Taking Responsibility for our Role in Creating a Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Journals Publishing World
By Martha Avtandilian
When SAGE Publishing was founded, we committed, as a business and as an ethos, to the lifelong pursuit of an improved global society on the easel of science. An undeniable basis of doing so with success is to challenge the systems that create barriers – most urgently, for marginalized and underserved communities.
We acknowledge the role we play and the responsibility we hold – not only in making representation and scholarship more diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI), but in ensuring we do so in a manner that is just, mindful, and moral.
In pursuit of this growth, in 2020 we launched four working groups to guide DEI efforts within our journals research program. Our goal was to identify the four most important meridians of influence that don’t just focus on any one endeavor or event, but instead futureproof our efforts by establishing strategic groups (or “streams”) that focus on persisting, continuous, and active work.
The Content Stream aims to ensure that the content published in our journals is free from bias, is representative of our diverse readerships and that the language used in published articles is inclusive and sensitive to our communities. We also recognize that some of our historical content does not meet today’s standards on diversity and inclusivity and need to acknowledge that.
Some of the projects the content stream is working on include:
· Reviewing our language style guides for authors and copyeditors
· Working with COPE to develop policies around sensitive content in our archive
· Addressing bias within peer review
· Addressing citation inequality
The Representation Stream’s focus is on improving representation of diverse voices in our journal publishing program, by increasing diversity of editors, editorial boards, authors and reviewer pools. This is very much a shared endeavor between SAGE and our publishing partners, and we acknowledge the wider systemic issues in Higher Education that affect the academic pipeline. We believe diversity, equity and inclusion are central to the duty of our staff and editors, and we are already working closely with many journal editors to expand gender, geographical and ethnic representation within editorial boards. In the first half of 2021, we are working on resources to support editors further, including in the following areas:
Increasing awareness of potential bias (including unconscious bias) within peer review
Supporting researchers writing in English as a second language
Embedding inclusive language in journal submission guidelines and other material
Supporting authors with disabilities or neurodiverse conditions.
We are also reviewing our editor recruitment practices to ensure they are inclusive and attract applications from a broad range of candidates. Current open editor positions can be found here.
The Application Stream orbits the dissemination of research published within our journals to the wider audience of researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and the public in order to influence policy, practice, and public awareness. The key goals of this stream are expanding and creating avenues for amplifying underrepresented, silenced, or otherwise marginalized voices and creating a new space for voices and research that highlight issues and accomplishments of race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, gender, religion, and more. This stream’s current projects include introducing new resources and tools to share new and existing content, including trialing Plain Language Summaries for journals that publish scholarship that affects underserved communities and areas of study to increase accessibility to current research and establishing a blog series that spotlights DEI-centered work within journals.
Lastly, in order to increase diverse representation in our journals program, our Data Stream seeks to establish a strong evidence base to track our progress and introduce transparent data collection policies that will allow us to identify inequalities and track DEI initiative progress. The stream’s work will establish a foundation of evidence for setting new targets for DEI initiative and identifying ways we can better empower authors and research to make change. The writ-large goals of this stream are to introduce transparent data collection policies that will allow us to identify inequalities within our journals and track the diversity of our editors, editorial boards, reviewers, and authors.
Our commitment towards diversity, equity, and inclusion of course does not end with these four streams. Most recently, with support from our LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Groups, SAGE’s Research Integrity Group has formalized a policy to allow for post-publication name and pronoun changes for article authorship, which establishes that authors can request a name change for any reason, including gender affirmation. This is one of the many ways we strive to work with internal stakeholders, like our ERGs, and external partners, like our journal editors and societies, to assure the door is always open in this, our natural home to research.
About the author
