Royal Society of Chemistry releases plan to diversify academic publishing

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has released its “framework for action” to improve the diversity of its editors, peer-reviewers, and authors across its more than 40 journals. The plan, released June 15, says that the RSC will take actions to raise awareness of unconscious biases when deciding who serves on editorial boards and as editors and reviewers. It will also aim to have editors choose referees from a wider pool of scientists, partly by encouraging authors to recommend more reviewers from underrepresented groups. To increase transparency and ensure each author gets the credit they deserve, the RSC says it will routinely publish author contribution statements. And it will develop a plan to demystify the scholarly publishing process for new authors, targeting underrepresented minority groups in particular. The new framework follows an analysis released earlier this year of more than 700,000 manuscripts and 140,000 citations in RSC journals (Chem. Sci. 2020, DOI: 10.1039/C9SC04090K). That analysis found that women chemists face subtle biases and barriers at every stage of the publishing process.