Expanding Inclusion and Training on Disabilities and Ethics

Expanding Inclusion and Training on Disabilities and Ethics

Disability Inclusion at Elsevier Simon Holt, Elsevier

Expanding Ethics Training for Student-Run Journals Emma Molls, University of Minnesota Libraries

GW Ethics in Publishing Conference 2021

Disability Inclusion at Elsevier: A Case Study Accessibility of commercial products has gained much traction over recent years, but creating a disability confident environment for employees within the publishing industry is equally important. The social model of disability states that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets and they can also be caused by others’ attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can't do certain things. People with either physical or neurological disabilities make up 15% of the global working-age population, according to the UN. However, employment opportunities for people with disabilities continue to lag behind those of the rest of the population by as much as 50%. This talk will explore how a grassroots movement is helping Elsevier to unlock the potential of this substantial segment of our workforce.

Simon Holt is a Senior Publisher at Elsevier. He is also Business Lead for Disability, spearheading Elsevier’s Disability Action Plan. He founded and co-chairs Elsevier Enabled, Elsevier’s disability employee resource group. He has contributed to the Scholarly Kitchen on disability inclusion in the publishing industry, and sits on the Publishers’ Association’s Accessibility Action Group. He lives in Oxford, UK.

Expanding ethics training for student-run journals The University of Minnesota Libraries (UMN) publishes six journals with editorial boards composed of graduate students and four journals with editorial boards composed of undergraduate students. Each journal varies between the level of faculty involvement, journal platform, and the demographics of authors and readers. This variety presented a challenge to the Libraries in offering consistent training and core curriculum for all journals, and resulted in offering only highly-tailored, individual-journal, editorial board-requested trainings each year. Beginning in 2018, the UMN Publishing Librarian has offered "publishing ethics training" to student journals. This training, which focused on publishing ethics, used a mix of COPE’s (Committee on Publication Ethics) core practices and, what Charlotte Roh calls, “bias and diversity within traditional publishing structures.” The training focused on the implications of running a journal, instead of focusing on the traditional procedural and functional editorial duties that earlier Libraries training provided. The training had editors consider ethical scenarios from the role of publisher, editor, reviewer, author, and reader. These scenarios were based on real examples from the global research community and all centered around larger issues of bias, racism, colonialism, and power structures. This training has been repeated each year since and has received positive feedback from student journal editors. This presentation will provide a framework for ethics training for student journal editors and will act as a call to action for other publishers who work directly with student journals.

Emma Molls (they/she) is the Publishing Librarian at the University of Minnesota. At Minnesota, Emma leads the Publishing Services Team to develop and manage open access publications created by faculty, students, and scholarly societies. Emma is an associate editor and advisory board member for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), editorial board member of Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, and board member at the Library Publishing Coalition. Emma's 2018 paper, co-authored by Kate McCready, "Developing a Business Plan for a Library Publishing Program" won the 2019 Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Library Publishing. https://www.lib.umn.edu/services/publishing