Agents of Diversity and Social Justice: Librarians and Scholarly Communication

This chapter considers diversity broadly to mean a variety of perspectives, whether grounded in race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic status, or disciplinary study. It begins with a description of the current environment of scholarly communication, looking at the demographics and state of affairs in academia, publishing, and librarianship, including how biases present in all three fields affect scholarly communication. It then moves to a consideration of how librarians and library publishing programs can transform scholarly communication. By adopting a social justice perspective--actively working against ignorance and indifference to reduce systematic biases and injustice in academia, publishing, and librarianship- academic libraries can make their collections and products more reflective of the breadth of knowledge and experiences found in society and make their processes more welcoming to a diversity of participants