look into book ban policies.
And there's a slightly different story being told here. Now, of course, some of the same states that have passed the most book bans are, again, these Republican controlled states Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah. However, I want to point out that many states that engage in book bans are not these trifecta Republican trifecta states Maine, Virginia, Oregon, Pennsylvania and a handful of other states have seen at the district level book bans and other levels of censorship.
And that's despite them being either purple or even Democrat trifecta states. Oregon and Maine right now are Democrat trifecta states. And this is because compared to statewide restrictions, book bans are usually carried out at the school district level, making it easier for them to happen anywhere. So with all of this knowledge, what do we do from here. It's obviously very important for us as members of our own communities to pay attention to state and local laws and to vote for officials that value this access to knowledge and academic freedom.
However, we can't rely our entire strategy against censorship on voting behavior alone. And one strategy that I'll posit to the audience to directly counteract censorship, especially amongst the publishing community, is if you are in a position to do so, to double down on the investment into knowledge that is being targeted. And this can be a few different things.
This can be buying and reading banned books. This can be learning about these divisive concepts that are being targeted in classrooms. This can be amplifying authors and expertise and perspectives that directly discuss race, racism, sexuality and gender identity. These are just a few of the many methods that you can use, and it's important to continue to invest more deeply in the fight against censorship in the United States.
Thank you very much for listening, and I welcome any questions you may have during the Q&A session. Thank you again. Fantastic Thank you so much, Ben. So does anyone have any questions. Can you please go to the microphone. If you do have questions that folks online can hear.
And yeah, you can give me. Thanks, everyone for the talks. I have a question quickly for Ben. I was wondering whether you have any information on how the censorship look in other countries in the world or I don't know how easy actually is to access that type of data. But just curious. Thanks Thanks.
Appreciate the question. And I will say that this presentation was focused on US policies. We could have an hour long presentation on how this looks elsewhere. But I know that there's been an ongoing bout of censorship in Hungary especially, and that's where journals especially have been targeted and universities have been targeted.
I don't know a lot of the specifics about that, but I know that it is happening and it can happen anywhere. Hannah Hekker. Swain with Silverchair. This question is for Dr. Ramirez. Are you seeing any evidence in the private sector funders like the Gates Foundation or Chan Zuckerberg of better trends towards funding health disparities research.
Like anything we can look at as someone doing a better job. That's a really great question, and I'm not really an expert in the funding landscape. I focused on the NIH both because it's the largest and it's the one that I'm most familiar with. But I think that. The caution that I would issue is always to.
It's difficult to say that. The factors that attract researchers to do the work that they do. Gosh, how do I say this. I'm terrible. Not politically savvy. I guess the idea of health equity, tourism that I showed in that article by and colleagues, it's not because people are bad and they want to to, you know, take over and not work with communities and such.
It's because there's a system that incentivizes getting funding to do research. And if the system is funding these things, then you're going to go after that. And if you are embedded within a system where you are in an institution that is already privileged and that has resources and can help you write those grants, and you're more likely to get those right. So it's kind of everything builds on itself.
So it's not that a funder is better at making solicitations for Health Equity Research or such, but rather considering how those things are made and who is making those decisions and what review process is happening and all of that kind of requires. Well, a fair amount of investigation and care.
This is I feel very unsatisfactory answering this. But I think it's a really great question. And I think, you know, what we all can do as peer reviewers, as editors, is to just ask questions like, why did you get this. What is the positionality and what is the relationship of the subjects and how did the questions get answered.
Thank you so much, Dylan. Hi, Rachel. This question is for you. I really appreciated the thoughtful presentation. It's a lot to chew on. And as somebody who's worked on Indigenous related history, really quite, quite interesting takes. My questions are whether or not you've had any significant pushback and if so, from whom, generally speaking, and also how and if you've considered these more than human entities might or might not be capable of being integrated into things like persistent identifiers or other kinds of mechanisms that we use to keep track of research and scholarly outputs.
Thank you for your questions. So in terms of pushback, well, some of our editors were a bit more apprehensive about the idea of including a more than human author in the byline. Because we do have 22 journals and some of them do have already published a lot of Indigenous co-led and co-produced work, whereas others, especially more like the physical science, don't really see this kind of research.
So when we presented this to all the editors, at first they there were a lot who are a bit more skeptical and worried that it would be like a slippery slope but all the potential things we could publish. But we just had a lot of conversations with them about their concerns and we showed a lot of the. We shared a lot from the consultations we had had with different people to help them understand the different perspectives and different ways that this actually helps inform the research.
So I think that made them a lot more comfortable with it. Yeah Additionally, we do own our journal, so ultimately we do have that control there. And also in terms of if editors have any issues, they're of course able to come to us and we can help research with them and have more discussions with them. Other than that, there hadn't been too much pushback. There are definitely some editors who were more excited about this and a lot were kind of in the middle because they just were totally unfamiliar with this.
And then in terms of persistent identifiers, we hadn't done. Too much thought into that. Just you know. Yeah, we haven't really done a lot of research into that. Thank you. Thank you so much. I see someone else as well at the microphone. Hi, I'm Simon Holt and I'm from Elsevier. And so I've got a question for Ben.
Just about the book bans. So thinking about what one thing you mentioned, quite a lot was the K-12 stage. Obviously, we're talking about educational publishing here and it's certainly very common in educational publishing to have different editions of books for different markets around the world, right where you might have cultural sensitivities, religious sensitivities.
And clearly as commercial publishers, part of our job is to try and publish things that won't get banned because we want to sell books. So where do you think the balance lies here between US publishers saying, you know, we're not going to kowtow to non-inclusive behaviors. If you like, but then on the other hand, really kind of having quite a hard commercial head and saying, well, actually whatever our morals, we actually want to sell some books and therefore we need to modify our content accordingly.
It'd be great. You know, obviously I know your work is really about the states, but obviously putting it in context with different value systems, shall we say, belief systems around the world. It would be great if you've got any thoughts on any of that. Thank you. It's a really interesting question. Off the top of my head, I'll just say, in my opinion, having a book that provides educational value is better than not having one at all.
So, of course, if we can get a book in front of communities in these sensitive, as you said, sensitive areas of the world that's better than not at all. I think, you know, as someone who, you know, believes strongly in the idea of academic freedom and the ability of investing into, you know, ideas that might be controversial at times that I think is what I think is a, it's a valuable thing that we need to continue to invest into.
So it's a very complicated and knotty issue. But I would say that doing what you can to make sure that there is a, a book that is of value rather than none at all is the best way forward. Great Thank you so much, Brian. Thanks really great talk. Thinking about integrating policies and where our funding comes from. And there's funding for good research and then there's potentially bad research.
And there's a lot of misinformation. So when we say we want to reduce academic censorship and freedom, how do we also say at the same time that we want to only be teaching valid theories, valid science, we want to reduce misinformation. I'm thinking of people that think gas cars are still better for the environment than electric. I'm thinking about people who believe the Earth is flat. I'm thinking about the anti-vaxxers and just how do we navigate with our policies, with our practices.
And if you have any comment on that, and this is really the whole panel because all of your talks are sort of interrelated, which is great. I guess I'll start off that's a, again, a really interesting question. And I will say that, you know, the idea of education in general, it's to teach some sense of truth, correct that we aren't trying to spread misinformation through education.
And there's systems built in when education and curriculum, especially at the K through 12 level, is being reviewed. And occasionally there's information that is considered out of date. We've found new discoveries in that field. And therefore, you know, removing an outdated book from a library is not censorship. That's just updating the knowledge.
