Stuart King

Annotations

1. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Report on the actions arising from the work of our Working Group focused on bias in the peer-review process

   In the first half of 2022, we will be progressing two projects put forward by our Working Group focused on addressing bias in peer review.

   These are: designing a data-analysis pipeline to aid routine monitoring and piloting giving eLife editors personalised feedback on their editorial activities and decisions.

   These and other actions are outlined in our January 2022 update.

2. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Publicise the criteria for participation on our editorial board (carried forward from January 2021) Launch the call for self-nominations for editors from Latin America Monitor and report on the outcomes of the open call

   As described in our January 2022 update, this work has experienced delays but we have now added additional resources to see that it is accomplished early this year instead.

3. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Report on the response rates of our author and reviewer demographic data

   As shared in our January 2022 update, so far, almost 85% of authors submitting a manuscript have opted to answer at least one of our updated demographic questions.

   Based on data provided by over 1,200 authors who submitted a paper during the second half of last year, 44% of submissions are made by first authors, while 54% are made by last authors (including co-first and co-last authors respectively).

   33% of submitting authors are women, 65% are men and 2% are non-binary. 13% of authors submitting to eLife identify as a member of an underrepresented or minority group based on their race or ethnicity.

   Similar questions in our anonymous reviewers’ survey have been answered by about only 18% of respondents. This combined with the low overall response rate to this survey means that this approach would be expected to provide demographic information for just over 3% of reviewers.

   As such, we are pushing forward with a new approach to collect this data as described above.

4. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Via a designated subcommittee, review the makeup of our Governing Board, members’ term limits and processes for adding new members

   A subcommittee has been formed and the review described is in progress.

5. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Identify a way to ask the optional demographic questions to authors who submit directly from preprint servers and not via our submission system Identify a way to collect demographic data from reviewers that can be linked to the manuscripts to aid in our work to understand and address bias in peer review

   We have identified and are readying to implement a mechanism to collect demographic data from reviewers via our peer-review management system.

   If this approach proves successful, we can use the same mechanism to collect similar information from authors who submit to us directly from preprint servers,

6. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Offer more training opportunities for early-career reviewers

   More training workshops, based on materials developed in the course of the Open Reviewers programme, were conducted with early-career reviewers in the second half of 2021 in partnership with PREreview.

7. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Identify the steps required to make a publicly available list of our early-career reviewer pool to support wider use Recruit early-career reviewers in Medicine through an open call (carried forward from January 2021) Monitor our editors’ engagement of early-career reviewers from the pool

   All members of our early-career reviewers have now been contacted to obtain consent for their names to be publicly shared in this manner and confirm that they are still eligible to be included in the pool.

   The work to make the list itself available and improve the visibility of the pool will begin this quarter.

   The other two objectives listed here have been postponed until the above work is completed.

8. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Work with PREreview to engage early-career researchers in Africa with reviewing preprints

   eLife and PREreview are now working with AfricArXiv, Eider Africa and the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) on a new peer-review training programme for early to mid-career researchers in Africa.

   Details can be found in this press release published in December 2021.

9. eLife Latest: July 2021 update on our actions to promote equity, diversity and inclusion

   Report on results of our open call in Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics

   The outcomes of our open call for early-career reviewers in Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics were shared in October 2021.

   More detail can be found here.

10. eLife Latest: The diversity of our editorial community

    an optional online form

    A copy of the questions asked via this form can be accessed here .