Over the past year, students from over academic students have made demands to "an end to systemic and structural racism on campus." (http://www.thedemands.org/) The most popular demand is for more faculty and staff of color. As part of the effort to address the disparities in representation amongst faculty of color, scholarly communication librarians at the University of Massachusetts have partnered with the Graduate Students of Color Association to educate future faculty – namely, graduate students - on 1) the process of publishing 2) how to network with publishers and editors, and 3) how to understand the systemic biases in publishing in order to subvert them. 

Editors, reviewers, and editorial boards all hold power, and the structural inequalities duplicated in these structures of power are not widely recognized, although acknowledged in studies that examine racism and sexism in academia. As a former publisher and scholarly communication librarian, Charlotte Roh is actively engaged in studying these power inequalities and in educating scholars on how to understand and maximize the roles in scholarly publishing beyond authorship that can provide diversity and multiculturalism in lasting and important ways - namely, the scholarship that is produced, read, cited, and promoted. Roh makes clear the existing power structures and how scholars can understand and address the existing systems in productive and practical ways. The program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst takes the form of a casual brown bag lunch that fosters open and safe discussion, since many students and scholars have anxiety regarding the publishing process. Roh will also discuss the library’s role in enabling structural inequalities in scholarly communication, and how libraries as publishers and scholarly communication information literacy providers can work to provide transparency and set shared goals with faculty to address racism and sexism in scholarly publishing.