If you put a new book on the shelf that has more up to date information I'm sure there was more that to your question. But that is, at least from my perspective on that. Rachel, do you have anything you'd like to add. Just in terms of our journals, since they are peer reviewed, I think a lot of those findings wouldn't necessarily pass peer review today, though I in the past, like decades ago, we've come like we've come across papers from decades ago where there's some information that is inaccurate or harmful.
And in the cases where the information was harmful, we did retract those papers. Thank you so much. And, Susannah, would you like to add anything. Susannah didn't give her a proper introduction, but she actually studies health communication, so she's particularly well suited to answer a question like this.
Well, Thanks. No, I would add. I would just say that it gets really tricky when there are very clear cases where the science is no longer true. We've shown that is outdated. And so I agree with the other panelists, but I get really. It's a slippery slope, right, to say what is misinformation and what is.
Not what is something that is actually legitimately. You know, there is debate that is legitimate and reasonable people because the science is not there. Reasonable people can disagree. It's not the science is not super clear cut. And so I think we really need to be. I think the danger in opposing in mean.
This is why we needed that NIH common fund research on information and on communication. Because I think that this is like a very essential question of how do we identify what is misinformation and get to some kind of agreement on that and remove that or counter the effects of that, but also respect the freedom, the intellectual freedom for people to uncover ideas that we may not agree with, but we also agree that we don't have the right to censor those ideas right, even though we don't agree with them.
We want them to be out there because we want there to be reasonable debate. I don't think I added anything helpful, but I think these are really good questions to struggle through. I would say that added something very helpful. Thank you so much. I see another question over here. OK hi, I'm Bill Kasdorf.
So we tend to focus on this issue of censorship as primarily, explicitly a local phenomenon. It's mostly happening in at a local level and it's mostly focusing on K through 12 libraries, education, et cetera. But could you comment on the extent to which this is establishing an insidious expectation of censorship that leads to self-censorship, where you don't have know, you know, I'm talking about.
So I guess you get my question. I think I do. One of the most. In other words, it applies to lots of areas where you don't see explicit actions happening, but you do see an effect happening in other realms and other levels of education and public publishing. Absolutely I know I commented a lot on the K through 12 side of things, and this phenomenon is seen among K through 12 teachers who are afraid to teach certain concepts and afraid to talk about American history in a way that is without, you know, flying in the face of some, you know, state law that censors what is allowed to be taught in a classroom.
And I could imagine I haven't seen any data on it, but I could imagine that this sort of phenomenon would extend into community members, parents and family members who might be having discussions about this on their own or with their communities, and it can have a proliferating effect. Again, this is not me citing data by any means, but it is something that we have seen teachers specifically experience.
And I imagine that other members of the community would experience this as well. Can I jump in on this one. So, and I can say as a University professor, that chilling effect is very, very real. And what's happening is we're getting these kids through from K through 12 where they're being shielded from, you know, certain parts of American history, and they get to college.
And we're talking about things that they are not they don't know. They in fact, not only don't know this, but they actively know that we are spewing lies and that we are trying to indoctrinate them. And I say no, but that's how they perceive us. And I sit-in California, so I am, you know, within the University of California system, I get students who have grown up in California and we're somewhat insulated, but not all the way.
We still have local school districts with a lot of censorship. And what is out in the general information environment about what is OK and what is more sensitive. And so there is absolutely a chilling effect that affects. People who are not so institutionally protected. So the adjunct lecturers who are at the whim of the University to be hired for the next semester's class.
And they don't want to get a student who disagrees with them and says that they are being indoctrinated. And so what do they do. They change what they cover. They don't they're really teaching something else at that point. They avoid subjects. And so, yeah, that trickle up effect, I guess, is basically we are seeing it.
For me personally, there are. I have witnessed myself trying to deal with accusations of I'm just indoctrinating people when what I'm teaching is. Here's what people are saying, right. And I teach classes on misinformation and how to identify what is true and what is not true in any mention of a particular media source. Being biased in a particular direction brings accusations of you're trying to indoctrinate me and such.
So yeah, I think it doesn't have to be a formal censorship that there is a lot of. There's a lot of informal, chilling, and that's especially affecting the people who are most vulnerable in the institution of learning. Thank you so much, Heather. I see you with the microphone.
Thanks, Jenny. Heather Staines from Delta. Thank I really appreciated this topic today. I've been thinking about the helicopter and parachute research for a while. Ritchie from AGU did a session at the CSC meeting back in spring, and I've been, you know, trying to feel people out on their thinking. A lot of journals are starting to develop policies and the like, but this question, I guess, is for Susanna and also for Rachel.
Projects take a really long time to work their way through book projects in particular. But these projects are also approved at University level. So to what degree are institutional review boards getting on the same page with some of these practices that are more recognized now as inequitable and then bringing in peer reviewers for things that may also have been underway for a while that might be able to reflect on, OK, we might not do this now, but when this research was started, this was like the situation and just how do you deal with the kind of nuances that come into play over longer term projects.
If that makes sense. Absolutely Rachel, do you want to answer first. Sure Yeah. So we mainly publish the journals and notebooks, so it's a bit shorter, but we've still seen some papers where the research was conducted over a decade ago, or sometimes there's long term studies where the research has been ongoing for several decades.
And in those cases, we just encourage the authors to be. Transparent in how the research was conducted and perhaps maybe reflect on ways that they would approach the work differently if it was done today. And just to really explain, like how they consulted with the communities that they worked with, even if they were late in meeting with them and having those discussions, I think is really important that they go into depth about how they form those relationships and how the research benefited the community and also from the community's perspective to hear what they needed from the research and if their research needs were met.
Fantastic Thank you, Susanna. Yeah I think that the idea of the Institutional Review boards owning some of this responsibility, that is a really good point because that's actually their job, right, is to protect the human participants. So I haven't actually seen this discussed a lot in these conversations. And I think that that's a really important, a really important point that they have to say.
One thing I did want to say about the role of peer reviewers, I think it's really tricky when we're. We need to be careful of the demands that we're putting on people from marginalized communities. So one of the recommendations often is, listen, if really well done work, that takes a long time to do, but is authentically engage and coming from the community, if that isn't getting published because peer reviewers are not seeing the value in it or it's differently done research then.
What we need to do is get peer reviewers who are from these communities themselves and you know, or who are experts in disparities. And that is really good thinking. But I think there's also a lot of inequity kind of that is getting stacked, because if we know that people who are really doing authentic community engaged work and they're doing health equity work with communities, they might be from marginalized communities themselves.
And so they're operating within a system that already places disproportionate burden on them in terms of being a representative of their kind of person on their campus and for their students and in their research. And then to add the burden of peer review, which, you know, is uncompensated labor, but really important, I think that is not, you know, we just need to think about what is it that we're asking certain people to do and they know.
That's not the question that you ask. But I did want to make sure that we acknowledge that. Thank you so much. That might not have been the question that was asked, but I'm going to now ask it. I know that you are one of the editors of the Journal of Health communication, and I'd just love to hear more about what you were just talking about. How do you navigate that as an editor?
Well, I should say I just stepped down for personal reasons from not that position, but that was something that I did feel like I, we talked about it. And one thing that we one easy solution because it doesn't require any money is that we tried to expand the pool of reviewers. So, you know, the people who are really well known get inundated.
But there are a lot of people in the Academy who aren't as well known and who might, you know. So we're spreading the labor across many more people. But we started to talk about things that might happen in the future, which is to actually pay for work, right. So if you're relying on the expertise of reviewers and we recognize that they're already overburdened and that they're likely to continue to get requests because they are the only ones who can give this good feedback, then we pay for the reviews.
