DEI at Sage Journals: Reflections on four years of action, resistance, and hope

As we approach the third anniversary of Sage Journals’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pledge, our team would like to share observations, reflections, and hopes for the future of our journals program. Sage established a taskforce in mid-2020 to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion within our research publishing. In 2021, we pledged to amplify diverse voices, increase representation, and heighten the visibility and impact of our research. We recognized that educating ourselves and others was vital to this commitment and have consistently enacted initiatives and policies to foster the continuous development of our journals.   

Now in 2024, we are witnessing the dismantling of DEI across higher education in the U.S., 127 active anti-trans bills in various stages of legislation (as of this writing), increased violence toward marginalized communities, and watch as similar headlines play out across the globe.

In a time of increasing uncertainty, we wish to make it abundantly clear: Sage Journals has and will remain steadfast in our pledge. We acknowledge, champion, and uplift all underrepresented communities. We sincerely appreciate the dialogue with researchers, many with lived experience, in continuously improving our processes and outputs.

We honor all experiences and expressions of identity. As an organization, we have made changes to our hiring practices to be more inclusive; introduced Dignity at Work clauses to support our staff; instituted a standard practice for Name Change requests; and we have added educational resources such as inclusive language guidance to help support authors in their writing. We also wish to highlight resources for editors on unconscious bias, language, and working with authors with disabilities.

We celebrate the increasing LGBTQIA+ diversity within staff at Sage as well as among our editors, authors, editorial board members and reviewers. Topics covering trans and non-binary communities are featured in over 6,500 articles  since we took the pledge in 2021, not to mention thousands of other published articles before this date. We are thrilled to share that Sage achieved a Gold Award and high ranking in Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, for actions toward building a working environment that supports and empowers LGBTQIA+ colleagues and customers.

We put together Sage’s first benchmarking report on author and reviewer demographics. This data is self-reported and collected within our peer review system, ScholarOne®. We retrieve anonymized aggregated reporting and will use it to inform our future approach and objectives in relation to DEI for our author and reviewer community; details of our findings will be shared soon!

We are exploring and launching journals, such as Neurodiversity and Equity in Education & Society, and we encourage submissions for new journal proposals on topics that serve this mission. You can read more about our proposal guidelines here.

We also initiated a pilot to support authors from under-represented countries by providing a select number of journals with free language editing waivers. Uptake has been so successful that we are expanding the pilot to include more Sage journals with our partner, Editage.

Lastly, we are collaborating with the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) to host a DEI best practice workshop for Editor and Editorial Board Member recruitment practices. More information regarding this event will be available in the coming weeks.

This names but a few of the thousands of actions taken by Sage staff, authors, editors, and publishing partners to enact our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We hope to continue and expand upon this work, and we are grateful for Sage’s commitment to our communities. We will continue to share our progress and invite any feedback on our journey thus far.