Welcome to the New Dignity

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence Volume 6 Issue 1 Article 10 February 2021 Welcome to the New Dignity Donna M. Hughes Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence, donnahughes@uri.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity Part of the Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Law and Society Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Social Influence and Political Communication Commons, Social Justice Commons, Social Policy Commons, Social Psychology Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hughes, Donna M. (2021) "Welcome to the New Dignity," Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence: Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 10. DOI: 10.23860/dignity.2021.06.01.10 Available at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol6/iss1/10https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/ vol6/iss1/10 This Editorial is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@etal.uri.edu. Welcome to the New Dignity Keywords Dignity, new name, sex, gender, gender identities, sexuality, violence, violence against women, girls, children, exploitation, reproduction, sexual, prostitution, pornography, economic exploitation, forced labor, human trafficking, surrogacy, reproductive technologies, migration, harmful cultural practices, refugees, race, ethnicity, religion, femicide Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Acknowledgements As the editor-in-chief of Dignity I have many people to thank. The first two people are librarians at the University of Rhode Island. Andree J. Rathemacher was the person who told me about the possibility of publishing an open access journal and hosting it through Digital Commons at the University of Rhode Island. Julia Lovett helps me on a regular basis to keep my publication details straight. It’s a challenging job, but she carries on calmly. Since the beginning, she has assumed the responsibility of contacting all the appropriate organizations and registries to maintain Dignity’s official status. At the beginning, before I could file the first form to establish Dignity, I needed an Editorial Board. Thank you to all of you who agreed to serve on the Editorial Board based solely on an e-mail from me telling you of my intention to start a journal. Thank you for having faith in me, although a couple of you suggested that I was crazy. I’m not sure I could keep Dignity going without Jody Raphael, our Associate Editor. She just showed up to help. Now, she’s involved in everything, and I can’t publish an article without her say-so: “I want to see every article before it goes online.” And she absolutely won’t let me relax the APA Style standards. Many, many people have helped review the articles that are submitted to Dignity. They number in the dozens, now. As we are getting more submissions, I need more help with editing, and more people are stepping-up to help. Since it is all volunteer work, I try to spread the work out, so we are building a small army of editors. I knew our community needed a journal, so I created Dignity, but after I got started, I realized that typing without making typos and proof-reading were essential skills for an editor, and I had neither. Nevertheless, I’ve persevered. This editorial is available in Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol6/iss1/10 Hughes: Welcome to the New Dignity Volume 6, Issue 1, Article 10, 2021 https://doi.org/10.23860/dignity.2021.06.01.10 EDITORIAL WELCOME TO THE NEW DIGNITY Donna M. Hughes Editor-in-Chief https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6563-2573 KEYWORDS Dignity, new name, sex, gender, gender identities, sexuality, violence, violence against women, girls, children, exploitation, reproduction, sexual, prostitution, pornography, economic exploitation, forced labor, human trafficking, surrogacy, reproductive technologies, migration, harmful cultural practices, refugees, race, ethnicity, religion, femicide W ELCOME TO THE NEW DIGNITY. Dignity has changed its name to Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence. In addition, our layout got a facelift with a new banner, design, color scheme, and upgraded fonts. The purpose is to expand our coverage beyond sexual exploitation and violence. Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence was founded in 2016. Since then, we have published 170 articles, including research and scholarly articles, frontline reports, book reports and editorials. Our articles have been downloaded over 185,000 times, with our top 10 articles downloaded between 4000 and 11,000 times, each. Many articles remain popular and continue to be regularly downloaded years after they were published. We have a global readership with readers in 209 countries and territories around the world. We have published articles by authors in U.S., UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Greece, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Ireland, Cambodia, Austria, and Mexico. The main reason I founded Dignity was because so many authors were encountering biased gatekeepers at other journals (Hughes, 2016). One of Dignity’s big successes is giving authors a place to submit their papers where they will be given a fair review. Dignity took aim at corrupt reviewer practices by naming and publicly thanking our reviewers after the double-blind peer review process was completed. We became an academic leader with our acknowledged peer review practice (Hughes, 2016). Now, we are broadening the scope of our publication to include articles and discussions on topics that are crucial for us to address through our scholarly publishing. We want to publish articles that report on