Inclusion and diversity one year on: our work with world’s leading academic journals

Publishers with portfolios in excess of 15,000 peer-reviewed journals have now signed up to our joint commitment for equality in publishing.

Just over a year since we launched it, our initiative to eliminate bias and discrimination in publishing has welcomed its 47th signatory – already including half of the world’s academic journals.

Our Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing was launched after extensive research found several barriers to research publishing across genders and race. That was echoed in studies by a number of partner organisations, including publishing giants Elsevier, who became one of the early supporters.

Publishers with portfolios in excess of 15,000 peer-reviewed journals have now signed up to our joint commitment for equality in publishing

Just over a year since we launched it, our initiative to eliminate bias and discrimination in publishing has welcomed its 47th signatory – already including half of the world’s academic journals.

Our Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing was launched after extensive research found several barriers to research publishing across genders and race. That was echoed in studies by a number of partner organisations, including publishing giants Elsevier, who became one of the early supporters.

Some of the latest signatories, Springer Nature, De Gruyter and Taylor & Francis Group, come as we are releasing the first widely-agreed minimum standards for inclusivity in scholarly publishing, upon which the industry can build a more inclusive future. This was one of the original aims that the group agreed as a priority to proactively eliminate bias.

Dr Helen Pain, Royal Society of Chemistry CEO, said: “When we launched our Joint Commitment, we did so with the intention of making a far-reaching and meaningful change not only to publishing, but to the lives and careers of those people who may have been overlooked in the past through no fault of their own.

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