Demographic Information in Peer Review Systems: Challenges and Solutions
Insufficient representation among editorial leadership, editorial boards, authors, and reviewers remains a key barrier to promoting an inclusive and equitable scholarly publishing industry (Buchanan, et al., 2021; Hanson, et al., 2020; Roberts, et al., 2020; & Roh, et al., 2020). The systematic exclusion of groups, including Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), women, gender non-conforming people, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and members of the disability community from scholarly communications is harmful to both the integrity of the scientific review and publication process and to those individuals’ careers (Roh & Inefuku, 2016). Collecting, measuring, and using demographic data to improve these gaps in representation are important mechanisms for enabling an equitable and inclusive scholarly publishing environment. This session will offer perspectives from several scholarly publishing professionals about how their organizations are collecting and using author and reviewer demographic information to improve representation and inclusion in the peer review and publication process. Speakers will address questions around challenges and solutions for collecting demographic data; they will also offer actions for addressing, measuring, and mitigating bias in peer review to create a more socially just science. Demographics differ by country and region, and so this session will offer global perspectives on these issues.
Moderator
Rebecca (Becs) Kirk, PLOS
Speakers
Holly Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, Elsevier
Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, is the Vice President, Research Intelligence with the Global Strategic Networks team, currently on secondment with Strategy, at Elsevier. Her key role is giving voice to research and library leaders at universities, funders, and science policy organizations to help deliver the most impactful and inclusive research information solutions to support research globally. Dr. Falk-Krzesinski has been Co-chair of the Gender Equity Taskforce since its inception six years ago, advocating for greater diversity in the STEMM workforce, promoting sex & gender-based analysis in scientific research and scholarly publications, advancing journal editorial board diversity, and co-authoring Elsevier’s two global gender analytics reports. Dr. Falk-Krzesinski’s engagement activities include building partnerships around DEI issues with a focus on intersectionality – notably gender, race & ethnicity, and age. She has been leading Elsevier’s efforts, in collaboration with the 53-member, multi-publisher Joint Commitment for Action in Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing group, to develop a global framework to consistently collect gender identity and race & ethnicity data across scholarly communication and editorial workflow platforms. The intention is for this data to lead to actionable insight that advances diversity and inclusion and addresses bias, discrimination, and systematic inequities in research.
Prior to joining Elsevier, Dr. Falk-Krzesinski was a faculty member and administrator at Northwestern University. She helped launch the Chicago Collaboration for Women in STEM program to address institutional underrepresentation of women in both pre-and post-tenure faculty positions across STEM disciplines at Chicago-area universities and Department of Energy National Labs. For more than a decade, Dr. Falk-Krzesinski has been an influential contributor to a growing community of research development professionals and the international community of practice for team science and ‘science of team science’ field.
Dan Rogers, Oxford University Press
Dan Rogers is an editorial manager at Oxford University Press USA, where he oversees a team of project editors and editorial assistants working across a range of online research databases. Dan also serves as a co-lead of OUP’s US D&I committee. Since 2015, he has managed the Oxford Bibliographies editorial program and team and has overseen the entire editorial process across the product’s 43 disciplines. Dan started at OUP in 2012 as an editorial assistant and holds BAs in political science and journalism & media studies from Rutgers University.
Alex Mendonça, SciELO
Alex Mendonça has a degree in Digital Media with emphasis in Interface Design from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. He’s been working at SciELO Brazil since 2006 and has been part of its Coordination Board since 2014. In 2017, Alex joined the Technical Committee of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the initiative behind Open Journal Systems (OJS). He currently co-leads two important strategies in SciELO: the first is the transition of its indexed journals towards Open Science for an even more democratic access to knowledge, including overseeing the development of the SciELO Preprints server, promoting the adoption of open data and making the peer review process more transparent and open; the second is the implementation of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) policies both inside and outside SciELO and its indexed journals.
SSP is proud to be a founding member of the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications. Learn more about C4DISC.