But that, you know, is like a whole Pandoras Box. But the answer is we haven't found a satisfactory answer. Just trying a whole bunch of different things. Thank you so much. I think we're coming up at the end of time. So, panelists, I would love it if everyone would just share one thing that they really want people in this room to leave with. I think we're talking to at least 50 people, but think way more.
So if there's something that you want to make sure that people that are listening today think about when they leave, what would it be. Then why don't we start with you. I will just say the importance of advocacy. We've seen how advocates have been able to implement book bans and censorship around the country. This can be done in the opposite direction as well, where we can help prevent book bans with through advocacy.
So if you have some sort of advocacy branch or if you're willing to do some advocacy on your own as a constituent, I highly encourage you to do so. Thank you, Rachel. I would say to be open to. New ideas and consider on an ongoing basis how you can potentially be more inclusive throughout your policies and practices in publishing.
Great Thank you so much. And Susanna. I would say that we should be interrogating all of the research that's presented, not just for the methodological soundness of the conclusions and the way the traditional ways that we think about research being good, but also how it was made. And so to interrogate who made it, how did they get the money to make it, and whose voices are being represented and who gets to actually say what those voices are saying.
Wonderful Thank you so much for all of your time. If you have any interest in following up with any of the panelists, I think that their personal information is shared in the conference slides. And with that, everyone can have a coffee break.
Segment:0 .
Good morning, everyone. Last call for a cup of coffee before we get started, we're just a minute or two away. Hang with us. Yeah my gosh. I better be brilliant.
Yeah there you go. OK good morning, everyone. Thank you so much to everyone in the room for joining the SSP fall seminar. New directions in scholarly communications, both in person in the room and online. Shout out to our virtual attendees as well. My name is Leddy Conrad. I am an independent researcher, consultant and Jack of all trades.
I have had the privilege of being the group lead for organizing our new direction seminar this year. So really excited to share with you what we've planned. I do want to let everyone know right up here at the top that we are not going to talk about open access today and we are not going to talk about large language models. Don't laugh. We're not going to talk about peer review and blowing it up and opening it up.
And we're not going to talk about research integrity. We're not going to talk about fraud in research. We're going to talk about all of it. And everything else that may be on your mind. Any area of change or disruption, however minor in the niso plus forum yesterday, we had a couple of folks say that artificial intelligence, quote unquote, could be a paradigm change for our industry.
Some changes could be small. All of these changes are impacting each of us and each of our organizations. So we're here today to talk about those disruptions and how we respond to them, how we cope with them. And yeah, I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on these topics. Before we get started, I've got the usual housekeeping, so bear with me.
I would like to share the land acknowledgment. To start, SSP acknowledges that this event is hosted on the traditional territory of Anacostia an Nacotchtank. Hicks got away. I should have practiced all of these before. Pumunkey peoples our Thanks to the native peoples on whose ancestral lands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native communities who make their homes here today.
May we honor their past and care for this land. A shout out to our incredible volunteers and our organizing committee. Matt cannon. Jane Carvalho. Do Amaral. Jaime Devereaux. John gerstell. Janie Herbert.
Avi Charite. Jordan Schilling. Lillian solonik. Heather Rowland Staines Walker Swain. Simone Taylor. Sophie rice. Jeff Lang. And a huge Thanks to the SSP staff. Melanie, Susan Patton, everybody who has helped make this possible.
We also want to Thank our event sponsors Mercia access innovations, Cadmore media, DCL data conversion laboratory and Silverchair and wily partner solutions. The housekeeping password among various housekeeping items. If you haven't seen on the table should be cards with the Wi-Fi password. That's welcome to net 0% AG is an incredibly green building, as you'll see as you wander the halls.
So net zero is our keyword there. The Twitter hashtag is hash SSP and 2023. That probably works in other platforms of your social choosing as well. Please do remember to silence your devices as a courtesy to our speakers and fellow attendees, and we will have closed captions enabled for all sessions. If you haven't checked it out already. Our meeting app is the Whova app.
Our virtual attendees, of course, we welcome you as well. Thank you for joining us today. Our goal is to host an interactive and engaging event. So please use the window on the right of the video viewer in Whova to chat or to ask questions Among our organizing committee, we have volunteers watching both remotely and in the room to ensure that everything is working as it should. If you can't see or hear, you can't log in.
Please indicate that in the meeting app and we will get to you just as soon as we can. Onsite in room attendees. Please remember that you can also use those features as well on the Whova app. If you'd like to connect with fellow attendees there or enter a question there. If you need technical assistance, anyone needs technical assistance at any time, you can use the Ask the organizers feature under the community board in the Whova app, or you can email us net.org. Recordings of the presentations.
Most presentations. There will be a few snippets that are left out, but recordings of most of the presentations will be posted on the Whova platform within about 24 hours. Once they are posted, they will be available in Whova until the end of December of this year. I also wanted to mention just a bit about SSP. For those who may not be members or who this may be your first meeting.
If so, welcome. SSP is a membership organization that is focused on connecting professionals in our industry to the people, information and professional development resources. You need to succeed in scholarly communications. If you have any questions about membership, there is information about joining at the registration desk or you can go online to SSP net.org for more information.
A couple of notes about SSPs core values. Reminder that we are focused on community adaptability, integrity and inclusivity. And finally, a reminder of our code of conduct. A quick note here on SSPs code of conduct that applies to today's meeting as well as all of our events. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct.
We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. For more information on the SSP code of conduct and how to report a violation, please see the code of conduct tab in whova, which you can find under logistics. I believe it's also on the SSP website. And with that, let me introduce Jenny Herbert, who will be moderating our first session.
Welcome. Thank you. And I'm going to try to not scream at you at 10:00 AM into this microphone. Can I call up the other panelists as well, please. OK good morning.
Thank you so much again for joining us at New directions this year. We're really excited to have all of you. And I don't know how much you read the description of how new directions was laid out this year, but we're doing it in order of the research life cycle. So the session this morning is on the preparation stage. So what kind of research questions are people asking. Where is funding coming from and what are we even calling research.
So the point of this session right now is to really stretch your brains. We'll be talking about Indigenous knowledge with Rachel. Rachel sorry, I'm also a little nervous if I'm being honest. With Rachel pizhma then we'll be talking about research funding with Dr. Susana Ramirez, who's joining us remotely, and then we'll be talking about the politicization of knowledge with Ben Goodrich.
And the purpose here today is to really question what it is that we actually call research and how it is that research is created so that when we're thinking about a second ago, because I muted it as publishers or librarians, as we can think a little bit more critically about what that really means to it seems OK to me. It would not only do I'm going to hand it off to my panelists who have much more interesting things to say than we'll have time for questions at the end.
But I clicked the switch to Zoom and it's working fine that way, so maybe have them switch to Zoom. So Your elevator music.
There you go. Thank you. You're welcome.
Hello, everyone. My name is Rachel pietersma and I'm a journal development specialist at Canadian science publishing. I'm honored to join you today on the lands of Nestor and Scully peoples space in Ottawa, Canada, which is the unceded and traditional territory of the Algonquin, Anishinaabe peoples. And the work I'm going to talk about today has really made me think about my own relationship with the land and the people who were there before me.
So at Canadian science publishing, we publish 22 different science journals. Over the years, we've received an increase in inquiries on or sorry, we've received an increase in submissions with Indigenous led and co-produced work. And with that, there's also been an increase in inquiries on how to respectfully and responsibly report this work in a manuscript. So from that we've started to develop some tools and resources for our authors, as well as hosting a couple of workshops with one of our editors with different Indigenous groups on how we can potentially make the publishing process more inclusive and engaging.
