How COPE is working on diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility
COPE is committed to creating an inclusive and equitable culture, where all voices are welcomed and heard, and difference is celebrated. Through our words and actions, we have been working – and intend to continue working – for real change.
As you may know, in March 2021 we established a COPE subcommittee on DEIA. It aims to develop COPE’s approach in DEIA, especially in support of individuals and groups who experience systematic discrimination or who have been historically marginalised. It also pushes for improved policies and procedures, aiming to ensure that COPE drives the conversation in DEIA within the wider publishing community. In March 2022 we issued a position statement which stated that
COPE is committed to creating an inclusive and equitable culture, where all voices are welcomed and heard, and difference is celebrated. Through our words and actions, we intend to work for real change and to nurture and represent broader and more diverse research integrity, publication ethics, and wider scholarly publishing communities.
Several of the subcommittee members also sit on other related bodies outside COPE, such as C4DISC, NISO, and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing.
Over the past year or so we have taken some bigger steps to embed DEIA matters at the heart of our work. We would like to share some of these with you and invite suggestions for ways which we can continue to build on our efforts.
First, at our residential Trustee and Council meeting in June, we engaged a professional trainer to challenge us on our understanding of systemic bias and inclusive practice. We were asked to identify key areas in our work where we encounter unconscious bias and to identify these in ourselves. We discussed COPE’s sphere of influence, and we formulated plans for action that we can embed at COPE.
We went on to identify ‘being more inclusive’ as a key aim to embed in the next strategic cycle. This is a big, general aim, however, and it covers many areas of our work. For example, we continue to expand our membership into parts of the world where we do not currently have much representation. Reviewing our membership criteria is part of an ongoing discussion and review on which we will continue to report. We are also aware that standing for election to Council can be difficult for people who may not have existing connections with publication ethics networks in regions such as the UK, Europe, or North America, and we are reviewing our Council application criteria and processes with the goal of making it more accessible for a broader pool of candidates. We want our leadership to genuinely reflect our members, their cultures, concerns and interests. We have a number of discussions open at different levels to ensure that we are taking best-informed steps to address these issues.
We are also taking positive steps to address DEIA matters right now. Our second move of 2023 has been to curate recommendations for inclusive language and inclusive thinking for use by our Education subcommittee in drafting our resources. We hope that these will also be useful in challenging our planning across all areas of our work. The recommendations are based heavily on the C4DISC Guidelines on Inclusive Language and Images in Scholarly Communication but we will continue to add more resources both as the C4DISC guidelines evolve, and as we encounter good practice in other settings. We already try to be accessible in our use of specific terms: our recent discussion document on Dealing with concerns about the integrity of published research, for example, has moved away from the term ‘whistleblower’ as this was felt to be a term not well understood outside English speaking countries. Our summaries of Forum cases also now avoid gendered pronouns and identifiers.
Our third positive step of 2023 is to plan a strand on DEIA in our forthcoming Publication Integrity Week which will run from 2-6 October. We will be releasing more details over the coming weeks, but in the DEIA session we hope to launch several new discussion documents on name change requests, historic content that is now deemed offensive, and author behavioural misconduct. These have challenged us to think deeply, sensitively, and collaboratively, and we look forward to opening up the discussion to participants. Editorials on diversifying editorial boards and creating a more trans-inclusive publishing world have been our most popular news items over the past three years, and this session will build upon that interest among publishers and editors.
A fourth priority is to improve the usability and accessibility of our online resources. We are doing this as part of a project to redevelop our website, launching in 2024. The current site doesn’t support the diversity of languages used by our members. For example, it doesn’t properly display names which include certain diacritics. So we’re changing our fonts to make sure that all our members’ names display as they should. We know that the website search isn’t as good as it should be, so this will improve on the new website. Curated collections on topics will guide users to our key resources in specific areas. We are also developing new guidelines for our staff and volunteers. This will include effective link text, use of images, and structuring content. This will ensure our resources are usable and accessible.
Finally, we would like to remind readers about an exciting initiative which COPE launched earlier this year in partnership with Crossref, DOAJ and OASPA, and. This is PLACE: Publishers Learning & Community Exchange. PLACE is designed as a hub for publishers to communicate with, and easily discover, resources from each of the founding organisations in one place. Its aim is to make publishing a more equitable space. We would encourage all readers to have a look at the site and register to make their contribution.
As we said at the outset, there is much yet to do to increase diversity and inclusivity both at COPE and more broadly in scholarly communications. However, even with these steps we hope that we are moving closer towards our goal to have all members represented accurately and sensitively. We welcome further feedback and suggestions on how to achieve this.
Alysa Levene, COPE Operations Manager
Further resources
- COPE’s Diversity policy
- Diversity and inclusivity COPE discussion document
- Diversity, equity and inclusion COPE webinar 2021
- Driving diversity, equity, and inclusion to shape the future of publication ethics COPE seminar 2021
- C4DISC is the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications
- NISO is the National Information Standards Organization
- You can read more about PLACE