eLife Latest: Promoting equity, diversity and inclusion – December 2025 update

Earlier this year the ECAG gained a new member, Gang Xue. Gang obtained his PhD from Peking University, China, and is currently based at Harvard Medical School, US. We are very much looking forward to working with Gang as he brings a fresh perspective to our work on improving scholarly publishing in the life sciences and medicine.

The eLife Ambassadors have been busy attending training sessions since they started with us in March this year. So far, they have attended sessions on: effective leadership with Nadine Buckland; Open Peer Review training with PREreview; Community Engagement and Advocacy training with Dr Fátima Sancheznieto; an introduction to federated preprint commentary via Sciety and Bonfire Networks with Mark Williams; and Open Science and Global Research Culture training with Emmanuel Boakye of the African Reproducibility Network (AREN). Where possible, all training sessions are run twice to accommodate different schedules and time zones.

As mentioned in our previous updates, the ECAG have been trying to gain insight into the eLife peer-review process to monitor for any potential biases, as well as find ways to increase opportunities for early-career researchers to be involved in peer review. This included finding ways to help eLife editors identify suitable early-career reviewers in our system.

The preliminary findings from the observer programme, which in its initial stage focused on observing the consultation sessions (an essential element of the eLife peer-review process), did not identify biases in the system. However, a more in-depth observation of the process is needed, so the ECAG are working with the eLife Leadership team to allow its members to scrutinise the entire peer-review pipeline.

After a short hiatus, in September 2025 we restarted our data collection of editor demographic information. The goal of this activity is to monitor the make-up of our editorial boards in terms of demographic representation, such as gender and geographic location, to make sure they represent the communities that we serve. The next update is due out in the coming months.

We are also analysing the demographic make-up of our reviewer pool and plan to release an update on our findings soon.

Earlier this year, the Global South Committee elected its new Chair and Vice-Chair. After a successful tenure, Olavo Amaral (Chair) and Muhammad Maqsud Hossain (Vice-Chair) stepped down, and were succeeded by Humberto Debat (Chair) and Roseline Dzekem Dine (Vice-Chair).

Also this year, the Committee has worked together on their first collaborative publication around the role of the Global South in innovative scholarly communication. The paper has been published as a preprint and the Committee also wrote an accompanying Feature Article that has been published in eLife.

In the upcoming academic year, the Global South Committee is planning a number of online events that aim to showcase various open science initiatives in the Global South. The topic of the first event, planned for early 2026, will be announced soon.