So this morning I'm going to share some of the initial steps we took in order to make our improve our publishing policy. I just wanted to also there's always more that we can do and we'll continue to do as things change and the needs of our authors and communities change. But there's a lot we can do to promote equitable and diverse participation research. One of the biggest things we found from this research is it really takes a lot of time, like way more time than you think.
You need to really build relationships, get to know people, take the time to listen and learn. And of course, there's a lot of diversity both between groups and within groups. So it's really important to be flexible or have some flexibility in your policies to accommodate different needs and preferences. So I hope that the case study I'm going to share this morning leaves you thinking of ways you can make your own policies and practices more inclusive.
So a couple of years ago, we received a request for a more than human entity to be listed as the leading author of a paper submitted to our journal facets. So this was masunoyama, which roughly translates to all my relations in Mi'kmaq. The corresponding author, Karen Beasley, is filling the rationale.
Consistent with Indigenous worldviews. All people, language and knowledge come from the land and are inseparable from the land. In storytelling and story listening, people are just the conduit. We would similarly like to acknowledge and honor the collective source of knowledge. It also helps break down the hierarchies, dichotomies and privilege that are encountered in lead and co-author listings.
So this is a new concept for us and it led to a lot of research and outreach. We did look to see if other publishers had published papers with more than human author in the byline. There were a few at different publishers, but at the time there weren't any policies or notes about the decision to include this more than human author. So we began reaching out to a different scholarly organizations, funding agencies, mostly in Canada, other publishers around the world, but especially Australia and New Zealand, Indigenous organizations.
A lot of researchers, both Indigenous researchers and researchers who have a lot of experience working with Indigenous communities as well as individual consultants. Overall, no one was really aware of any specific guidelines, but they were broadly supportive of including this authorship. Many of the Indigenous scholars we consulted agreed that it made sense in an Indigenous worldview or in an ontology. One said as an Anishinaabe person, it is part of our language way of being and knowing.
For me there is really no separation. If you were to look at the world through an Indigenous lens. Many also agree that there wouldn't be one specific approach. They said we should encourage coauthors to provide information on the land itself and to use Indigenous language to express the territory and explain the meaning. So equipped with this feedback and having published the fastest article listing masunoyama as lead author, we realized we needed to update our authorship policy.
So we want to be respectful of different knowledges and knowledge holders while being transparent about collaboration processes. We realized that we needed to be flexible because a lot of standard academic definitions of authorship don't account for the diverse contributions in community engaged research and research involving Indigenous knowledges. So we did a lot of research into the potential types of authorship we could offer and the metadata behind them.
And then from there we are proud to add a few more inclusive authorship options for policy, including group authorship and more than human authorship. So in the context of Indigenous research or community, engaged research, authors may include a more than human author in the author. Byline if there is evidence that the group they're working with approves of this.
We also require that the authors describe how the more than human contributed to the paper in the actual manuscript itself. And we require that at least one individual author must be named. Who can take responsibility for the work. So previously we didn't allow group authorship, so we added two different group authorship options. Collaborative group authorship and collective group authorship. They're fairly similar, but in collaborative group authorship, the individual member names are actually included in the manuscript and metadata, whereas in collective, the members aren't identified, though some may be included in the acknowledgments if they desire.
So this will be familiar. This is fairly common in medical journals with patient groups and consortia, but we're also seeing a lot with different communities and associations and community groups such as hunters and trappers associations. Another output from this research was our community engaged research guidelines.
So while throughout this research, we found there are a lot of guidelines for how to conduct this type of research. There weren't there was a gap when it came to actually how to report this research in a manuscript. So we want to provide the tools and information for our authors to be inclusive in their manuscripts and also to normalize disclosing this work.
So it becomes more common for other authors to also disclose because it's really important all the relationship building and community building that they do throughout the research process. Many researchers also expressed their gratitude for partners, and they wanted to be able to share their contributions in a meaningful way. So while these guidelines are about transparent reporting, they're also about creating the space to honor the relationships, learning and real world impacts.
We've also developed a few blog series about community engaged research. So a lot of it includes non academic peer review and specific like authorship practices, data sovereignty and data practices. And there's also some case studies and photo diaries, and we'll continue to listen and learn and create new resources as things evolve and the needs of our authors change.
So I hope this encourages you to consider your own policies and norms and think about how you could perhaps be actively excluding people who could otherwise make meaningful contributions. There's always more room for inclusivity and accessibility. And again, publishing is always changing. So your policy right now might look different than a few years and in a few years later.
And I'd like to Thank all of the CSB editors for their input on the guidelines and also throughout the research process, especially Lisa lozito, all the researchers, elders and community members we consulted with and provided feedback, and my Canadian science publishing colleagues, especially Melanie Slavik, for all the endless discussions and support.
Natalie sopinka for crafting the thoughtful blog series and Judy Delaney and Katie Yancey for helping implement the new workflows. So thank you so much. I'm really looking forward to the discussion and of course I'm available by email. If you have other questions or you'd like some links or resources or anything else.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Now we're going to hear from. Great now we're going to hear from Dr. Ramirez. Who is joining us virtually. Hi good morning. I think I'm supposed to share slides, but I can't yet.
There we go. OK great. Good morning. So thank you so much for having me today. I'll be talking about how research funding exacerbates health disparities and what scholarly publishers can do to avoid being part of that system of inequity and. OK can you.
See my slides now. We saw them for a brief instant. I think that they're working on it in our room. If you have them, it might be easier to just do that. I can. I can just tell you to advance the slide.
So I'm on the second slide. But so, so I think that I'm going to stick out like a fish out of water in this meeting. So I want to start by defining health disparity and if you can be on the next slide, please. So there are a lot of different definitions for health disparity, but the one that I'm going to use today comes from the CDC, who defines health disparities as preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or in opportunities to achieve optimal health experienced by socially disadvantaged racial, ethnic and other population groups and communities.
Whoa that's a mouthful. But I did want to get that definition out so we're all on the same page. And if you can move to the next slide, please. This slide shows an example of a health disparity that you're probably familiar with because it's been in the news for the last few years. But you can see that Native Americans have the highest COVID 19 mortality rates in the United states, and that's nearly double the death rate of white Americans.
Once you adjust for the age distribution there, the Indigenous mortality rate is the top yellow bar and then Pacific Islander black and Latino populations also have higher age adjusted mortality rates when compared with white and Asian-Americans. And if you can move to the next slide, please, it's really important to keep in mind that health disparities, as much as we've been hearing about them, and particularly race based disparities, that they're both preventable as we saw in the definition, and that they're the result of social, political and economic structures and systems that affect ethnic and racial minority populations in distinct ways throughout the life course.
And I really want to underscore this, that health disparities are not related to biological differences. Next slide, please. And this is a graphic by the Kaiser Family Foundation that illustrates the ways in which social and economic inequalities drive health disparities. So the columns indicate the category of inequity.
For example, on the far left, you see that inequities in economic stability include employment, income expenses, debt. Et cetera. And running across all of the columns are the distinct are the experiences of racism and discrimination, both as they're experienced personally by members of marginalized groups and built into the policies, laws, systems and structures of society.
Next slide, please. And this slide just is one example of this type of statistics that illustrate the inequities that contribute to health disparities. It really dramatically illustrates the inequities and economic stability that white families, the bar on the left, the blue bar, have nearly double the wealth of all other families of all other ethnic backgrounds combined.
