Our goals
We support the Sustainable Development Goals
As a leading social science publisher, we're passionate about leading change, and align everything we do with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
In doing so we publish research that influences thinking, changes policies, and positively makes a difference to lives beyond the walls of academia.
Our goals: Fairer society | Healthier lives | Responsible management | Quality education for all | Sustainable structures and infrastructures
Our intent
A facilitator of research impact rather than a publisher of articles
Emerald’s new strategy builds on our on-going commitment to promoting ‘real world’ impact from the research we publish and the services we offer. As a founding signatory of the UN SDG Publisher Compact, we are already focused on supporting the publication and impact of research and ideas aligned to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Our next step in this is to focus our work on five interdisciplinary goals, each aligned to multiple SDGs, to further support these goals and ensure that the research we publish can fully play its part in solving significant global challenges.
These five SDG-aligned goals will encompass existing Emerald publications but also look beyond the restrictions of traditional subject disciplines to address societal challenges. We will commission interdisciplinary, mission-led research aligned to these five core areas which inspires positive change in society and addresses real world problems. In refocusing more squarely on the UN SDGs, we aim to meet our goal of being a publisher who supports and promotes equality in its widest sense.
We are well known for developing deep, supportive relationships with our communities, through our publishing programmes and author services, as well as initiatives such as our Interdisciplinary Research Fund and support for researchers and institutions looking to create real world impact from their work.
Our well-established connections to a global community of researchers, practitioners and policymakers allow us to ensure that our publications can be both influenced by the real world at source through co-creation and co-production, and have ‘real world’ impact through engagement with a wide range of audiences and organisational partners.
We also want to move to an ‘open by default’ stance, supporting researchers, funders and institutions in exploring new commercial models, partners and sponsors to remove existing barriers to open publication. We feel that publishers have a significant role to play in visibly contributing to the development of an open and inclusive research culture, and are keen to help existing authors and researchers new to Emerald in navigating the options available to them, whether through publication in our award-winning books or journals programme, or through our innovative Emerald Open Research platform – we will work closely with you to find the right route and format for your work.
SDG Publishers Compact
We are proud to be a member of the SDG Publishers Compact, compromising 10 action points that publishers, publishing associations and others can commit to undertaking in order to accelerate progress to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
You can learn more about the Publishers Compact and how the scholarly community can embed SDGs into practice. You can also see what progress we are making on the Compact commitments.