We are committed to advancing more equitable and inclusive global publishing and to supporting the meaningful interventions needed to enact essential change. We believe the scholarly books and ideas entrusted to us can achieve enduring impact when there is a greater diversity and inclusivity of voices collaborating in their creation, at every stage of the publishing process.
In 2018, with the unequivocal support of our Board of Trustees, we launched a holistic strategic initiative in equity and inclusion. The strategy is to leverage our unique resources, the strength of our creativity and collaborations, and our historic excellence to shape a future of greater diversity of representation of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, abilities, and socioeconomics in ourselves and in our publishing.
In prioritizing our actions in support of this strategy, we have begun the work of reckoning with the limitations of our history; most specifically, what and who have been excluded. As publishers, we are entrusted daily with the privilege of actualizing the words of others. But in the work of equity, inclusion and belonging (E, I & B), we need to actualize our own words. Our mission statement commits us to 鈥渆mbrace the highest standards of scholarship, inclusivity, and diversity in our publishing.鈥� To fully realize these ambitions, we need to illuminate and eliminate our own biases, systemic exclusion, and to actively question the heuristics and norms that a long, successful history can create.鈥�
Our efforts to create an inclusive environment and publishing program are symbiotic. Our initiatives are ongoing, and the success of our efforts will be measured in impact: in the fortitude of our collaborations and in the relevance and resilience of our publishing.
We will use this space on our website to share highlights of our initiative; this is not a comprehensive list of actions and decisions. We also encourage reading and listening to our Ideas and News features. In each of our publishing endeavors we are working collectively to prioritize equity and diversity. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions, and seek your ongoing support as colleagues, authors, readers, listeners, and other vital partners for change.
Investing in Change
We recognize our privilege as an independent, non-profit scholarly press supported by an endowment; with the support of our Board of Trustees we have sought ways to invest this privilege in expediting change, including:
- av福利社 Publishing Fellowship, for which we will recruit, train, mentor, and collaborate with ten individuals from communities historically excluded from publishing, and in doing so hope to launch publishing careers for these fellows.
- Global Equity Grants, which support Press authors from underrepresented communities with additional resources for the preparation and publication of their work. Nearly 100 grants have been offered since launch of the program, subsidizing the costs of childcare, permissions and illustration preparation, media coaching, additional marketing, and research and engagement related travel.
- Book Proposal Development Grants: Supporting Diverse Voices, launched in February of 2021, offer historically excluded and underrepresented authors the opportunity to partner with book and writing coaches at earliest stages, from idea to proposal. Our coaching partners in this endeavor share our commitment to diversifying scholarly publishing. While all grant recipients will submit proposals for consideration following coaching, we realize we won’t be able to publish all of the projects, and the grants will therefore support books in the wider publishing community, in addition to expanding av福利社’s publication program.
Creating a More Inclusive Culture and Collaborations
Governed by our Code of Conduct created in 2018, we strive for a culture of affirmation, one in which colleagues of all lived and professional experiences thrive in collaboration.
Staff Training and Awareness
Partnering with the Cornell Interactive Theater Ensemble and The Equity Paradigm (TEP), and , we have invested in all-staff learning about the power of story and empathy, anti-racism, decentering white supremacy, the LARA method, neurodiversity, and implicit bias in hiring. We have supplemented the expertise of these partners with the Emtrain Learning Management system, (including bystander training and annual anti-harassment training), funds for individual acquisition of anti-racism resources and neurodiversity resources, and peer-to-peer resource sharing. We have also embraced the ethos of peer review and commissioned an equity assessment by TEP that has been formative in creating E, I & B priorities and tracking the impact of our actions.
Staff Recruiting and Retention (See Careers for More Information)
- Increased entry level salaries by 30% over five years and assessed all salaries for gender equity.
- Converted to paid internships,. Hosted for students of African American, Asian, Latinx, and Native American descent. Partnered with Princeton University to host ASAP interns, and with the , a program that has been formative in diversifying race, class, and ethnicity of early career publishers. We also support the Tutorial Scholarship and provide an internship for Oxford Brookes publishing school.
- Introduced and expanded paid maternity and paternity and family leaves.
