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Equity, diversity and inclusion

Like many academic publishers, we are tackling long-standing challenges around recruitment and publishing workflows relating to who, how and what we publish and who has access to this. As part of the School of Advanced Study and the wider University of London, it’s important for us to support the promotion and facilitation of humanities research by ensuring that we publish a diverse range of voices, support global access to the work we publish for both academic and non-academic audiences and offer space for new authors and topics to emerge without barriers.

Open access and commissioning

A cornerstone of our publishing strategy is that our books programme is predominantly published open access and free to read, as a mechanism for driving diversity and inclusion for UoL Press.  Open access publication has proven benefits in increasing usage and access globally which is a priority for us, including higher usage in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.

Our core open access book series which form the majority of our book programme are free for authors to publish in and open to potential authors from any institution and region, which we hope will ensure a diverse range of authors, voices and perspectives within these series.

Our new publishing strategy, processes and policies have been developed with issues of equity, diversity and inclusion in mind and will continue to evolve over the next few years as we put these into practice. All editorial decisions are based on scholarly merit, and the origins of the manuscript (including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race or religion of authors) do not affect our decisions to publish.

We are also working to recruit diverse and inclusive advisory boards for our new book series which include the Reimagining Law and Justice series which specifically focuses on law and justice of all forms (whether that takes the form of racial, sexual, economic, environmental, intergenerational or social justice). We make best efforts to ensure international reviewer feedback is secured for all new proposals being considered, where this is possible.

UoL Press community and collaborations

We are a member of EvenUp, a collective of like-minded university presses in the UK and Ireland working together to drive change within our organisations in improving long-standing challenges with equity, diversity and inclusion within our own presses, in who we work with and in what we publish.

As part of this, we have a shared undertaking to do the following:

  1. Share best practice for EDI across presses.
  2. Commit to using either the AUPresses survey tool to collect demographic data, or our own surveys of comparable quality, in order to assess and understand areas in which we can improve, benchmarking across presses where appropriate.
  3. Create and share an ongoing programme of training and events, such as guest speakers, webinars, online symposia.
  4. Promote and demonstrate transparency and equal opportunity in recruitment and career progression processes in university presses, including: i) inter-press career mentorship for colleagues from under-represented groups; ii) listing salaries/salary bands on all entry level roles and on all recruitment advertising, subject to commercial or confidentiality requirements; iii) paid internships.
  5. Work together to raise awareness of career opportunities in our presses with groups that are currently underrepresented in scholarly publishing.
  6. Have a designated lead for equality, diversity and inclusivity in our organisations and have those leads meet regularly.

For more information about the formation and aims of EvenUp, please see ‘EvenUP:  A case study of building cross-publisher collaboration on equity, diversity, inclusivity and belonging‘ co-written by some of the founding members. 

Even Up logo in red text

The inclusion of our open access books on the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) means that they are also available through Research4Life, which provides low- and middle-income countries with free or low-cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content. Research4Life promotes to libraries in lower income countries in Africa, Asia, Pacific, Europe and Latin America, with the latter particularly important to us to facilitate wider access to our books focusing on countries within this region.

In our marketing and promotional activity, we have made several changes to improve accessibility features, including the adoption of camel case hashtags using capital letters to separate words to make them more legible (e.g., #OpenAccess rather than #openaccess).

We are also working closely with the EDI team within the University of London to ensure the Press aligns with the University’s wider Equality and Inclusion Strategy and principles.

We have developed our new website with accessibility considerations in mind. For more information about this, please see our Accessibility Statement.

UoL Press data, evidence and learning

Like many university presses with small publishing programmes (<50 books per year), we face challenges in collecting anonymous demographic survey responses from authors and reviewers. We are discussing this issue with similar sized presses within EvenUp, to see if collective action may be one way of tackling this issue. Demographic surveys are important tools in being able to benchmark activity and inform the evolution of our work on inclusion, so this is a key area for us to focus on over the next couple of years.

Future areas of activity

We are adding to this list all the time, but our immediate areas of focus include the following actions:

  • Work on our proposal submission process to capture preferred pronouns for authors and to create a new name change policy.
  • To develop new author guidance and a new workflow for asking authors to provide descriptive text for any images, figures, graphs and tables in their work to support alt text in all new books published from 2025 onwards.
  • A key priority for us over the next couple of years will be focusing on improving the accessibility of our new and backlist books, in line with industry best practice and changing legal requirements.
  • To explore the feasibility of adding alt text to images in previously published open access books and developing new workflows for not-yet-published books to include alt text as standard.
  • Continued participation in the EvenUp group of UK and Irish university presses working together to improve equity, diversity and inclusion in our organisations and our publishing programme and practices. As part of this, we’re an active member of the ‘Recruitment and Career Development’ working group within EvenUP and are working towards developing new internships aimed at offering experience for underrepresented community groups within publishing.
  • Work with similar presses within the EvenUP group to think about appropriate collective demographic author, reviewer and editorial board surveys and benchmarking activities.