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Record W4410705257 · doi:10.29173/cais1917

Cycles of Bias: Soft Censorship in Libraries

2025· article· en· W4410705257 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Adelaide Tracey, Anton Ninkov

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l ACSI · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLibrary Science and Administration
Canadian institutionsUniversité de Montréal
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCensorshipComputer sciencePolitical scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Library professionals, often without knowing, can indirectly reduce access to information, a phenomenon known as soft censorship. This research-in-progress conceptualizes key aspects of soft censorship and identifies conditions conducive to soft censorship in libraries. The individual and systematic biases that form the cycles that facilitate soft censorship become evident through this conceptualization, including content warnings, neutrality, subject headings, hiring, and publishing. In future work, we will analyze other areas where soft censorship has the potential to proliferate, including acquisitions, weeding, and reference, to obtain a fuller picture of soft censorship. Les cycles du biais : la censure subtile dans les bibliothèques RésuméLes bibliothécaires, souvent sans le savoir, peuvent indirectement réduire l'accès à l'information, un phénomène connu sous le nom de censure subtile. Cette recherche en cours conceptualise les aspects clés de la censure subtile et identifie les conditions favorables à celle-ci dans les bibliothèques. Les biais individuels et systémiques qui forment les cycles facilitant la censure subtile deviennent évidents à travers la conceptualisation, en incluant les avertissements de contenu, la neutralité, les titres et sous-titres, l'embauche et la publication. Dans un projet de recherche futur, nous analyserons d'autres sphères où la censure subtile a le potentiel de proliférer, en incluant les acquisitions, la pré-sélection et la référence, afin d'obtenir une image plus complète de la censure subtile. Mots-clésCensure; Censure subtile; Biais implicite; Bibliothèques; Science de l'information

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.020
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesScholarly communication
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.163
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.020
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.014
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.046
GPT teacher head0.291
Teacher spread0.246 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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Same venueProceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l ACSISame topicLibrary Science and AdministrationFrench-language works237,207