Michael K.
Seery
School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh, David Brewster Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3FJ, UK. E-mail: michael.seery@ed.ac.uk
“We found that there is a complex interaction of subtle biases occurring throughout the publishing pipeline, which combine to put women at a disadvantage when disseminating their research.”
This finding about publishing in the chemical sciences necessitates close scrutiny of author actions and editorial practices in each of the chemical sciences sub-disciplines, including our own practices in Chemistry Education Research and Practice (CERP). Below I set out a response to the report including actions that will arise. Before I do so I want to state that I think the Society should be acknowledged for publishing this analysis of their own journals – and indeed I join their call for other major publishers to do so – and to state that the views expressed below are my own as Editor of CERP, and not those of the Society.
The key message in this Editorial is that CERP will be enthusiastic participants in any activities the Society proposes to eliminate gender bias in publishing. We will seek to lead our peers by showcasing exemplary editorial practices, both in the managing of submissions as well as documenting and explaining aspects of the publishing to our community. CERP has already a long tradition of improving awareness about various aspects of publishing, with a series of articles from our previous Editor, summarised in a recent Editorial offering guidance for those looking to submit manuscripts to this journal (Seery et al., 2019).
The analysis summarised in the report was conducted on the Society's full suite of journals of which CERP is one. 47 journals are named in the Supporting Information to the corresponding research article (Day et al., 2019), and at the time of writing, data on individual journals is not in the public domain. Therefore it is not possible to label any specific conclusions to this journal. However, on the basis that a gender bias was found for the complete suite of RSC journals in this study, and gender biases have been found in other large scale studies (Freeman and Huang, 2015; Elsevier, 2017; Murray et al., 2018), this Editorial is written with the hypothesis that there is a gender bias in publishing. Furthermore, while outside the scope of this Editorial, the report is set in the context of two previous reports published by the Society: “Diversity Landscape of the Chemical Sciences” and “Breaking the Barriers”, and readers are encouraged to read those reports to gain insight into systematic barriers in place for women in the chemical sciences (RSC, 2018a, 2018b). Even if individual journal data were to show CERP having better metrics than those achieved overall by other journals in the suite of RSC publications, the wider landscape shows there is no room for complacency.
• Submission: Authors submit a manuscript to a journal.
• Initial Assessment: Editor makes an initial assessment to consider whether the manuscript is within scope and whether it is of sufficient quality and selects one of two options:
– Assignment to Associate Editor: The manuscript is deemed by the Editor to be within scope and of sufficient quality (or potential quality) to undergo peer review. At CERP, Associate Editors may also conduct their own pre-screening judgement.
– Reject without Peer Review: The Editor decides that the manuscript is not within scope or is not of sufficient quality (the context of what is meant by “quality” is defined elsewhere (Seery et al., 2019)).
• Peer Review: Associate Editors select two reviewers, including up to one of the author-suggested reviewers where appropriate.
• Decision: The Associate Editor considers the two reviews and also their own judgement of the manuscript and selects one of the following options. In some cases, a third review may be sought to inform the decision:
– Minor Revision: The manuscript is accepted in principle with minor changes or additional clarity and/or detail required. The revision is not usually sent to reviewers again unless there are specific details that warrant reconsideration.
– Major Revision: The manuscript needs substantial revision and will be sent for review again on resubmission.
– Reject and Resubmit: The manuscript needs substantial revision usually involving additional data or reconsideration that is not feasible within the timeline of major revision (3 months).
– Reject: There is a (usually unanimous) decision that the manuscript is not suitable for CERP because of either scope or quality.
• Accept: After any required revision cycles, manuscripts are accepted and passed to production for publication.
Category | Main finding |
---|---|
Population | Female population in study: 35.8% |
Female first author: 36.9% | |
Female corresponding author: 29.2% | |
Involvement in review process | Female reviewers: 24.3% |
Female editors: 40.5% (including in-house RSC editors for certain journals) | |
Manuscript success | Manuscripts that progress to peer review |
• Female corresponding author: 69.78% | |
• Male corresponding author: 70.74% | |
Overall acceptance rate (including pre-screening) | |
• Female corresponding author: 47.38% | |
• Male corresponding author: 50.1% | |
Citations | Average citations for: |
• Papers where corresponding author is female: 5.9 | |
• Papers where corresponding author is male: 7.2 | |
Citations by: | |
• Female corresponding authors to papers that have female corresponding authors: 20.6% | |
• Male corresponding authors to papers that have female corresponding authors: 17.8% |
Action 1: Continue the policy of explaining guidance for quality in editorials to empower authors to submit high quality work to CERP.
Manuscripts that are rejected without peer review are slightly but significantly lower for female corresponding authors, and journal specific information will be valuable in monitoring this process. An Editorial challenge in pre-screening is balancing the desire of authors to receive a critical overview of their work from peer reviewers against not demanding too much of reviewers in the extent of work asked of them in completing a review. However, there is certainly potential in offering authors some more detail on pre-screening decisions by way of specific editorial feedback. This is often the case now – especially when manuscripts are within scope and show potential for the quality required (and indeed in these cases we do, on balance send manuscripts out for review, or at least a second consideration by an Associate Editor) – but there is potential for improvement in the standard pre-screening decision email to offer more guidance to authors that is journal specific.
Action 2: Monitor pre-screening rates for CERP and act to improve feedback on pre-screening.
Action 3: Prepare an Editorial on the provision of useful and constructive reviews; monitor statistics of reviewer selection and set out standards for high quality reviewing.
As well as these actions that we will consider locally within the CERP editorial processes, the Society has committed to four key areas of action across all of its journals:
(1) To increase transparency by publishing annually an analysis of authors, reviewers, and editorial decisions by sub-discipline;
(2) To recruit and train reviewers, editorial board members, and associate editors to reflect the current gender balance of the research community;
(3) To provide training and resources to empower editors to eliminate bias;
(4) To encourage intervention to drive change in the academic publishing industry more generally.
The report concludes with the statement from Professor Melinda Duer and Dame Athene Donald which sets out a challenge to all of us in this community:
“Our challenge to publishers, editors and referees alike is to do more to check at every stage that there is no lurking bias, implicit or explicit – and to think about the knock-on effects, for gender equality, of everything they do.”
The Society brings together all of the journal editorial boards in February 2020 at its Editorial Symposium where we will hear how practical actions can begin to address the findings of this report, and the actions proposed in this Editorial will be presented to the journal's Editorial Board. CERP will seek to be at the forefront of activity that contributes to eliminating any bias in publishing, both in our own journal, and as a means to demonstrate exemplary practice for other publications within the RSC suite of publishing as well as the wider publishing landscape.
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2020 |