- Established staff-choice hybrid organization in 2021, in which each staff member regardless of position or years of experience determines their optimal site of work.
- Added two weeks of winter and summer collective breaks and one wellness day a month for all staff.
- Added paid community service day for all staff.
- Added meeting-free Fridays and weekday guardrails for email
- Added E, I & B goals to every staff member’s annual performance and development review process.
- Implemented inclusive staff listening tools (climate and culture surveys, suggestion box, pulse surveys, peer to peer praise).
- Added a student loan repayment program.
- Diversified our benefits.
Leadership
- Assessed the gender demographics and realigned management demographics to match gender demographics over a three-year period.
- Created Managers Council to empower and facilitate cross-departmental collaboration.
- Expanded leadership-specific coaching and mentoring.
- Added E, I & B goals to every manager’s annual performance development review goals and assessment.
- Created infrastructure for E & I leadership:
E & I Council: Appointed and chaired by Press director and chief of staff, with responsibility to embed E & I in each area of our publishing and collaborations, includes co-chairs of E & I Culture Committee.
E & I Culture Committee: Staff-led, all-staff optional opportunity to lead peer-to-peer knowledge growth focusing on lived experience and its potential to inform our collaborations; the committee led our first all-press E & I roundtable conversation.
Employee Resources Groups: Staff initiated and led, including POC, early career, mentoring, and work-life integration, which helped create and refine our flexible work hours policy.
Community
- We became a partner in the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) and contributed to their .
- We are also a founding member of , a consortium of UK and Irish publishers committed to equity, diversity and inclusivity in our workspaces, in who we work with and in what we publish.
- We joined the inaugural cohort of contributory publishers to the founded by the American Political Science Association.
Centering Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in Our Publishing
Just as our scholarly authors do to their diverse subjects they research and write about, we have brought rigor, intention, and resources to studying the patterns of publishing.
Partnering with Princeton University鈥檚 Graduate School, we have hosted for several years. Their systematic studies of the demographics of Press-published authors and those under contract鈥攐ur future鈥攈ave resulted in data that is unequivocally motivating. Our editorial department has embraced the opportunity to use this knowledge as a catalyst for actions, including:
- Opt-in author and reviewer identity questions to generate greater transparency of publishing demographics and benchmarks for change.
- Partnership appeals to series editors and authors for diversifying referral and author recruiting networks.
- Expansion of reviewer networks to include assistant and associate faculty.
- Expansion of acquisitions and commissioning initiatives to more diverse institutions and networks.
Communicating Change
- Internal Press communications include a new staff newsletter created by our Community Building Committee (PUPDates); quarterly Director鈥檚 reports to the Board of Trustees shared with all staff; open discussion sessions with the leadership team; departmental presentations on E, I & B initiatives and experiments; staff-led opportunities to share lived experiences and stories; and an internal site that collects all of our E, I & B actions and learning.
- External communications include Ideas features, News posts, presentations on E, I & B and our publishing priorities to scholarly and industry organizations worldwide; social media channels, and this E, I & B page, which will be used as a dynamic space to share the evolution of our intentions, actions, and impact.
Our Commitment to Accessibility
We are actively working to make our content in all formats as accessible as possible to the widest possible audience, including people with print disabilities. We guide ourselves by the standards and specifications defined by, including W3C鈥檚 EPUB 3.3 Recommendation and . Learn more about our commitment to accessibility.
A Timeline of Ongoing Initiatives
Our work toward a more diverse, equitable, inclusive community of belonging at av福利社 has been a strategic initiative since 2017, with full support of the staff and the Board of Trustees. Learn more about the first five years of building diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
We exist within communities actively reckoning with their exclusivity鈥攑ublishing and higher education both. Publishing statistics reported by and the Lee & Low Survey make acutely clear the need for ambitious and purposeful industry transformation. We fundamentally believe that scholarly nonprofit publishing has a mission to do right, and only in fulfilling that mission can we ensure the continuing relevance and resilience of av福利社 publishing, a responsibility entrusted to us for over a century. We thank our collaborators for sharing our commitment to the next century, one of inclusion and equity in all of our ambitions and endeavors.