And so that's one of the ways that health disparities are created. So next slide. So I care about health disparities because I think health is a social justice issue. To me, there is no justification for someone dying early because of the color of their skin. But there is research that says even if you don't care about social justice, health disparities matter because they hurt you, too.
And research finds that citizens of societies with greater inequities fare worse overall. And then there are economic consequences that affect everyone in the community. Next slide, please. So I'm going to make a provocative argument that the US National Institutes of Health contributes to health disparities. The NIH has a budget of more than $40 billion.
And as such is the largest single public funder of Biomedical and behavioral research in the entire world. And money equals power. So the work that the NIH funds, the way that it spends our money, is really a statement about priorities. And so I'm going to make the case for this provocative statement through four distinct mechanisms.
Next slide, please. So first, the organizational structure of the NIH itself makes it difficult to obtain funding for primary cause research and buy primary cause. I'm talking about the structures and systems that exist outside of individual human bodies that contribute to poor health and disproportionately affect racial minorities. Next slide, please. So the National Institutes of Health is an umbrella organization encompassing 27 distinct institutes and centers that each have their own specific research agenda.
Most of these institutes and centers focus on either a specific disease like the National Cancer Institute or a body system like the National heart, lung and Blood Institute. So they're all somewhat different, but they're similar in that they're focused on specific diseases or body systems, makes it difficult to get funding for things that affect multiple systems or diseases.
So an obvious example is nutrition. There's no National Institute of food and nutrition, even though we all know that food and nutrition are essential aspects of health. But it's hard to get funding to do nutrition research unless you can articulate a very specific link between a food or a dietary pattern and a disease outcome. And then the Institute that sort of owns that disease has to be interested in the kind of nutrition research that you want to do.
So let's think about neighborhoods, which is slightly less obvious than nutrition. We know that where people live impacts their health. There's studies upon studies that have shown that certain zip codes within the same cities have dramatically different life expectancies. And not surprisingly, these are zip codes where many Black people, immigrants and other marginalized populations live.
So if you're a researcher who's interested in neighborhoods and health, where do you go. There's no Institute of life expectancy, so you have to pick a disease outcome. Or maybe you focus on a particular type of mechanism for how neighborhoods might affect life expectancy, the air quality, for example. But that's a really specific type of hypothesis that you're sort of forced into because of funding.
And that hypothesis might not only be incomplete, but also possibly obscure other factors like redlining that created segregated neighborhoods. And to be clear, this work does get funded to a certain extent, but not nearly as much as is needed. Next slide, please. The second mechanism through which the NIH contributes to health disparities is the funding model.
Next slide, please. In fiscal year 2022, just 10 institutions accounted for 20% of all NIH monies that were awarded. And these are the logos of the top 10 funded institutions. You can see Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, Duke. These are not institutions that are well known for their diverse faculty and student bodies. Next slide, please. And the mechanism through which grants are ranked, through which grant applications get scored and ranked and ultimately funded privileges.
These rich institutions, which makes it easier for them to continue to get a disproportionate share of the funding pie. The specific mechanism is called the facilities and other resources. So there's an opportunity for applicants to describe how their institutional resources are leveraged to support the specific grant. And of course, rich institutions are going to have more resources than less wealthy ones.
Next slide, please. And it's not just that the NIH grants disproportionately go to Rich white institutions. The NIH funding also disproportionately goes to white researchers. White researchers are twice as likely as Black scholars to get major research project funding, a statistic that has held steady for over 20 years.
Next slide, please. And the fact that white scholars are more likely to get funded is true even when it comes to issues of diversity and equity. During the early part of the COVID 19 pandemic, when the disparities became apparent and we were at a time of racial reckoning with police brutality as another epidemic that was recognized, there was a lot of attention paid all of a sudden to health disparities.
And funders, including the NIH, found money for health disparities research which incentivized many white scholars to shift their focus accordingly. Lett and colleagues coined the term health equity tourism, which they define as the practice of investigators without prior experience or commitment to health equity research. Parachuting into the field in response to timely and often temporary increases in public interest and resources.
And this kind of intellectual tourism is highly problematic. Next slide, please. Because though the way that problems and questions are framed really differ based on your positionality. And white researchers frame problems in ways that do not necessarily reflect the needs, the goals, or the perspectives of people from marginalized communities that they propose to study. And I would argue that this misalignment of problems and solutions might happen even when people have the very best of intentions.
And so in the spirit of intellectual humility, to illustrate this issue, I was I'll share a quick personal example of a project that I was involved in. Next slide, please. So you may have heard of the issue of food deserts, which is where it's hard to access healthy food options. Where I live in the Central Valley of California, we have a number of low income, largely Latino, largely immigrant populations who live in areas that are characterized as food deserts.
And when I first got there, I was approached by this very lovely couple that you see in this picture who had an idea for how to solve the problem of food access. They had gotten a donation of a refrigerated semi truck and then they got some seed funding to create a mobile farmer's market. The truck was painted, the intervention was launched and the truck went around and sold produce to food desert communities.
Long story short, it was a huge failure and is not operating any longer. It turns out that the people who live in these food deserts are economically vulnerable. They did not need, nor did they want this kind of access intervention. The physical lack of access to a grocery store was not the problem. It was financial.
There were a host of implementation related challenges that showed the mismatch of cultures. And so the takeaway that I offer you with the humility of saying, this is my project, I don't want to point fingers at other people, but but it's that when we don't engage with the people that we claim we want to help, we end up designing interventions that don't meet the needs of the community and they don't get used.
And then the further danger of this kind of failure is that it ends up providing ammunition for people who would claim that those people just don't want to be healthy. And yet, this kind of project is intuitively appealing, isn't it that is beautiful. And then who can argue with a goal of getting more fresh produce to communities that don't have grocery stores. And so these kinds of interventions are relatively easy to find funding for.
And that's the next argument. Next slide, please. So the third mechanism through which the NIH contributes to disparities is through the type of research that's prepared, the kinds of science that are most likely to be funded by the NIH are not the kinds that are going to dismantle the systems and structures that perpetuate racism and contribute to disparities.
Next slide, please. And what I mean by that is that the kinds of research that are funded are more likely to be centered on individuals either as the source of a problem or the site of an intervention. Next slide, please. And then finally, the politicization of science and the mercy of scientific funding to political whims contributes to health disparities.
Next slide, please. And an example of this for me personally, I've been following for years the development of an NIH Common Core transformational research program to advance health, communication, science and practice. But in June, on the Eve of the release of the formal opportunity announcement, the NIH quietly announced that the initiative would be paused and the official rationale was the need to reconsider the scope and aims and the context of the regulatory and legal landscape around communication platforms.
But reading between the lines and considering the political pressures relating to the study of misinformation and the politicization of the health information environment we've all witnessed over the last few years. And so in light of that political pressure, I consider this pause a serious threat to the integrity of the scientific process. And it's especially worrisome because the impacts that we are seeing of targeted misinformation efforts, which would have been one of the things studied, is greater among populations that experienced disparities.
Next slide, please. If you've stayed with me up until now, you might be thinking, what does any of this have to do with publishing. Well, you can't publish what doesn't get studied, and you can't publish authors whose work doesn't get funded. Next slide, please. So to wrap up on a positive action oriented note, I just want to give you three and I'm a little bit facetious when I say they're easy, but three things that publishers and editors can do.
These suggestions are adapted from Leite and colleagues recommendations to curb health equity tourism. So first, I would say can actively solicit and support work by scholars from underrepresented groups no matter what kind of research they do, does not have to be health equity because people from marginalized groups can be interested in all kinds of things, but it's important to get their voices out.