and analyze the following topics (and these are just examples): Published by DigitalCommons@URI, 2021 1 Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence, Vol. 6, Iss. 1 [2021], Art. 10 Reproductive violence and exploitation, such as surrogacy, forced abortions, forced pregnancies, sex-selected abortions, and baby selling; Traditional harmful practices, such as female genital mutilation and child marriage; Domestic violence, revenge attacks on women, and femicide; Forced labor, economic exploitation, and property theft; The debate about biological sex and gender identity, and sex-based rights versus gender based rights; The experiences of migrant, immigrant, and refugee women and children; and The growth of authoritarian political and social movements and how they are impacting women and girls’ rights and lives. And of course, we want to publish articles, book reviews, and editorials on legislative efforts and movements to oppose these crimes and civil and human rights violations. There is a need to analyze the successes and failures of these movements. There is growing political and social polarization in academia and civil society. Academic freedom and free speech on the research, speaking, and writing about women, gender, exploitation, and violence are being threatened and debates are being shut down. We want Dignity to be place where we can take part in these debates. Dignity will remain a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, which means that readers do not have to have a subscription to download and read the articles, and an author does not have to pay an author processing fee to publish in Dignity. These factors likely contribute to the global popularity of Dignity. Dignity continues to be an all-voluntary project. No one receives a salary or payment for the work he/she does, and I, the editor-in-chief, do not receive a reduced course load at my university for this work. We are developing an ever-growing international body of volunteers, sometimes separated by thousands of miles, all dedicated to Dignity. Please submit your articles, reports, book reviews and editorials to Dignity. We want to publish your research findings and read your opinions on books and controversies. If you find Dignity worthwhile, please help publicize the journal and the articles through the multiple networks, media, and platforms that you are on. Dignity wants to expand its reach. If you have any questions about whether something you have written will fit in, contact me at DignityJournal@gmail.com The following reasons to publish in Dignity are slightly modified from the 2017 editorial: “Twenty Reasons to Publish in Dignity.” 1. 2. Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence is an Open Access scholarly journal, which means that the articles are freely available to all. Unlike most other academic journals, access to articles in Dignity doesn’t require a subscription. Dignity does not charge authors to publish their articles. There is no author processing charge (APC), which commercial academic journals charge if the author wants their article to be available to the public. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol6/iss1/10 DOI: 10.23860/dignity.2021.06.01.10 2 Hughes: Welcome to the New Dignity 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Dignity is a peer-reviewed journal. Research and Scholarly Articles and Frontline Reports are reviewed by experts in the topic area using a double-blind process, which is the gold standard for academic peer review. In the double-blind peer review process, the authors don’t know who the reviewers are and the reviewers don’t know who the author is. We emphasize constructive comments to the authors, so they can revise their paper for publication. Dignity has developed an acknowledged peer-review process for more fairness and accountability in the peer review system. After the anonymous reviews and revision of the article are complete, with the permission of the reviewers and the authors, Dignity names the reviewers and thanks them for their time and expertise to review the article in the Acknowledgements of the article. Dignity’s acknowledgment of reviewers after the peer-review process is complete enables the reviewers to get the professional credit they deserve. They can list this professional service on their curriculum vitas and resumes. Dignity supports the development and maintenance of democratic, open societies where people live with dignity. Its goal is not corporate profit. Dignity has an international audience of academics, professionals, and community advocates. Our readers, authors, and reviewers come from around the world. Authors who publish in Dignity retain the copyright to their work. With a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), the author does not have to sign the copyright of the paper over to a commercial publisher. If the author wants to use the article again, such as in an anthology, he/she is free to do that without asking for a copyright release from Dignity or paying a reprint fee. Authors and readers are free to share Dignity articles immediately after publication. They can share them with colleagues and friends. They are free to upload them onto websites and share them on listservs. Dignity will never limit where, how, or how often you share your article. Authors will never receive a “take-down” notice (meaning you must remove your article from a public website) because you shared your article online. Authors and readers are free to use articles for educational purposes without permission from Dignity. 