“The scholarly communication ecosystem reflects in large part the prevailing modes of thought, knowledge creation, and knowledge sharing of the time. Building a scholarly communication project that is truly inclusive of existing voices, thoughts, and perspectives takes time, critical reflection, and iterative thinking. Building a feminist-centered framework for collaborative scholarly communication projects requires enacting an ethic of care to ensure that marginalized voices and perspectives are given the space they deserve and that invisible emotional labor is recognized and valued. This team of six women, who stand at the forefront of the scholarly communication work in their respective regions, institutions, and fields, comes together to explore what it means to build a truly inclusive, feminist-centered scholarly communication agenda, rooted in a foundation of equity.

Given the focus of our individual work and our collective proposal for this project, we are delighted by this year’s theme of “Equity in Scholarly Communications.” Each of us has experienced the inequities inherent in the scholarly communication landscape on a number of fronts. We know what it means to operate in a scholarly communication system rooted in inequity and oppression, and we are committed to bringing an intersectional—taking account of multiple levels of oppression (Kimberle Crenshaw, 1991)—feminist approach to bear in our work.

We recognize the need for a framework of practical tools to help fellow colleagues build scholarly communication projects, at all stages of the process that focus on true equity, inclusiveness, and shared value of labor. We seek to begin building an iterative, living, multi-lingual, crowd-sourced toolkit that focuses on best practices for the conceptualization, creation, and completion of inclusive scholarly communication projects. Whether the project involves interacting with marginalized communities to curate and manage collections of materials, developing decolonized and anti-oppressive descriptions and methods for discovery, or creating culturally sensitive publication and dissemination strategies for these materials and resulting research output, our goal is to begin the process of creating a living document that will address best practices for any of these scenarios across cultural and disciplinary contexts….”