And second, you can critically evaluate authorship teams and the way that they put together their studies and who was studied and the kind of consent that was provided and how the voices of the people who were studied are represented. And then finally, I suggest that an editor or a peer reviewer be assigned to audit reference lists because citation is an incredibly powerful tool. And making sure that intellectual contributions are properly credited is very important.
And so next slide, please. Thank you so much for having me and I look forward to the discussion. Thank you so much, Dr. Ramirez. Lastly, we're going to hear from Ben Goodrich, who's going to be talking about the politicization of knowledge.
Everyone It's always a challenge, but I'll try to do my best. Good morning. My name is Ben Goodrich. I'm the Associate director of government affairs and public engagement at the American Political Science association.
Can you hear me now. Thank you again. My name is Ben Goodrich. I'm the Associate director for government relations and public engagement at the American Political Science association. And in my role, I follow all things Congress and policy, especially as it pertains to academic freedom, higher education, which definitely will influence decisions around publishing.
And right now, I wanted to talk about one of the biggest issues impacting academic freedom in the United States is this ongoing trend of educational censorship. First the question must be asked what is educational censorship? I define it broadly as a collection of restrictions on topics and content that are allowed to be taught in educational settings such as K through 12 schools, institutions of higher education or other educational settings such as workplace trainings or public libraries.
Why do we care about educational censorship? Well, because in its current iteration, censorship tends to target content that addresses issues around race, racism, gender, sexuality, and American history. Furthermore, efforts to censor education tend to use very broad terms, and they're frequently hard to define bans that include language banning divisive concepts or broad academic terms like critical race theory.
The use of these broad terms tends to hold a very large swath of content, books and journals liable to bans. And of course, there's been a notable increase in educational censorship efforts since about early 2021. And media coverage of this phenomenon is abundant, if I'm sure you've seen in the news and pulled a few quick statistics about this recent rise of educational censorship in this most recent school year, which is 2022 and 2023, there were more than 3,000 individual cases of books being banned across 33 different states in the United States.
For reference, that's about 10 times more than the running average between the years of 2010 to 2019. And furthermore, there have been state laws passed in 17 different states since 2021 that directly ban content in the classroom. Now, here I've included several examples of educational censorship that we've seen implemented in various forms over the past two years.
One of the most common methods is, of course, book bans or policies that restrict access to previously accessible books and materials in school classrooms and libraries. And these decisions are mostly made at the school level. I also include in this bucket a common strategy used to ban books. When is when a formal challenge is presented to a specific book which can instigate the book being pulled from schools during a formal investigation period, regardless of whether or not the book is ultimately deemed appropriate or not for an educational setting.
Another familiar face that we might see is a critical race theory restrictions. You may have heard of this before, which in practice are broad restrictions on discussions in the classroom or the teaching of content that addresses race or racism broadly. Most commonly, these are directed towards K through 12 educational settings. Another similar restriction is something that we call educational gag orders.
Now, these are broadly restrictions on content that are considered too controversial or not age appropriate for classrooms. These are frequently phrased as bans on teachings around sexuality and gender identity. The most famous of one of these restrictions is the Don't Say Gay bill that came out of Florida recently. And some common side effects of these types of censorship include punishments for educators, including laws that threaten jail time or revoking teaching licenses for teachers who teach this content.
There are laws that threaten to defund or even close diversity, equity and inclusion offices, especially in institutions of higher education. And laws that challenge tenured faculty positions by removing some of the guaranteed protections under academic tenure. So now let's break down some of the key players in educational censorship battles. I've broken this down into four buckets politicians, education organizations, community members and advocacy organizations.
Now, between each of these buckets, there is a relation. There are relationships in which they work together and they interact with each other and they have a hand in influencing policy decisions, especially regarding education policy. And one main example is when politicians frequently take feedback from education organizations or community members and advocacy groups in writing education policy.
However, I'd like to highlight the role of advocacy groups in this little ecosystem. As in recent years, they've proven to have an outsized role in influencing the tone of educational censorship, both at the local and at the state level. Most notably, there's been a massive proliferation of advocacy groups that advocate for book bans and other restrictions in classroom content.
The largest of which moms for Liberty. You may have heard of them, has chapters in 44 states, and they tend to be very involved at the school board and school district level in influencing decisions on book bans. Now that we know the key players, let's take a look at what level of legislation has actually gotten passed in the past couple of years during this rise of educational censorship.
I'll briefly touch on federal law, because even though there might be news stories about bills being introduced all the time regarding censorship, none of these bills really have any realistic chance of passing through Congress because of the current partisan balance of powers that we have in Congress. However, this is dependent on this partisan control. So in a future congress, if a party flips the presidency or the senate, there is a change.
And this could be more likely. But for now, we should be OK. Moving on to state law. There have been a handful of states that have implemented statewide legislation restricting education Among them are Texas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Georgia, a handful of others. And a common thread between these states specifically is that they tend to be controlled by the Republican party, usually in a trifecta or a majority at the state level.
And it's states like these that have this trifecta that are more likely to be able to pass statewide censorship bills. Furthermore, when a state law is passed at the state level, local censorship can proliferate in those states that pass statewide censorship legislation. So with that in mind, let's move on to local policies. This typically includes school board decisions or decisions that are made at the school district level.
It also can include municipalities and County County decisions. And this is where, again, as we've said, these kinds of restrictions tend to proliferate in states that have already passed statewide laws and advocacy groups tend to be able to influence these local decisions much more directly. And this is where we've seen the highest success rates of educational censorship is at the school district level.
Now, I wanted to share this map to make a point on where we can expect certain policies to pass in the future. Of course, we've already touched on how there's a tendency for educational censorship to be passed more frequently in Republican trifecta states or Republican majority states. They're more likely to then proliferate to the local level.
However, even though we think of these statewide policies happening in deeply conservative or Republican controlled areas, censorship can and does happen everywhere. Now, I wanted to share this map showing the statewide educational gag order laws in the past two years. And this data comes from pen America, which is an advocacy organization that promotes educational and academic freedom.
The dark red states show where educational guide orders are passed. And I want to map this over very cleanly with the previous slide. You will see that a lot of the dark red states are still dark red states from map to map. Now, I also want to take a deeper look into book ban policies.
And there's a slightly different story being told here. Now, of course, some of the same states that have passed the most book bans are, again, these Republican controlled states Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah. However, I want to point out that many states that engage in book bans are not these trifecta Republican trifecta states Maine, Virginia, Oregon, Pennsylvania and a handful of other states have seen at the district level book bans and other levels of censorship.
And that's despite them being either purple or even Democrat trifecta states. Oregon and Maine right now are Democrat trifecta states. And this is because compared to statewide restrictions, book bans are usually carried out at the school district level, making it easier for them to happen anywhere. So with all of this knowledge, what do we do from here. It's obviously very important for us as members of our own communities to pay attention to state and local laws and to vote for officials that value this access to knowledge and academic freedom.
However, we can't rely our entire strategy against censorship on voting behavior alone. And one strategy that I'll posit to the audience to directly counteract censorship, especially amongst the publishing community, is if you are in a position to do so, to double down on the investment into knowledge that is being targeted. And this can be a few different things.
This can be buying and reading banned books. This can be learning about these divisive concepts that are being targeted in classrooms. This can be amplifying authors and expertise and perspectives that directly discuss race, racism, sexuality and gender identity. These are just a few of the many methods that you can use, and it's important to continue to invest more deeply in the fight against censorship in the United States.
