Read full story here: https://www.dal.ca/faculty/management/news-events/news/2023/10/25/seeking_solutions_to_gaps_in_the_publishing_industry.html
Morgan Paul loves when October rolls around. She says,“it’s holistic and a really good month for me.” The second-year Master of Information student from the Maliseet First Nation in New Brunswick finds Mi’kmaw History Month in Nova Scotia, and the month-long focus on Indigenous culture, energizing and a chance for connection.
Not only is Paul interested in the cultural events, like workshops on traditional beading and drum making, she’s excited about the dialogue on Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS), the right of Indigenous People to own, control, access, and steward data about their communities, lands and culture.
Currently building the framework for her master’s thesis, Paul is examining gaps between open access practices, which ensure academic research is available to everyone, and IDS guidelines. She says, “There’s lots of points of contention between the two,” but she wants to find ways of making them more supportive of one another.
Among the many concerns about academic publishing is its inherent tie to colonial structures like the ‘Indian Act’, passed in 1876. As Paul points out, policy governing Indigenous Canadians is full of assumptions — in this case, an assumption that Indigenous people gather and share information like all other Canadians.
Having just published her first academic article, Looking to the Future: Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy in Canada, Paul notes that the open access publisher Pathfinder didn’t require her to submit a positionality statement that tells readers about her relationship to the subject matter.
Instead, Paul included this in her opening. “This paper has been written through a First Nations lens as these are my own people and this is an IDS context I am capable of appropriately examining.” She is appreciative that Pathfinder was willing to publish her article when other open access publications just said no.
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