Day/Time/Room
June 17, 2026 | 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. | HUB 214
Title: The Contract as Compliance: Negotiating Privacy and Accessibility in Library Publishing
Presenters:
- Ellen Dubinsky (she/her), Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Arizona
- Michele Gibney (she/her), Visiting Program Officer – Privacy & Surveillance, SPARC / Head of Publishing and Scholarship Support, University of the Pacific
Description: Library publishers are responsible for more than just the content we publish; we are responsible for the containers we put it in. While we champion Open Access, the infrastructure we lease from vendors often undermines the values we claim to uphold.
Consider the reality of our vendor platforms: You can have perfectly accessible PDFs, but if a blind author cannot navigate the submission dashboard, your program is exclusionary. Similarly, you can remove the financial paywall for your readers, but if your vendor replaces it with a surveillance dragnet, you haven’t made the research free—you’ve just changed the currency.
The commercial surveillance of user data in academic systems continues to grow unchecked. The April 2026 Department of Justice (DOJ) deadline for WCAG 2.1 AA compliance has passed, leaving libraries to face legal liability for the accessibility of these third-party platforms. We cannot code our way out of these problems; we must negotiate our way out.
This session frames the license agreement as the library’s and library publisher’s most powerful tool for enforcing equity. We will present SPARC’s work on privacy contract negotiation alongside an initial landscape analysis of accessibility clauses. Participants will discuss how to move beyond checking the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) to demanding binding contract language that protects user data and ensures legal compliance. Join us to strategize how we can hold our infrastructure vendors accountable to our values and the law.