Thank you very much for listening, and I welcome any questions you may have during the Q&A session. Thank you again. Fantastic Thank you so much, Ben. So does anyone have any questions. Can you please go to the microphone. If you do have questions that folks online can hear.
And yeah, you can give me. Thanks, everyone for the talks. I have a question quickly for Ben. I was wondering whether you have any information on how the censorship look in other countries in the world or I don't know how easy actually is to access that type of data. But just curious. Thanks Thanks.
Appreciate the question. And I will say that this presentation was focused on US policies. We could have an hour long presentation on how this looks elsewhere. But I know that there's been an ongoing bout of censorship in Hungary especially, and that's where journals especially have been targeted and universities have been targeted.
I don't know a lot of the specifics about that, but I know that it is happening and it can happen anywhere. Hannah Hekker. Swain with Silverchair. This question is for Dr. Ramirez. Are you seeing any evidence in the private sector funders like the Gates Foundation or Chan Zuckerberg of better trends towards funding health disparities research.
Like anything we can look at as someone doing a better job. That's a really great question, and I'm not really an expert in the funding landscape. I focused on the NIH both because it's the largest and it's the one that I'm most familiar with. But I think that. The caution that I would issue is always to.
It's difficult to say that. The factors that attract researchers to do the work that they do. Gosh, how do I say this. I'm terrible. Not politically savvy. I guess the idea of health equity, tourism that I showed in that article by and colleagues, it's not because people are bad and they want to to, you know, take over and not work with communities and such.
It's because there's a system that incentivizes getting funding to do research. And if the system is funding these things, then you're going to go after that. And if you are embedded within a system where you are in an institution that is already privileged and that has resources and can help you write those grants, and you're more likely to get those right. So it's kind of everything builds on itself.
So it's not that a funder is better at making solicitations for Health Equity Research or such, but rather considering how those things are made and who is making those decisions and what review process is happening and all of that kind of requires. Well, a fair amount of investigation and care.
This is I feel very unsatisfactory answering this. But I think it's a really great question. And I think, you know, what we all can do as peer reviewers, as editors, is to just ask questions like, why did you get this. What is the positionality and what is the relationship of the subjects and how did the questions get answered.
Thank you so much, Dylan. Hi, Rachel. This question is for you. I really appreciated the thoughtful presentation. It's a lot to chew on. And as somebody who's worked on Indigenous related history, really quite, quite interesting takes. My questions are whether or not you've had any significant pushback and if so, from whom, generally speaking, and also how and if you've considered these more than human entities might or might not be capable of being integrated into things like persistent identifiers or other kinds of mechanisms that we use to keep track of research and scholarly outputs.
Thank you for your questions. So in terms of pushback, well, some of our editors were a bit more apprehensive about the idea of including a more than human author in the byline. Because we do have 22 journals and some of them do have already published a lot of Indigenous co-led and co-produced work, whereas others, especially more like the physical science, don't really see this kind of research.
So when we presented this to all the editors, at first they there were a lot who are a bit more skeptical and worried that it would be like a slippery slope but all the potential things we could publish. But we just had a lot of conversations with them about their concerns and we showed a lot of the. We shared a lot from the consultations we had had with different people to help them understand the different perspectives and different ways that this actually helps inform the research.
So I think that made them a lot more comfortable with it. Yeah Additionally, we do own our journal, so ultimately we do have that control there. And also in terms of if editors have any issues, they're of course able to come to us and we can help research with them and have more discussions with them. Other than that, there hadn't been too much pushback. There are definitely some editors who were more excited about this and a lot were kind of in the middle because they just were totally unfamiliar with this.
And then in terms of persistent identifiers, we hadn't done. Too much thought into that. Just you know. Yeah, we haven't really done a lot of research into that. Thank you. Thank you so much. I see someone else as well at the microphone. Hi, I'm Simon Holt and I'm from Elsevier. And so I've got a question for Ben.
Just about the book bans. So thinking about what one thing you mentioned, quite a lot was the K-12 stage. Obviously, we're talking about educational publishing here and it's certainly very common in educational publishing to have different editions of books for different markets around the world, right where you might have cultural sensitivities, religious sensitivities.
And clearly as commercial publishers, part of our job is to try and publish things that won't get banned because we want to sell books. So where do you think the balance lies here between US publishers saying, you know, we're not going to kowtow to non-inclusive behaviors. If you like, but then on the other hand, really kind of having quite a hard commercial head and saying, well, actually whatever our morals, we actually want to sell some books and therefore we need to modify our content accordingly.
It'd be great. You know, obviously I know your work is really about the states, but obviously putting it in context with different value systems, shall we say, belief systems around the world. It would be great if you've got any thoughts on any of that. Thank you. It's a really interesting question. Off the top of my head, I'll just say, in my opinion, having a book that provides educational value is better than not having one at all.
So, of course, if we can get a book in front of communities in these sensitive, as you said, sensitive areas of the world that's better than not at all. I think, you know, as someone who, you know, believes strongly in the idea of academic freedom and the ability of investing into, you know, ideas that might be controversial at times that I think is what I think is a, it's a valuable thing that we need to continue to invest into.
So it's a very complicated and knotty issue. But I would say that doing what you can to make sure that there is a, a book that is of value rather than none at all is the best way forward. Great Thank you so much, Brian. Thanks really great talk. Thinking about integrating policies and where our funding comes from. And there's funding for good research and then there's potentially bad research.
And there's a lot of misinformation. So when we say we want to reduce academic censorship and freedom, how do we also say at the same time that we want to only be teaching valid theories, valid science, we want to reduce misinformation. I'm thinking of people that think gas cars are still better for the environment than electric. I'm thinking about people who believe the Earth is flat. I'm thinking about the anti-vaxxers and just how do we navigate with our policies, with our practices.
And if you have any comment on that, and this is really the whole panel because all of your talks are sort of interrelated, which is great. I guess I'll start off that's a, again, a really interesting question. And I will say that, you know, the idea of education in general, it's to teach some sense of truth, correct that we aren't trying to spread misinformation through education.
And there's systems built in when education and curriculum, especially at the K through 12 level, is being reviewed. And occasionally there's information that is considered out of date. We've found new discoveries in that field. And therefore, you know, removing an outdated book from a library is not censorship. That's just updating the knowledge.
If you put a new book on the shelf that has more up to date information I'm sure there was more that to your question. But that is, at least from my perspective on that. Rachel, do you have anything you'd like to add. Just in terms of our journals, since they are peer reviewed, I think a lot of those findings wouldn't necessarily pass peer review today, though I in the past, like decades ago, we've come like we've come across papers from decades ago where there's some information that is inaccurate or harmful.
And in the cases where the information was harmful, we did retract those papers. Thank you so much. And, Susannah, would you like to add anything. Susannah didn't give her a proper introduction, but she actually studies health communication, so she's particularly well suited to answer a question like this.
Well, Thanks. No, I would add. I would just say that it gets really tricky when there are very clear cases where the science is no longer true. We've shown that is outdated. And so I agree with the other panelists, but I get really. It's a slippery slope, right, to say what is misinformation and what is.
Not what is something that is actually legitimately. You know, there is debate that is legitimate and reasonable people because the science is not there. Reasonable people can disagree. It's not the science is not super clear cut. And so I think we really need to be. I think the danger in opposing in mean.
This is why we needed that NIH common fund research on information and on communication. Because I think that this is like a very essential question of how do we identify what is misinformation and get to some kind of agreement on that and remove that or counter the effects of that, but also respect the freedom, the intellectual freedom for people to uncover ideas that we may not agree with, but we also agree that we don't have the right to censor those ideas right, even though we don't agree with them.
