Emerald partners with the Royal Society of Chemistry in a joint commitment for action on inclusion & diversity in publishing

19th June 2020

We are delighted to announce we have partnered with the Royal Society of Chemistry and other publishing organisations to set a new standard to ensure a more inclusive and diverse culture within scholarly publishing.

Now more than ever, we believe that research is most impactful when a diverse range of voices are included, and this partnership shows our continued commitment to driving change and standing up for the under-represented.

The joint initiative commits to acknowledge that biases exist in scholarly publishing and to scrutinise publishing processes to minimise these.  We will pool resources, expertise and insight to accelerate research culture change, with a plan of action based on four key areas:

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.

We look forward joining forces in order driving the much needed change together.

Find out more on the Royal Society of Chemistry's website