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This editorial describes the crucial role of building transnationally diverse STS communities that our Editorial Collective (EC) has imagined and sought to implement for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS). Community-building as an ethic characterizes all aspects of our EC’s work: from editorial practices to infrastructural development, and from content publication to the broader initiatives that we undertake. In a context where the role of scholarly journals is increasingly instrumentalized through corporate-led valuation systems that effectively also render them largely inaccessible, we see this as an especially important value to affirm in and through strengthening open access publication.

In this editorial, the ESTS editorial collective (EC) reports on various events it had organized at the 2022 ESOCITE/4S joint meeting held at the Universidad Iberoamericana-Puebla in Cholula, México. The EC hosted a journal “happy hour” meet-up and several roundtables on the “Politics of Language,” the challenges and opportunities for open research data in STS worlds, as well as a Managing Editor (ME) Roundtable collaborating with other OA journals. The EC also participated in a two-day pre-conference writing workshop for early-career researchers. Various events organized further the EC’s commitment to cultivating and supporting the development of transnational STS.

In our inaugural editorial, we, the incoming Editorial Collective (EC) of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS), describe the digital and social infrastructural work that we have undertaken since assuming editorship of the journal. We also note some of the changes we have introduced in terms of the journal’s content and policies. A key argument is that even though publishing infrastructures shape the form and movement of scholarly content in crucial ways, they often remain black-boxed, rendering invisible the time, labor, and skill in developing and sustaining them.

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