We want them to be out there because we want there to be reasonable debate. I don't think I added anything helpful, but I think these are really good questions to struggle through. I would say that added something very helpful. Thank you so much. I see another question over here. OK hi, I'm Bill Kasdorf.
So we tend to focus on this issue of censorship as primarily, explicitly a local phenomenon. It's mostly happening in at a local level and it's mostly focusing on K through 12 libraries, education, et cetera. But could you comment on the extent to which this is establishing an insidious expectation of censorship that leads to self-censorship, where you don't have know, you know, I'm talking about.
So I guess you get my question. I think I do. One of the most. In other words, it applies to lots of areas where you don't see explicit actions happening, but you do see an effect happening in other realms and other levels of education and public publishing. Absolutely I know I commented a lot on the K through 12 side of things, and this phenomenon is seen among K through 12 teachers who are afraid to teach certain concepts and afraid to talk about American history in a way that is without, you know, flying in the face of some, you know, state law that censors what is allowed to be taught in a classroom.
And I could imagine I haven't seen any data on it, but I could imagine that this sort of phenomenon would extend into community members, parents and family members who might be having discussions about this on their own or with their communities, and it can have a proliferating effect. Again, this is not me citing data by any means, but it is something that we have seen teachers specifically experience.
And I imagine that other members of the community would experience this as well. Can I jump in on this one. So, and I can say as a University professor, that chilling effect is very, very real. And what's happening is we're getting these kids through from K through 12 where they're being shielded from, you know, certain parts of American history, and they get to college.
And we're talking about things that they are not they don't know. They in fact, not only don't know this, but they actively know that we are spewing lies and that we are trying to indoctrinate them. And I say no, but that's how they perceive us. And I sit-in California, so I am, you know, within the University of California system, I get students who have grown up in California and we're somewhat insulated, but not all the way.
We still have local school districts with a lot of censorship. And what is out in the general information environment about what is OK and what is more sensitive. And so there is absolutely a chilling effect that affects. People who are not so institutionally protected. So the adjunct lecturers who are at the whim of the University to be hired for the next semester's class.
And they don't want to get a student who disagrees with them and says that they are being indoctrinated. And so what do they do. They change what they cover. They don't they're really teaching something else at that point. They avoid subjects. And so, yeah, that trickle up effect, I guess, is basically we are seeing it.
For me personally, there are. I have witnessed myself trying to deal with accusations of I'm just indoctrinating people when what I'm teaching is. Here's what people are saying, right. And I teach classes on misinformation and how to identify what is true and what is not true in any mention of a particular media source. Being biased in a particular direction brings accusations of you're trying to indoctrinate me and such.
So yeah, I think it doesn't have to be a formal censorship that there is a lot of. There's a lot of informal, chilling, and that's especially affecting the people who are most vulnerable in the institution of learning. Thank you so much, Heather. I see you with the microphone.
Thanks, Jenny. Heather Staines from Delta. Thank I really appreciated this topic today. I've been thinking about the helicopter and parachute research for a while. Ritchie from AGU did a session at the CSC meeting back in spring, and I've been, you know, trying to feel people out on their thinking. A lot of journals are starting to develop policies and the like, but this question, I guess, is for Susanna and also for Rachel.
Projects take a really long time to work their way through book projects in particular. But these projects are also approved at University level. So to what degree are institutional review boards getting on the same page with some of these practices that are more recognized now as inequitable and then bringing in peer reviewers for things that may also have been underway for a while that might be able to reflect on, OK, we might not do this now, but when this research was started, this was like the situation and just how do you deal with the kind of nuances that come into play over longer term projects.
If that makes sense. Absolutely Rachel, do you want to answer first. Sure Yeah. So we mainly publish the journals and notebooks, so it's a bit shorter, but we've still seen some papers where the research was conducted over a decade ago, or sometimes there's long term studies where the research has been ongoing for several decades.
And in those cases, we just encourage the authors to be. Transparent in how the research was conducted and perhaps maybe reflect on ways that they would approach the work differently if it was done today. And just to really explain, like how they consulted with the communities that they worked with, even if they were late in meeting with them and having those discussions, I think is really important that they go into depth about how they form those relationships and how the research benefited the community and also from the community's perspective to hear what they needed from the research and if their research needs were met.
Fantastic Thank you, Susanna. Yeah I think that the idea of the Institutional Review boards owning some of this responsibility, that is a really good point because that's actually their job, right, is to protect the human participants. So I haven't actually seen this discussed a lot in these conversations. And I think that that's a really important, a really important point that they have to say.
One thing I did want to say about the role of peer reviewers, I think it's really tricky when we're. We need to be careful of the demands that we're putting on people from marginalized communities. So one of the recommendations often is, listen, if really well done work, that takes a long time to do, but is authentically engage and coming from the community, if that isn't getting published because peer reviewers are not seeing the value in it or it's differently done research then.
What we need to do is get peer reviewers who are from these communities themselves and you know, or who are experts in disparities. And that is really good thinking. But I think there's also a lot of inequity kind of that is getting stacked, because if we know that people who are really doing authentic community engaged work and they're doing health equity work with communities, they might be from marginalized communities themselves.
And so they're operating within a system that already places disproportionate burden on them in terms of being a representative of their kind of person on their campus and for their students and in their research. And then to add the burden of peer review, which, you know, is uncompensated labor, but really important, I think that is not, you know, we just need to think about what is it that we're asking certain people to do and they know.
That's not the question that you ask. But I did want to make sure that we acknowledge that. Thank you so much. That might not have been the question that was asked, but I'm going to now ask it. I know that you are one of the editors of the Journal of Health communication, and I'd just love to hear more about what you were just talking about. How do you navigate that as an editor?
Well, I should say I just stepped down for personal reasons from not that position, but that was something that I did feel like I, we talked about it. And one thing that we one easy solution because it doesn't require any money is that we tried to expand the pool of reviewers. So, you know, the people who are really well known get inundated.
But there are a lot of people in the Academy who aren't as well known and who might, you know. So we're spreading the labor across many more people. But we started to talk about things that might happen in the future, which is to actually pay for work, right. So if you're relying on the expertise of reviewers and we recognize that they're already overburdened and that they're likely to continue to get requests because they are the only ones who can give this good feedback, then we pay for the reviews.
But that, you know, is like a whole Pandoras Box. But the answer is we haven't found a satisfactory answer. Just trying a whole bunch of different things. Thank you so much. I think we're coming up at the end of time. So, panelists, I would love it if everyone would just share one thing that they really want people in this room to leave with. I think we're talking to at least 50 people, but think way more.
So if there's something that you want to make sure that people that are listening today think about when they leave, what would it be. Then why don't we start with you. I will just say the importance of advocacy. We've seen how advocates have been able to implement book bans and censorship around the country. This can be done in the opposite direction as well, where we can help prevent book bans with through advocacy.
So if you have some sort of advocacy branch or if you're willing to do some advocacy on your own as a constituent, I highly encourage you to do so. Thank you, Rachel. I would say to be open to. New ideas and consider on an ongoing basis how you can potentially be more inclusive throughout your policies and practices in publishing.
Great Thank you so much. And Susanna. I would say that we should be interrogating all of the research that's presented, not just for the methodological soundness of the conclusions and the way the traditional ways that we think about research being good, but also how it was made. And so to interrogate who made it, how did they get the money to make it, and whose voices are being represented and who gets to actually say what those voices are saying.
Wonderful Thank you so much for all of your time. If you have any interest in following up with any of the panelists, I think that their personal information is shared in the conference slides. And with that, everyone can have a coffee break.
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