Last updated: August 2, 2026
This policy explains how Academia Unusualverse selects, documents and publishes information about Deaf academics, how that information is verified and corrected, and how any person featured on this site can have their profile amended or removed. It complements our Privacy Policy, which concerns visitors to this website; the present policy concerns the people written about on it.
1. Purpose
Academia Unusualverse exists to make the work of Deaf academics visible. Deaf scholars are systematically under-represented in academic directories, conference programmes and citation databases, and many careers of real significance leave almost no searchable trace. This site documents those careers so that Deaf researchers, students considering an academic path, and colleagues seeking collaborators can find one another.
This site is not an evaluation tool. Nothing published here is intended to inform hiring, promotion, funding or admission decisions, and it should not be used for those purposes.
2. Who is included
This site uses a broader definition of "academic" than the traditional one confined to university affiliation. As explained on our About page, we consider an academic to be anyone who actively contributes to scientific knowledge production, participates in research, or engages in critical analysis using scientific methods — as a professor, independent researcher, practitioner-researcher or expert in their field — regardless of institutional affiliation or where this work takes place.
A person is documented on this site only where both of the following apply:
- They meet this definition of an academic, whether or not they hold a university position.
- Their identity as a Deaf or hard-of-hearing person has been made public by the person themselves — for example in an institutional biography, an interview, a public lecture, a personal website or a social media profile — or is documented in a published, verifiable public source, which is cited in their profile.
Where either condition cannot be met, the person is not included. This means many Deaf academics and researchers are absent from this site. Their absence reflects the limits of what can be publicly documented, not the limits of their careers.
Inclusion is editorial, not exhaustive. There is no application process and no ranking of who merits inclusion.
3. What each profile contains
Profiles are limited to professional and academic information already in the public domain: name and any published variants; country of residence; institutional affiliation; field of research; doctoral thesis title and year; public academic identifiers (ORCID iD, Google Scholar, Scopus, OpenAlex, ResearchGate, Academia.edu); public social media accounts; a summary of academic career, research contributions and public engagement; and a photograph.
Where a researcher's year of birth has been published by the person themselves — on their own website, in an authorised biography, on Wikipedia, or on an openly accessible public profile — it may be recorded. This is used only to provide context for career stage, such as the age at which a doctorate was completed; a doctorate obtained later in life often represents a different set of circumstances than one obtained at the typical age, and both are of equal academic value. Where the original source discloses a full date of birth, only the year is published here.
No private contact details, home addresses, family information, health information, or any information about a person's audiological status beyond the fact of their public Deaf identity are published.
4. Sources
All content is drawn from public sources, which are listed at the end of each profile: university and research centre pages, ORCID records, bibliographic databases, published interviews, recorded lectures, institutional news, and the researcher's own public websites and profiles. Where a statement cannot be traced to such a source, it is not published.
5. Deaf identity and special category data
Under Article 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), information relating to a person's disability is a special category of personal data. This site processes such data in a narrow and specific way: the fact that a person publicly identifies as Deaf or hard of hearing, which is the very basis on which this site documents them.
Where that identity has been manifestly made public by the person themselves, processing relies on Article 9(2)(e) GDPR. Where the site processes this information for purposes of academic, journalistic and documentary expression, it relies on Article 85 GDPR and the corresponding provisions of Spanish law (Ley Orgánica 3/2018, LOPDGDD). The site does not infer, diagnose, verify or comment on any person's hearing status, and it does not publish audiological information.
If you are featured here and consider that your Deaf identity was not in fact publicly self-declared, tell us and your profile will be removed without further discussion. See section 10.
6. Photographs
Photographs are reproduced from public institutional or press sources and are credited to the photographer or the institution where that information is available. Alternative text describing the image is provided for accessibility. Any photographer, institution or featured person may request removal or replacement of an image at any time.
7. AI-assisted content
This site is written and maintained by one person on a voluntary basis. To make that workload possible, draft profile text is prepared with the assistance of AI language models working from sources selected manually. Sources are always chosen and verified by the editor; the resulting body text is not always reviewed line by line before publication.
