Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing

The Royal Society of Chemistry has brought together 56 publishing organisations to set a new standard to ensure a more inclusive and diverse culture within scholarly publishing.

As a group with journal portfolios in excess of 15,000, we acknowledge that biases exist in scholarly publishing and we commit to scrutinising our own processes to minimise these. We will pool our resources, expertise and insight to accelerate research culture change.

Since the group was formed we have launched standardised questions for self-reported diversity data collection and minimum standards for inclusion and diversity for scholarly publishing.

On this page:

What is the joint commitment?

What progress has been made so far?

Who has signed it?

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What is the joint commitment?

The Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing was launched in June 2020. It was developed following a workshop in which we shared our Framework for action – a practical guide to reducing bias in our own publishing activities – in a workshop with other publishers.

Collectively we agreed to pool our resources to take decisive action. We promised to:

1. Understand our research community

   We will collaborate to enable diversity data to be self-reported by members of our community, and we will work towards a collective and compliant system so that researchers only need to self-report data once. We will share and analyse anonymised diversity data to understand where action is needed.

2. Reflect the diversity of our community

   We will use anonymised data to uncover subject-specific diversity baselines, and set minimum targets to achieve appropriate and inclusive representation of our authors, reviewers and editorial decision-makers.

3. Share success to achieve impact

   We will share and develop new and innovative resources to improve representation and inclusivity of diverse groups. We will transparently share policies, measurements, language and standards, to move inclusion and diversity in publishing forward together.

4. Set minimum standards on which to build

   We will scrutinise our own publishing processes and take action to achieve a minimum standard for inclusion in publishing, based initially on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Framework for Action in Scientific Publishing. We will engage all relevant stakeholders to improve outcomes on inclusion and diversity, at all stages of the publishing process. Our minimum standards have now been launched and can be found here.

By working together, we will become more effective in driving positive change within scholarly publishing – and we invite and encourage other publishers to join us.

What progress has been made so far?

Sub-groups comprised of members of the overall group are taking forward specific areas of action under each of the four points made in the original commitment. These groups meet and share information frequently, and whole-group meetings are held three times a year to review progress, agree actions and set direction.

One year on from launch, the group’s milestone achievements are:

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