Conduct

Summary

In the Library with the Lead Pipe intends to help improve communities, libraries, and professional organizations. Our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations, to document our concerns and argue for solutions. In keeping with our community building values, we are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, or economic status. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This Code of Conduct applies to all Lead Pipe editors at all times, and to all conduct by all participants in any Lead Pipe sponsored spaces, including our website, mailing lists, and social media spaces, along with any other spaces that Lead Pipe hosts, both online and off. Some Lead Pipe-sponsored spaces may have additional guidelines in place, which will be made readily available to participants, who are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules. Anyone who violates this Code of Conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Lead Pipe Editorial Board.

Definitions

Harassment is any expression that threatens, intimidates, silences, or coerces. Harassment includes but is not limited to:

Comments that reinforce oppressive power dynamics related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, or economic status;
Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment;
Failure to use a person’s chosen name and pronouns (see https://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender);
Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images in public spaces;
Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g., textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop;
Threats of violence;
Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm;
Deliberate intimidation;
Stalking or following;
Photographing, recording, or logging online activity in a manner that threatens, intimidates, silences, or coerces;
Sustained disruption of discussion;
Unwelcome sexual attention;
Pattern of inappropriate contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others;
Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease;
Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse;
Publication of non-harassing private communication without consent.

Lead Pipe prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The Lead Pipe Editorial Board will not act on complaints regarding:

‘Reverse’ -isms, including “reverse racism,” “reverse sexism,” and “cisphobia”;
Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you”;
Communicating in a “tone” you don’t find congenial;
Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions.

Exceptions:

Discussion or images related to sex, pornography, quoting or discussing instances of discriminatory language, or similar is welcome if it meets all of the following criteria: (a) it is directly related to the topic of discussion, (b) it is focused on the article, not on the author(s), (c) it is necessary to the discussion and no better alternative exists, (d) readers are provided with a content warning at the beginning of the comment. This exception specifically does not allow use of gratuitous sexual images as attention-getting devices or unnecessary examples.

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of the Lead Pipe community, if you notice that someone else is being harassed, or if you have any other concerns, please reach out to the Lead Pipe Editorial Board at itlwtlp at gmail dot com and include “conduct” in your message’s subject. If the person who is harassing you is on the Editorial Board, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can. We will follow the best practices as laid out in Geek Feminism’s Conference anti-harassment / Responding to reports.

This Code of Conduct applies to Lead Pipe sponsored spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the Lead Pipe community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take seriously all good-faith reports of harassment by Lead Pipe members, especially members of the Editorial Board. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The Lead Pipe Editorial Board reserves the right to exclude people from Lead Pipe spaces based on their past behavior, including behavior outside Lead Pipe spaces and behavior towards people who are not involved with Lead Pipe.

In order to protect volunteers to the Editorial Board, authors, reviewers, and other relevant parties from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of Lead Pipe members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the Lead Pipe Editorial Board may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all Lead Pipe spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Lead Pipe members or the general public.

Comment Policy

Because we receive hundreds of spam comments for every one comment of substance, as of 13 November 2024, ITLWTLP will no longer be allowing readers to post public comments on articles we publish. We will continue to follow Committee On Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines about post-publication discussions and critique. Therefore, we encourage readers to submit letters to the editor, mailed to itlwtlp@gmail.com, if they would like to express substantive concerns with the content of an article published within a given 12-month period.

Additional reasons we are making this change are: the work required to manually moderate comments reduces the time we have for engaging in the editorial process, rarely produces valuable additions to scholarly conversations, and is not sustainable. We also think moving to a slower, more deliberate process is better praxis and hopefully will improve the ITLWTLP experience for our readers, our authors, and ourselves.

Historical comments

All content posted on In the Library with the Lead Pipe (except where otherwise noted) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, including comments added to the articles. As such, all comments may be archived along with the articles they accompany for the purposes of the author’s record of publication.

Note: In the Library with the Lead Pipe moved from CC-BY-NC licensing to CC-BY on September 10, 2014. Comments prior to September 10, 2014 were written under the CC-BY-NC license.

License and attribution

This policy is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license. It is public domain; no credit and no open licensing of your version is required.

This policy is based on the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Geek Feminism community as well as on the CLAPS code of conduct and the AdaCamp event policies.