This is disclosed on every profile that uses it. It carries a real risk of factual error. Any person featured on this site is entitled to have their profile corrected on request, and corrections are treated as a priority over new content. If you spot an error in a profile — your own or anyone else's — please report it.
8. Metrics: what they are and what they are not
The Academic Footprint Summary reports the h-index values that Google Scholar, Scopus and OpenAlex assign to the researchers documented here, together with a derived "h per year" figure. The methodology, including the exact rule used to order the table, is set out on that page.
These three databases were chosen for complementary reasons. Google Scholar offers the broadest self-service coverage, including conference papers, theses and book chapters that other indexes miss. Scopus, maintained by Elsevier, applies a curated journal selection and is widely used in formal research evaluation. OpenAlex, an open-access catalogue of over 480 million scholarly works, was added specifically because it indexes substantially more non-English journals and publications from Asia, Latin America and Africa than the other two — addressing the geographic bias that is central to this site's concerns. All three are free to consult, language-independent in their search interfaces, and provide a publicly verifiable h-index for each author record, which means every figure on this site can be checked by anyone without a subscription or institutional affiliation.
These figures are published as an aid to visibility, never as an assessment of quality. Specifically:
- h-index values are not comparable across disciplines. Citation cultures differ enormously between fields, and a lower figure in one field may represent greater influence than a higher figure in another.
- The h-index rises with time and never falls, so it partly measures career length rather than impact.
- All three databases under-represent non-English scholarship and research produced outside North America and Western Europe. A researcher's absence from them reflects the coverage of those databases.
- The ordering of the table is a display choice, not a judgement. Alternative orderings are provided.
This approach follows the spirit of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics.
9. What this site does not measure
No citation database captures the following, all of which are central to Deaf academic life, and their absence from our tables should not be read as their absence from a career:
- Scholarship published in a signed language, including peer-reviewed video articles.
- Sign language corpora, dictionaries, curricula, terminology standards and datasets.
- Teaching, doctoral supervision, and the building of academic pathways where none previously existed.
- Policy work, expert testimony and service to Deaf organisations and federations.
- Research published through national and regional systems that the databases used here index unevenly or not at all.
10. Corrections, updates and removal
Any person featured on this site may, at any time and without giving a reason:
- request correction of any inaccurate or outdated information;
- request that specific information, a photograph, or a metric be removed from their profile;
- request that their profile be removed from this site entirely;
- ask what information about them is held and where it was obtained.
Requests are sent to the email in section 15 and are acknowledged within seven days and acted on within thirty days. Removal requests are honoured in full and are not subject to negotiation; no justification is required and none will be asked for. Removed profiles are not re-published.
Because pages may remain in search engine caches for a period after removal, we will, on request, also submit the relevant URLs for removal from Google's index.
11. Your rights under data protection law
Any person documented on this site has the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing and objection under the GDPR. To exercise them, write to to the email in section 15.
Data controller: Emilio Ferreiro-Lago, Spain. Contact: see section 15.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos) or with the supervisory authority of your country of residence.
12. Independence and funding
Academia Unusualverse is an independent, voluntary, non-commercial project. It receives no funding, no institutional sponsorship and no advertising revenue, and it is not affiliated with any of the universities, research centres or organisations mentioned on it. No person or institution pays to appear here, and no one can pay to be removed from a table while remaining on the site.
13. Licence and reuse
Content on this site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence, except for photographs and third-party material, which remain the property of their respective rights holders and are reproduced under their own terms.
Reuse of the metric tables for evaluative purposes — institutional assessment, hiring, funding decisions or the production of rankings — is contrary to the purpose of this site and is not authorised.
14. Changes to this policy
This policy may be updated. Changes are posted on this page with a revised "Last updated" date.
15. Contact
If you have any questions about this Editorial and Data Policy, please contact:
Emilio Ferreiro-Lago
Email:
