The following joint commitment has been issued today by the Royal Society of Chemistry. eLife is pleased to be a signatory.
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The Royal Society of Chemistry has brought together 19 publishing organisations to set a new standard to ensure a more inclusive and diverse culture within scholarly publishing.
As a group, we acknowledge that biases exist in scholarly publishing and we commit to scrutinising our own processes to minimise these. We will pool our resources, expertise and insight to accelerate research culture change.
Collectively we will:
- 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. - 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. - 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. - 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.
By working together, we will become more effective in driving positive change within scholarly publishing – and we invite and encourage other publishers to join us.
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