Ethics Statement
The DisLIS editorial board uses the resources provided by the Committee On Publication Ethics to guide our ethical approach to journal publication. Important additional information about how DisLIS operates is provided below.
“AI”
There are many concerns around the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI or genAI) in the writing of research articles. These concerns include, but are not limited to, privacy, copyright, bias, transparency, environmental impacts, and accuracy (e.g., hallucinations, or when the program just makes stuff up to fill in a gap). We also recognize that some people with disabilities benefit from these tools. Should you use a program such as ChatGPT to generate part of your submitted content, in the interest of transparency, we ask that you include an acknowledgement statement of what you used and how. We use the SAGE Publications AI disclosure guidelines to guide our practices.
Copyright protections for AI-generated content are still under judicial debate. The Editorial Board does not contain any copyright lawyers, so we will be making use of articles written for general audiences to navigate this issue. The linked article about changes in US Copyright Office practices is a relevant example.
Article Processing Charges
There are no article processing charges or any other charges associated with publishing in DisLIS.
Complaint Process
If you need to report a concern about research, review, or publication misconduct, please email your concern to DisLisJournal@googlegroups.com (group email address) or to one of the listed Editorial Board members.
Post-publication debate may take the form of Letters to the Editor in the case of academic articles, or in the form of alternate-viewpoint reviews in the case of reviews.
Post-publication corrections and retractions will be undertaken in consultation with the author(s).
Copyrights
All content posted on DisLIS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, except where otherwise noted. DisLIS is an open access journal in accordance with the Directory of Open Access Journals definition. All content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the contents of this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or author, so long as they comply with the terms of the license.
Copyright remains with the author. Authors of manuscripts accepted for publication with DisLIS assign to the Editorial Board the non-exclusive right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently retrievable. Material that has appeared in DisLIS may be reused by the author in any form, provided that DisLIS is acknowledged as the original place of publication.
Disability Terminology
Language used to discuss disability can be contentious. We will in general follow the practices of the Disability Style Guide maintained by the National Center on Disability and Journalism. If an author’s personal identifying language preference differs from the Disability Style Guide, we will ask them to provide an introductory statement in the article explaining their choice.
Funding Sources
DisLIS is hosted by Minnesota State University, Mankato’s instance of bepress. The journal currently has no other funding sources. This means that, at present, we do not have the resources to pay editors, reviewers, or writers. We are exploring the possibility of grants or crowd-funding to pay media reviewers for their work and will update this section if we are successful in those efforts. We will work with publishers to try to provide reviewers with a copy of the book they will be reviewing.
Informed Consent/IRB Approval
Scholarly articles involving human subjects research (such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, direct interventions, etc.) often have institutional requirements for IRB approval before research can be conducted. We encourage you to include a statement indicating that your research received approval or formal exemption within the text of your article. If you were not required to get IRB approval to conduct human subjects research, we encourage you to include a statement indicating how you obtained informed consent from the people who participated in your project.
Lexile Scores
Though Lexile scores can be problematic for many reasons, we are including them when easily available because we know that they are used by some librarians/schools/institutions/individuals to make reading and purchasing decisions.
Researcher Positionality
DisLIS values insider viewpoints. That is, articles, reviews, and creative works by people with the disabilities under discussion. We hope that authors will feel comfortable sharing those identities with the editorial team. We also know that researchers might want to research and write about marginalized populations they don’t belong to (outsider viewpoints). In those cases, we strongly encourage you to demonstrate to us that you are in community with people in that population. For example, if you are not autistic and you want to write about improving services for autistic library patrons, consider writing with autistic people as co-authors, sharing who in that specific community would be able to peer review your article, or identifying how you will ask the people you are in partnership with to review your article prior to publication.
Resources mentioned
COPE. (2024). Promoting integrity in research and its publication. https://publicationethics.org/
Creative Commons. (n.d.). Attribution 4.0 international. [Website]. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
DisLIS Editorial Board contact information. https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/dislis/contact.html
DOAJ. (2020, November 17). What does DOAJ define as Open Access? [Blog post]. https://blog.doaj.org/2020/11/17/what-does-doaj-define-as-open-access/
Knibbs, R. (2024, April 17). How one author pushed the limits of AI copyright. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-copyright-office-loosens-up-a-little-on-ai/
National Center on Disability and Journalism. (2021). Disability language style guide. https://ncdj.org/style-guide/
SAGE Publications. (2023). Assistive and generative AI guidelines for authors. https://group.sagepub.com/assistive-and-generative-ai-guidelines-for-authors