Important But Not Urgent
Letter from the Executive Director, November 2024
There are so many large and challenging problems that face us; many of them are even urgent and require our immediate attention. These issues drive a lot of the conversations and projects advancing in our ecosystem. Some, such as research integrity, are at the core of the defining features of research processes, including validity and trust. Because of their immediacy, importance, and even financial implications, these problems get a lot of attention. In the classic prioritization matrix of importancy and urgency, the most overlooked segment is that of “important, but not urgent.”.Many things reside in this liminal space. We realize that the plumbing or the HVAC systems are old and should be fixed, but maintaining them is never the highest priority. That is, until they fail, which can often be catastrophic.
In thinking about our current state, yes, there are important, massive issues that are driving people’s attention. What will the state of national control and government support for research be in the coming years? How will advances in artificial intelligence impact our community and the users we serve? Will demographic trends negatively impact the resources that institutions have, and will this have a broader impact on the scholarly communications ecosystem? Will advances in equitable access and investments in diversity continue to be supported in an ever more polarized environment? Each of these questions is very important, and each garners a fair bit of coverage both within our community and even in adjacent news ecosystems.
Faced with these questions, we may neglect “important, but not urgent” problems. And yet, there are things on the horizon that, if our community isn’t attentive to them in the near term, will create bigger challenges down the road. Accessibility is one key aspect of equitable publishing and content service that deserves our greater attention now.
Over the past several months, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has been convening conversations about the need for greater accessibility related to availability of content and services. OSTP has hosted two public programs this fall regarding improved access to federally funded research content, in recognition that nearly one in five Americans lives with some form of disability. While the open access movement has largely focused on removing paywall barriers to content, content in inaccessible formats is no more accessible to a significant segment of the world’s population than it would be if it were hidden behind paywalls.
One might wonder whether this focus will continue in the next presidential administration. Realistically, attention could rise or diminish with a change in administration in 2025. However, the legal requirements for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II will still come into effect in early 2026, regardless of the administration. In addition, similar regulations will commence in 2025 in the European Union, with the implementation of the EU European Accessibility Act. Earlier this year, the US federal government issued a final ruling on the accessibility of web content and mobile apps provided by state and local governments, which would apply to any product sold to the public library or public institution markets. In large part, these requirements center around compliance with the W3C WCAG accessibility standards. However, publishers and information providers can do more.
The OSTP has also issued a call for voluntary commitments to achieving greater accessibility in the scholarly research process. Organizations interested in communicating voluntary commitments to OSTP should contact its staff by November 26, 2024. NISO has expressed its own commitments in a response to the OSTP, outlining some existing, planned, or potential work related to accessibility. This includes continued support for NISO’s existing standards related to accessibility, which include Authoring and Interchange for Adaptive XML Publishing, which will be up for reconsideration in 2025. In the coming year, NISO will host educational programming on coming into compliance with these regulations. We highlighted the continuing need for support and adoption of MathML in research publications and for support to complete the full implementation of MathML in browsers, which we supported with a grant from the Sloan Foundation in 2018. There are also ongoing conversations about how the community can improve alt text quality and production, as well as on how to improve the accessibility of manuscript submission tools. Certainly, more work in various areas regarding accessibility is needed, and NISO is poised to support community work on this important topic.
Accessible content creation need not necessarily require massive changes in how content is produced or distributed. The tools to produce accessible content are already in wide use and are no more complex than what is needed to simply produce quality content, as most of our industry already does. For example, the JATS model for journal content can be used to output accessible web, PDF, or EPUB formats for users. NISO just published the latest update of JATS, version 1.4, last week. Earlier this year, NISO published a recommended practice as part of the JATS4R series focused on accessibility. Adopting these approaches is the right thing to do. Fortunately, they aren’t the hardest things to implement, thanks to all the work that members of our community have contributed over the years.
As we consider all the significant issues on our tables, let’s not forget all of the important things that might not be as urgent as the things that demand our attention. It’s easy for the important- but-not-urgent things to languish on the to-do list. We need to focus our attention on those important things, as well.
Sincerely,
Todd A. Carpenter, Executive Director
