Helping researchers protect themselves online
by Yo Yehudi | A spotlight on Digital Safety for Open Researchers, a 2018 Global Sprint project
Digital Safety for Open Researchers (@OpenDigSafety) is a joint project by Beth Lytle, Elliott Stevens, Verletta Kern, Madeline Mundt, and Madison Sullivan from the University of Washington, and is part of the current round of Mozilla Open Leaders. As someone who works in research myself, it’s really great to see a guide to keep researchers safe online whilst working in an open environment.
I interviewed Beth Lytle, Elliott Stevens, Verletta Kern, Madeline Mundt, and Madison Sullivan to learn more about Digital Safety for Open Researchers and how you can help at the Mozilla’s Global Sprint 2018.
What is Digital Safety for Open Researchers?
If a researcher is concerned that their research might make them a target for online harassment, can this create a chilling effect on academic or intellectual freedom? If a researcher has been doxxed or cyberbullied, will they think twice about what they research next? Researchers who make their work publicly accessible, especially those from underrepresented or marginalized communities, can come under vicious personal and professional online attack. This can be a real issue for those who research topics the public may define as controversial. Currently, there are few academic institutions proactively working to educate researchers on digital safety, and many researchers are unsure of how to prevent or remedy attacks on their digital privacy. As project leaders, we believe that raising awareness about researchers’ digital safety and privacy is one way help to safeguard intellectual freedom in the digital age.
Digital Safety for Open Researchers will produce an open educational resource (OER) for members of the higher education community looking to mitigate digital safety threats while working and teaching open. Digital Safety for Open Researchers will be a living collection of case studies that present tools and practices researchers can learn from as they consider their own digital safety. It will bring together researchers who share their stories and suggest tools and practices based on their experiences.
Why did you start Digital Safety for Open Researchers?
As academic librarians, we highly value intellectual freedom and academic freedom. We believe that digital safety and privacy helps to bolster the right to open inquiry. Threats to an individual’s digital safety and privacy can be used as a tool to silence and instigate self-censorship. Our society feels especially polarized following the 2016 United States presidential election, and we have taken note of the hate groups that have felt emboldened and have made themselves more public as a result.
We don’t want any researcher to feel that they can’t do their work because their digital identity might be hijacked or attacked in some way. Researchers and scholars have been stalked online or sent death threats as a result of doing their jobs. We love and encourage open scholarship, but we also acknowledge that this can make researchers vulnerable to online attacks. We want to raise awareness of these issues. We want to help researchers feel confident in their digital safety so they continue to uninhibitedly explore and interrogate the world we live in.
Do digital safety concerns for researchers differ from those a non-researcher might experience? If so, how?
We definitely believe both researchers and the public should explore assessing their own digital safety and privacy online, and probably share similar concerns. What’s different about researchers (at least in the United States) is that they are encouraged, both at the federal and university level, to engage in what is called open scholarship and public scholarship. If you are a researcher looking to get federal funding, agencies now require and incentivize that you openly share the fruits of your research for the public good. Many universities and academic libraries across the U.S. have adopted open access policies for similar reasons.
While the societal benefits of open scholarship are clear, researchers can become vulnerable to negative attention both personally and online through sharing their work. Though government and academic institutions encourage open and public scholarship, few take this into account. Even fewer offer institutional support or training to prevent or address threats to a researcher’s digital safety and privacy.
The exposure researchers can get compared to most individuals is another factor. Some academics or researchers will write op-eds in newspapers, make an appearance on television, or have work that goes viral on social media. They might be well-known on their campuses, within their city or state, or have earned national or international reputations. Most researchers are excited to engage the public with their work, because they want to make the world a better place and because they’re encouraged to do so. As a result, a researcher or academic can be more vulnerable to online attack than the average individual simply due to their exposure.
Lastly, most individuals aren’t being encouraged by the government and by their employers (universities) to share the work they do openly with the public. Most individuals aren’t working to achieve promotion and tenure at a university, which is, in part, a result of their scholarship and its impact. If academics do not achieve tenure, they lose their jobs. They essentially have to be putting their work and themselves out there. These are some of the differences.
What challenges have you faced working on this project?
It has taken us a long time to determine the format for our project. Should it be a toolkit? Should it be a website? Should it be in GitHub? We are not developers or computer programmers, so we needed something that would be accessible for us, our contributors, and for the end users (researchers).
It’s been difficult to find people who are able to share their stories. On a related note, we’ve quickly realized that we need to be very careful about recording stories to begin with. The last thing we would want is for someone to be targeted again as a result of sharing their experiences. We’ve had to think carefully about how we would craft our contributor agreement for storytellers and how we can anonymize stories if and when individuals request that. This is also tied to potential legal issues, so that’s whole other can of worms we’re not looking to mess with.
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
Different skills will be needed to contribute to different portions of our project. Our hope is to have this GitBook OER shared and expanded on by other researchers and academic institutions. This collaborative, open effort will help us pool our knowledge to create the best possible resource and by working open we will ensure that everyone has equitable access to this resource. We could use your help with the following:
- Build out content for modules:
Share your own story about a digital safety problem
Share successful privacy expertise, teaching exercises, or lesson plans relevant to the module topics - Provide expertise on digital safety and law
- Provide expertise on creating good education texts
- Provide expertise on tools and practices for digital safety
- Provide perspectives from computer science, communication, journalism, activism, and other relevant fields
- Contribute to our community agreement
Here is a full list of the issues we need help with.
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2018?
Learn more about contributing to our project here: https://github.com/opendigitalsafety/Digital-Safety-for-Open-Researchers
You can email us at opendigitalsafety@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter at @OpenDigSafety.
Join us wherever you are May 10–11 at Mozilla’s Global Sprint to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Register today
This post by Yo Yehudi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