10. Dignity is committed to providing a publishing platform for professionals and advocates from local communities. A special section in Dignity—Frontline Reports—is dedicated to first person narratives and reports from individuals and organizations who have first-hand experience and knowledge of events. 11. In Frontline Reports, Dignity presents new information from professionals and advocates. Authors of these reports often name and describe new phenomena that have previously not been documented or researched. By publishing this new information in a scholarly journal, researchers, scholars, and legal advocates are given the opportunity to formulate future research and strategies for intervention. 12. Dignity publishes articles as soon as they are reviewed and edited. We do not hold articles until we have a full issue (as print journals do). As soon as the article is ready, it is uploaded to the Dignity site so it can be read and downloaded. 13. Dignity publishes Editorials and Book Reviews as soon as they are edited. A wellwritten piece can be published within a few days. 14. Articles published in Dignity are immediately indexed in Google Scholar, the most widely used academic literature search engine. Your article can be found in a Google Scholar search within a day or two of publication. 15. Each published article in Dignity is assigned a DOI (digital object identifier), which is a unique identifier for each article. DOIs are the current digital standard for Published by DigitalCommons@URI, 2021 3 Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence, Vol. 6, Iss. 1 [2021], Art. 10 identifying and indexing scholarly articles. Assigning a DOI will enable all articles in Dignity to be included in new academic databases. 16. Each author in Dignity can include his/her unique ORCID ID, a universal digital identifier that ensures that a researcher or scholar’s work is correctly attributed to them. 17. All articles published in Dignity will be indexed in the Digital Commons. Each month, the author will receive a report on how many times their papers have been downloaded from a Digital Commons site and the countries and the types of institutions (education, commercial, government, or military) where the papers have been downloaded. 18. Editors at Dignity help promote your articles through social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Academia.edu, and LinkedIn. 19. By publishing in Dignity, you are participating in a global movement to democratize knowledge by making scholarly articles openly and freely available to the public. 20. By publishing in Dignity, you will be part of a global community that uses both evidence-based research and professional and survivor experiences to stand against all forms of exploitation and violence. Publishing an article in Dignity gives you the opportunity to have impact. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As the editor-in-chief of Dignity I have many people to thank. The first two people are librarians at the University of Rhode Island. Andree J. Rathemacher was the person who told me about the possibility of publishing an open access journal and hosting it through Digital Commons at the University of Rhode Island. Julia Lovett helps me on a regular basis to keep my publication details straight. It’s a challenging job, but she carries on calmly. Since the beginning, she has assumed the responsibility of contacting all the appropriate organizations and registries to maintain Dignity’s official status. At the beginning, before I could file the first form to establish Dignity, I needed an Editorial Board. Thank you to all of you who agreed to serve on the Editorial Board based solely on an e-mail from me telling you of my intention to start a journal. Thank you for having faith in me, although a couple of you suggested that I was crazy. I’m not sure I could keep Dignity going without Jody Raphael, our Associate Editor. She just showed up to help. Now, she’s involved in everything, and I can’t publish an article without her say-so: “I want to see every article before it goes online.” And she absolutely won’t let me relax the APA Style standards. Many, many people have helped review the articles that are submitted to Dignity. They number in the dozens, now. As we are getting more submissions, I need more help with editing, and more people are stepping-up to help. Since it is all volunteer work, I try to spread the work out, so we are building a small army of editors. I knew our community needed a journal, so I created Dignity, but after I got started, I realized that typing without making typos and proof-reading were essential skills for an editor, and I had neither. Nevertheless, I’ve persevered. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Donna M. Hughes, Ph.D. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6563-2573 is a professor and holds the Eleanor M. and Oscar M. Carlson Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol6/iss1/10 DOI: 10.23860/dignity.2021.06.01.10 4 Hughes: Welcome to the New Dignity RECOMMENDED CITATION Hughes, Donna M. (2021). Welcome to the new Dignity. Dignity: A Journal of Sexual Exploitation and Violence. Vol. 6, Issue 1, Article 10. Available at http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol6/iss1/10 . https://doi.org/10.23860/dignity.2021.06.01.10 REFERENCES Hughes, Donna M. (2016). The inaugural issue of Dignity. Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence. Vol. 1, Iss. 1, Art. 12. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol1/iss1/12/ https://doi.org/10.23860/dignity.2016.01.01.12 Hughes, Donna M. (2017). Twenty reason to publish in Dignity. Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence. Vol. 2, Iss. 2, Art. 1. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol2/iss2/1/ https://doi.org/10.23860/dignity.2017.02.02.01 Published by DigitalCommons@URI, 2021 5