2024 First Peoples’ Lens Cultural Fund – Australia

First Peoples’ Lens

• The upwelling of Indigenous‐led research, demonstrated by the recent exponential increase in Indigenous scholars undertaking PhDs, is arguably the most exciting development in Australian research today. The repercussions of these contributions are changing Australia’s story in meaningful and positive ways.
• As Australia’s primary humanities research publications database, Informit is ideally placed to reflect and amplify these advances. It is vital and timely to work towards embedding a ‘First People’s Lens’ in Informit’s practice and business.

The Cultural Fund

• One of their core business pillars is Supporting the research community and amplifying Indigenous‐led research. As an initiative to enact this support, Informit has created a Cultural Fund offering grants or funding to support Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander project/s in research and innovation, with particular focus on the digital sharing of knowledge. They value bibliodiversity and wish to champion Indigenous perspectives in the research and publishing communities they operate in.
• Rationale:
  • To support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander publishers and researchers
  • To generate and build Informit’s relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations & research communities.
• The Cultural Fund is designed to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander projects in research and innovation, with a particular emphasis on the digital sharing of knowledge.

Funding Information

• In 2024, the fund will have a total pool of $30,000 to commit to selected projects that meet specific criteria. These include being awarded to an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander person, group or organisation, focusing on publishing, research or library projects, and prioritising digital knowledge dissemination. While collaboration with Informit is favoured, it is not essential.

Eligible Projects

• A digital publication, e.g. a journal or a book
• A dataset
• Library‐based catalogue and/or collection projects
• A website documenting a community cultural development project or collating data
• Projects exploring digital potentials for Indigenous purposes: eg geolocation, AI
• Digital archival projects – maintenance of cultural knowledge through digitisation
• Research projects that benefit Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities
• Projects that pertain to Indigenous metadata, description or cataloguing of Indigenous academic resources
• Assistance with publishing an Open Access book or journal special issue that would be hosted on Informit

Management and responsibilities of Informit and successful recipient/s:

• Assessment of projects to be funded will be undertaken by Informit’s First Peoples’ Lens Steering Committee, consisting of highly regarded Indigenous academic and publishing industry peers.
• A Service Agreement will be established with successful recipient/s stating project scope and milestones as agreed by recipients and Informit.
• Informit must be acknowledged as a contributor to the project’s funding on all published or public material (website, promotional material etc.) Details of wording and logo will be sent to successful recipients.
• Informit will promote the project/s through the Informit website, social media and other marketing channels.
• Intellectual property (IP) always remains the funding recipient/s’. Informit has no claim to the project’s IP. Use of content from the project for any purpose such as marketing would be specifically requested and only used with informed consent.

For more information, visit Informit.