In June of this year, Dr. Jol Babdor, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, received an email.
The email is the marketing manager of Springer Nature Publishing Company. Springer Nature is a household name in the scientific community. It publishes Nature and thousands of other scientific journals. It has branches in London, Berlin, and New York.
In the email, the marketing manager told Barberdo that he hoped to invite him to an event to share his “personal experience in academia, especially as a black person.”
The other party also emphasized that he does not need his self-introduction, “because you have published an article with us before.” Three years ago, Barberdo’s immunology paper was published in the journal Nature Immunology. He was First author.
Barberto’s black identity was learned in advance purely by accident. As far as Springer Nature’s thousands of other journals are concerned, they don’t know how many authors are white, how many authors are black or other races. However, this is a very serious problem in academic journals.
On October 30, an article published in the New York Times stated that many journals in the field of life sciences do not have a database that tracks the ethnic diversity of authors. According to research, maintaining ethnic diversity is an important factor in ensuring the quality of academic results.
Journal of Nature
When he received the email on June 16 this year, Barberdo was both excited and happy, but then he said, “My mood has become very bad.”
Barberdo is worried about becoming a “freak”. He wants to know how many black researchers the company has contacted, but the publishing company does not have such a database.
Barberdo has been working in the field of immunology for nearly ten years, but now it is still impossible to name some other black immunologists, which shows that black scientists have not received enough attention in the academic world. He felt that he had even become an abnormal character.
Barberdo’s experience has exposed the long-term neglect of ethnic diversity in academic journals.
Some researchers have estimated that there are about 30,000 academic journals worldwide and nearly 2 million articles are published every year.
Among them, Springer Nature is a relatively well-known scientific journal publishing group. Its predecessor, Springer, Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Press can all be traced back to the 19th century, and now this company’s publications lead the world academic trends.
Its publication “Nature” is one of the earliest scientific journals in the world. It was first published on November 4, 1869. Its founder, Joseph Norman Lockyer (Joseph Norman Lockyer), was one of the discoverers of helium.
Today, Nature is one of the few journals that still publishes first-hand research papers in the scientific field. However, there are no exact statistics on whether the author of the article is white, black or Latino.
In the media survey, like Springer Nature, institutions that did not track the author’s ethnic diversity include the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Public Library of Science, and the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences. , Cell Press, eLife, JAMA Network and PNAS.
Some other publishers stated that they are in the early stages of collecting these data or have begun to discuss this possibility, but cannot disclose more details at this time.
Some studies have repeatedly proved that diversity in multiple dimensions can improve the performance level and output quality of academic achievements from an interdisciplinary perspective. Experts say that only by diversifying researchers can people accurately capture the rich changes in nature and make innovations on top of them.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science publishes “Science” magazine. Image: Martin Shields/Alamy
Of course, there are also journal publishers that partially record data on the ethnicity of authors.
For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society, these two organizations provide data on authors and reviewers. It’s just that these two sets of data are collected through voluntary surveys by respondents, and they only account for 10% to 20% of the people who recently contributed to these journals.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science stated that two-thirds of authors and reviewers reporting their race to the association are white, while blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans add up to less than 10%. Pacific Islanders Together with Asians, it can account for about a quarter.
The Royal Society, headquartered in London, publishes a report on ethnic diversity every year. Among the authors and reviewers surveyed, about 75% to 80% are considered white, and the rest are classified as “blacks and minorities.”
Regarding the racial diversity of employees in the organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society and the American Public Library of Science provided their own data. Approximately 80% of the executives, editors, and consultants of the American Association for the Advancement of Science are white. Nearly 90% of the editorial board members of the Royal Society are white. Of the editors employed by the American Public Library of Science in the United States, 74% are white, and none are black.
Nowadays, scholars still value referrals if they want to publish academic results in top journals. Obviously, whites have more advantages in this regard. Blacks and Latinos may have a harder time entering the academic circle, and their achievements are harder to notice-such as Barberdo’s achievements, which will make the academic community not diverse enough.
“This is very worrying.” Columbia University neurologist Bianca Jones Marlin (Bianca Jones Marlin) said, “This does not involve outstanding results that should be respected.”
“It’s time to start this topic”
Three weeks before Barberto received the email, George Floyd, a black American man, was killed on his knees by a white policeman, causing protests from all over the United States.
After that, the anti-racism movement that swept the world also entered the academic world. Some journals published many articles promising to fight racism in the scientific field, but now it seems that they are not very aware of their own problems.
Dr. Camas of the University of California at Berkeley said that editors and reviewers need to create a level playing field. “People think this is just a superficial effort,” she said. “But in fact, if you take diversity, fairness, and inclusiveness seriously, the nature of the bonuses you offer will change.”
At present, academic journals may have just begun to respect diversity.
Alison Mudditt, CEO of the American Public Library of Science, said that they are currently prioritizing collecting more demographic data from authors. But she added that privacy regulations will inevitably hinder this process. These regulations will affect the way data is collected and stored, and the regulations in different countries are different.
However, some scientists are trying to encourage publishers to get involved and speed up the process. For example, Dr. Barberdo is leading the “Black Immunology Week”, which is a celebration of black immunologists and will be held at the end of November. In the early stages of the event, the team will contact journals and publishers and ask them to start collecting and reporting more diverse data.
Cited resource:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/science/diversity-science-journals.html