Implementing DEIA Training for Editors in a Library Publishing Program

Annual Meetings, Professional Development

By Amanda Karby and Charlotte Roh

At the 2025 AUPresses Virtual Annual Meeting, we presented “Implementing DEIA Training for Editors in a Library Publishing Program,” an overview of the University of California (UC) eScholarship open access journals publishing program and the launch of training webinars for our editors, beginning with an overview of DEIA issues in scholarly publishing.

About eScholarship

Established in 2002, eScholarship is part of the California Digital Library (CDL), the University of California’s systemwide digital library. We provide an open access publishing program and repository services aimed at supporting the scholarly communication needs of the UC academic community. We publish over 90 Diamond Open Access journals spanning many disciplines, and our open access repository is the destination for postprints, preprints and working papers, electronic theses and dissertations, and conference proceedings.

Values Alignment and Resources

The official policy of the University of California is that diversity, inclusion, and accessibility are integral to its excellence and its core mission. Under the auspices of the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication, eScholarship team members Catherine Mitchell and Charlotte Roh—along with UC librarians Kerry Scott, Allegra Swift, and Anneliese Taylor—created a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Scholarly Publishing resource to provide information for authors, journal editors and peer reviewers, publishers, and librarians to reconsider their roles within scholarly communication and the ways they might advance diversity, equity, and inclusion within their own practices. This resource is endorsed by the UC Academic Senate, and thus stands as an articulation of our institutional values. It also served as  the foundation for the “DEIA in Scholarly Publishing” webinar we developed for our journal editors.

DEIA Overview Training Content

The learning objectives for the DEIA in Library Publishing webinar are as follows: first, that attendees understand the ethical issues related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in scholarly publishing, and second, that attendees explore ways to address these issues in their publications. In each of these topics we also purposefully reference the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Scholarly Publishing resource.

The slides address five topics.

1) Diversifying editorial boards. In this section, the first slide asks “Why does diversity matter on editorial boards?”, and the second includes suggestions and resources. This two-slide structure is replicated throughout the webinar’s five topics, and the associated script includes further information as well as practical suggestions; for example, we suggest to editors that the first step here is often simply taking an audit of who has served previously on their publication’s editorial board.

2) Diversifying author pool. The second topic asks, “Why diversify your author pool?” and includes “Things to consider for diversifying your author pool” slides. We introduce concepts like cumulative advantage, and  share the UC-wide resource on DEI in Scholarly Communication, plus these resources:

3) Peer review. In “Peer review isn’t perfect,” we point out the problem of unpaid labor and the importance of community-led scholarship. (Our webinar includes three scoping reviews: one in the previous, author pool section, one in this section, and another in the following section on citation bias.) One of the ideas that we want to convey through sources like these is that the research on these topics is already extensive, and the need for improvement is established.

In this section’s second slide, we reference the UC-wide resource once again, and we mention that we offer additional training for editors in these topics. We created this  webinar as  an overview; for real change to occur, we understand that we will have to work more closely with individual journal staffs to address each of these topics directly. Here are a few key resources:

  • Lee, C.J.; Sugimoto, C.R.; Zhang, G.; and Cronin, B. (2013), “Bias in peer review.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64: 2-17. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22784
  • Aczel, B.; Szaszi, B.; & Holcombe, A.O. “A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review.” Research Integrity and Peer Review 6, 14 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2

4) Inclusive language/style guides. One of the practical ways in which the publishing industry as a whole has responded to calls for DEIA is through changing the standards for language through style guides. Typically journal editors are only thinking about citation formatting, but we want them to realize that citations can be, in fact, political and that, because of this, major style guides have made updates to be more inclusive. Here are some of the resources we share in this section:

5) Accessibility. The accessibility section of the webinar has three slides, the first addressing how “Accessibility is a right, not a privilege” and the others demonstrating how online content can have “born-accessible” features and introducing tools for accessible PDF practices, as most of our journals publish PDF files. Federal and state websites need to comply with these accessibility standards by April 2026, and that includes our eScholarship journals. Even if attendees were previously unaware of this deadline, this topic actually raises the most questions and interest—they very much want to make changes to make things better. This interest enables us to direct them to our targeted workshop on accessibility. (We also offer workshops on peer review, ethics, and other key topics.) We encourage them to consult the following resources:

Conclusion

After each webinar, we send out a follow-up email to its attendees, thanking them for joining us, linking them to our presentation slides and notes, encouraging them to share with the rest of their journal team, and asking them to fill out a short Google Form seeking their feedback. The form asks  if the webinar material was clear and engaging and if the session was a good use of their time, and offers space for comments and questions.

We’ve received positive responses, demonstrating that our editors are sincerely invested in learning about these topics. Editors have also been kind and grateful in sharing comments, which has been encouraging—these things are always nice to hear, but they also show how the webinars are changing the way our editors are thinking about their work.

For those who are interested in viewing the full presentation, the slides are available at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8kj892xg.

Amanda Karby is a Publications Manager for eScholarship at the California Digital Library, University of California. She previously held positions at Michigan Publishing and the MIT Press, and she is a current member of the Library Publishing Coalition’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee.

Charlotte Roh is a Publications Manager for eScholarship at the California Digital Library, University of California. Her work is at the intersection of scholarly communications and social justice. She is currently on the SPARC Steering Committee, and she is past convener of the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC).