Examining diversity, equity and inclusion policies in academic publishing through a decolonial lens Open Access

Academic knowledge production and dissemination are heavily influenced by academic publishers. Researchers are often evaluated regarding their publication activities and, therefore, depend on prestigious journals curating and accepting their work for publication. This configuration of the academic evaluation system gives power to publishing organizations, not only market-wise (Van Bellen et al., 2025; Larivière et al., 2015) but also epistemically. Through their historical organizational development, including their scope, organizational policies, adoption of certain innovations while rejecting others and technologies, publishers have significantly shaped how and what kind of research outputs are being produced globally (Collyer, 2018). This consolidated power position faces critique by movements for decolonizing knowledge production.

Based on the concept of coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007), scholars of different disciplines have articulated criticisms of the academic publishing system. For instance, Naidu et al. (2024) have shown how scholars from the majority world need to adapt their epistemic practices to the requirements of Western-centric publishing criteria in global health research. Mokhachane et al. (2024) demonstrate auto-ethnographically how editorial evaluation practices and comments challenge their identities to fit into the epistemological framework of medical education research journals based in the minority world. Moreover, global publication and citation maps show a continued dominance of research output from European and North American institutions (Alperin, 2014; Goudarzi and Mewa, 2018). These studies are often tied to a call for decolonizing the academic publishing landscape.

On the other side, little is known about the positions of publishers themselves towards such decolonial critiques. While other “science reform movements” of recent years have been more successful in placing their concerns at the center of transformative dynamics in the publishing landscape, as for example the large-scale implementation of open access publishing pushed by the open science movement, debates about decolonizing publishing practices are rarely picked up. However, the past few years have seen an increase in policies related to “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” being adopted by publishers (see Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing, 2020). While these policies often promote aims that arguably could align with those of decolonization movements, such as fostering social and epistemic diversity, enhancing gender and racial equity, and including marginalized voices, they usually do not explicitly mention colonial continuities or epistemic injustice in relation to DEI concerns. Instead, DEI policies are mostly implemented under the conceptual umbrella of research integrity, publication ethics or open and responsible research systems without addressing fundamental power asymmetries (Labib, 2025).

In this article, I aim to examine these potential conceptual and practical discrepancies between movements for decolonizing publishing and publishers' adoption of DEI policies. Which diversity conceptions shape current DEI measures in scholarly publishing and to what extent do they engage with epistemic justice from a decolonial perspective? To answer these research questions, I first provide an overview of decolonial scholarship on academic knowledge production and debates about coloniality in research evaluation. Second, from the literature, I derive a decolonial conception of diversity that seeks to counter the universality of European epistemology. Third, I analyze how publishers specifically conceptualize diversity in their DEI policies in order to compare their conceptual characteristics with a decolonial diversity conception. Assuming that organizational policies are shaped by power relations and ideological patterns (Chtena et al., 2025), I enquire about the ideological frame of reference behind publishers’ DEI policies. I conduct a document analysis of publicly available policy documents, including mission statements, editorials and training materials posted on publisher websites. For the analysis, I use five hooks proposed by Steyn et al. (2018) in their Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework, who suggest to examine how organizations engage with ideas of society, change, difference, responsibility and the (colonial) past. I focus on three exemplary cases that represent different organizational settings, namely commercial publishing, non-commercial publishing and society publishing, in order to assess to what extent diversity conceptions may be influenced by such organizational frameworks. Fourth, I contextualize the findings within debates about decolonizing scholarly publishing and outline implications for the wider debate about diversity in research evaluation.

Finally, I elaborate on how organizational ethnography can contribute to the transformation of academic publishing toward epistemic justice by bringing decolonial concepts into publishing organizations. Carving out what is there and what is missing conceptually can subsequently pave the way for organizational ethnography to examine potential spaces and practices of decoloniality in academic publishing.

For several decades, decolonial scholars have critiqued the power relations shaping global academic knowledge production. Coined by Aníbal Quijano and elaborated by subsequent thinkers, the concept of “coloniality of knowledge” exposes how Eurocentric paradigms remain entrenched within scholarly systems (Quijano, 2007). Contemporary decolonial accounts demonstrate how this legacy marginalizes non-Western epistemologies, undermines local knowledge practices and legitimizes ongoing Western domination (Anzaldúa, 1987; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018). Emancipatory concepts arising from this critique advocate for epistemic justice by diversifying academic formats and languages, such as fostering publications in vernaculars, multimedia outputs and community-based research dissemination (Reiter, 2018; Nagar et al., 2019).

Despite these conceptual advances, existing research evaluation systems continue to reinforce Western-centric norms through grant allocations, tenure and promotion criteria, and publishers’ gatekeeping practices (Khan et al., 2021; Vessuri and Rodriguez Medina, 2022). The traditional model of scientific publishing privileges standardized formats, peer-reviewed journal articles and monographs, in English, upheld by rigid review procedures and quantitative metrics like impact factors and citation counts (Collyer, 2018). These standards are defended as objective by editorial staff who are often trained within Global Northern epistemic traditions, effectively shaping what is considered valid knowledge and whose voices are recognized ^[1].

In response, many publishers have introduced DEI policies that recommend gender and geographic representation guidelines for editors and reviewers, provide language-editing support for non-native English speakers, and offer reduced Article Processing Charges (APCs) for authors in low- and middle-income countries. While these measures address material inequalities, they rarely confront the deeper epistemic injustices that force scholars from the Global South to engage in constant “border-crossing” to adapt their work to Western standards, revealing a lack of reflexivity within editorial practices (Naidu et al., 2024).

Critiques regarding peer review's objectivity highlight how informal norms, affective dynamics and editors' social and epistemic frames influence manuscript assessment (Lamont, 2009; Hirschauer, 2014). Editorial boards remain predominantly white and male, based in the Global North, limiting space for alternative perspectives and perpetuating homogeneous knowledge systems (Liu et al., 2023). Studies across fields confirm that this configuration generates biases against underrepresented authors, despite assertions of scientific objectivity (Meriläinen et al., 2008; Bruna, 2017; Espin et al., 2017; Goudarzi and Mewa, 2018).

Building on Fricker's theory of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) and Science and Technology Studies' (STS) critiques of open science's limitations for genuine inclusion (Leonelli, 2022), a decolonial approach calls for a profound reconfiguration of academic publishing's foundations. Rather than simply adding marginalized voices, it demands addressing the colonial legacies embedded in evaluation systems and editorial norms to transform scholarly communication toward epistemic diversity and justice. In this study, I follow Labib (2025) in that conceptions of diversity that neglect coloniality reproduce existing power hierarchies rather than transforming them. Therefore, I lay out a decolonial conception of diversity, which I subsequently contrast with those diversity conceptions that constitute current DEI measures implemented in academic publishing.

Decolonial scholarship envisions epistemic diversity in terms of recognizing multiple ways of knowing that exist in the world, acknowledging their historical and current hierarchical power relations and problematizing them (Reiter, 2018). Such conceptions of epistemic diversity are thus closely related to questions of epistemic justice. Different epistemologies do not and cannot coexist in equal terms, while the universalization of Eurocentric epistemology systematically shapes knowledge production and evaluation. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020) defines epistemic justice as “liberation of reason itself from coloniality” (p. 17). According to the author, such liberation might lead to epistemic freedom, which they conceptualize as the “right to think, theorise, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism” (p. 17). This approach emphasizes that a decolonial vision of epistemic diversity requires what Chakrabarty (2000) has termed “provincializing Europe,” meaning that the specificity of the European perspective and experience of the world ought to be recognized as such and non-European knowledge systems acknowledged as equally meaningful.

Now, what can epistemic diversity in the sense of epistemic justice mean for research practice and evaluation? Through the liberation of reason, enabling researchers to think and write from where they are located epistemically, diversity could emerge in the presence of differently located researchers. However, Sikimić (2023) finds that: “[…] epistemic inclusion is not simply an additive process, it is rather a dynamic process that allows for the group knowledge to be greater than the simple sum of the individual stances” (p. 754). Thus, a more nuanced understanding of epistemic diversity is needed. Science philosopher Koskinen (2022) proposes the conceptualization of three dimensions of epistemic diversity: social diversity, cognitive diversity and diversity of values and interests. They define these dimensions as follows:

This threefold concept of epistemic diversity enables the consideration of cognitive, social and ideological implications in the analysis of diversity policies.

Having outlined a conception of epistemic diversity that draws on decolonial philosophy and the philosophy of science, I now turn to operationalizing this conception for the organizational context. In this, I lean on the CDL framework (Steyn et al., 2018; Vanyoro and Steyn, 2024), which translates a conception of diversity rooted in decolonial and intersectional theory into a guide to examine organizational culture. The framework draws primarily on the experience of post-Apartheid South Africa and grapples with the role of organizations in societal transformation towards social justice. The focus is on the discursive dimension of organizational culture, aiming to understand how members of an organization communicate their understanding of and attitude toward transformative dynamics that center around diversity. The authors have adapted the CDL framework for the examination of organizations in transformation to enable a productive engagement with the successes and deficits of an organization regarding their critical diversity literacy (Steyn et al., 2018).

They classify five discursive “hooks” of transformative change within organizations, each of which is usually invoked through one or several positive or negative scripts. The first hook is society as a field of engagement that can be viewed either as enhancing or constraining the aims of the organization. Organizations can either understand themselves as leaders of societal change or passive objects in it. Second, the past represents a hook that can give insight into how progressively or reactionary an organization engages with the past as determining the present. Members of the organization can see their role in correcting historical wrongs, or reject historical injustice as a matter of a past era. Third, the framework suggests examining how members of the organization speak about change, for instance, whether change is viewed positively or negatively, who takes leadership or how change should be managed. Fourth, responsibility serves as a hook that can show who is deemed responsible for transformation and what is expected of those in leadership positions, such as critical engagement with privilege. The fifth and final hook is difference, specifically how difference is valued and understood in relation to necessary power shifts, and whether difference is spoken about openly and respectfully.

These five hooks can serve as entry points to the production of complex social realities within organizations that may either reproduce historical injustice or counter it to develop positive scripts about justice-oriented change. DEI measures have been part of measures for organizational change for several years, and they may be discussed in multiple ways along the five hooks, depending on the organizational culture. Moreover, recognizing the power dimension of DEI measures in an organization implies addressing their institutionalized and enacted hierarchies, which Ahmed (2009) has elaborated in her works on institutional diversity efforts.

In the following, I provide a brief overview of the recent history of DEI measures and present three exemplary cases of publishers’ DEI policies. In this, the CDL framework provides guidance for the critical analysis of how the discourse around DEI is accentuated in such policies at the different case sites.

Concerns around DEI have a rather young history in academic publishing, at least in their current form ^[2]. Definitions of the concept(s) still remain scarce, and the lack of clarity about terminology often leads to confusion, with the terms diversity, equity and inclusion often being conflated (Loui and Fiala, 2024). In 2025, after the second election of Donald Trump as US president, the term DEI gained attention as the US government took drastic measures to cut funding for research related to DEI. The effects of these measures on the research ecosystem have been strong, with many large institutions abandoning their DEI measures. For academic publishing, it can be said that these political developments have certainly been discussed among affected actors, but so far have not led to visible drawbacks from DEI policies, at least among the largest publishers.

That said, the history of DEI policies in their current form in academic publishing officially begins with the launch of the Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing (JC) in 2020, initiated and coordinated by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It started out with 11 publishers signing a collectively developed statement and grew over the past five years to a total of 56 signatories, including major publishers such as Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage Publications and others (RSC News, 2020). The full list of signatories together with the commitment's text can be found on the website of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Since July 2023, the activities emerging from the JC have been coordinated by a Steering Committee consisting of five representatives from different publishers.

In the JC, the publishers agree to collaborate on the following four sub-themes to be addressed in academic publishing: (1) They aim to “enable diversity data” in order to understand the research community better, (2) develop diversity strategies to “achieve appropriate and inclusive representation of authors, reviewers and editorial decision-makers”, (3) create and share new and innovative resources on policies and measurements, and (4) “work towards the Minimum Standards for inclusion and diversity” defined by the following part of the commitment (RSC, n.d.). The six Minimum Standards represent a list of action points that echo the sub-themes, calling publishers to ensure the integration of diversity into their planning, to understand their organizational demographics, to acknowledge barriers, to define responsibilities, review appointment procedures and report on their progress. The aim of these standards is stated as to enable leaders in publishing to “evaluate their performance and progress on inclusion and diversity” on the one hand, and encourage stakeholders to “take achievable, specific action to improve inclusion and diversity” on the other hand. The JC website further displays a set of questions suggested to be used by publishers to collect demographic data of their authors and editorial staff.

Using the JC as a point of departure for further examining the conceptualization of DEI in individual publishing organizations, I chose three signatories for the case study: Springer Nature (SN), Public Library of Science (PLOS) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). These three cases represent potentially different organizational settings, with SN being one of the largest commercial publishers by portfolio and revenue, PLOS standing for non-commercial publishing with a focus on open access, and the RSC as the founding organization and representative of society publishing. By comparing these cases, I want to find out to what extent the organizational context does or does not influence the conceptions of DEI articulated in their policies. The cases were selected from the list of JC signatories with a focus on their prominence in recent debates about DEI in publishing, specifically in the natural sciences, and their anticipated relevance for future transformative dynamics of the publishing landscape in this regard. Due to its large portfolio of so-called “high impact journals,” SN is considered one of the most influential actors in the field. Their conception and practice of inclusive scholarly publishing may therefore affect how the entire industry develops in this regard. PLOS has been at the forefront of promoting open science in publishing and has repeatedly engaged in debates about DEI considerations, specifically in this context. The organization has also received particular attention for its launch of the journal PLOS Global Public Health in 2021, which accentuates efforts to promote equity in global health publishing. RSC, as the founding organization of the JC, was chosen due to this special role in this unique collective effort to advance DEI in scholarly publishing, assuming that this role may reflect in its conception of DEI.

In order to compare the different publishers' policies, I first consider the form and presentation of the policy, such as dedicated websites, editorials or blog entries, and subsequently apply the five hooks of the CDL to critically analyze the policy contents. I collected such documents containing reference to DEI policies by manually searching the websites of the publishers (all last accessed on 31 July 2025), screening them for DEI rubrics first and then checking their publicly available guidelines for editors and reviewers for DEI-related content. When available, I also included related blog posts and editorials that were linked on the website. Other publications on DEI that are not directly related to an organizational policy were excluded. In the selection, I did not aim for completeness but for achieving a sense of the underlying logics in DEI approaches that are specifically related to research evaluation. Overall, I analyzed 30 documents, including 9 documents from SN, 12 from PLOS and 9 from RSC. All of these documents have been downloaded and permanently stored and are available upon request.

I employed a reflexive thematic analysis with a combined inductive and deductive coding strategy (Kuckartz and Rädiker, 2023). First, I constructed five categories based on the discursive hooks of the CDL: society, change, difference, responsibility and past. After coding the data with the main categories, I subsequently conducted an inductive round of coding in order to grasp the nuances of each hook for each of the three cases and to let additional themes emerge that can indicate patterns and particularities across the cases. Inductive codes include the following main themes: conceptual complexity, training, monitoring, South-North learning and collectivity. Finally, I used the inductive codes as a point of departure for the comparative analysis, identifying themes that distinguish the three cases. Throughout the analysis, I followed the reflexive methodological paradigm of Braun and Clarke (2013, 2025), which enabled me to navigate between the decolonial concepts informing my analytical lens, the guidance of the CDL for the analysis of organizational change, the particularities of the different forms of data at hand, and my positionality. Especially, I continuously reflected on my own normative convictions and solidarities with movements for decolonizing knowledge production and evaluation that may affect my interpretative decisions. In my reflections on how to balance and engage them, I relied primarily on the CDL providing thorough guidance for the analysis of organizations and the above-mentioned literature on qualitative methodology.

In the subsequent sections, I will present the results of my analysis, citing individual documents by referring to the page title, respectively.

SN is considered one of the largest commercial scholarly publishers. The company was established in 2015 by the merger of four publishing houses. Today, SN manages a portfolio of over 3.000 journals and has a revenue of approximately 1,9 billion Euros per year (Springer Nature, 2025). Their headquarters are located in Berlin, Germany, and further offices in the US, UK, Netherlands and China.

With regards to the form and presentation, the publisher's website (https://www.springernature.com/) does not list a dedicated DEI page in their main menu. However, on their landing page, the rubric “initiatives” lists the title “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Research Publishing” which leads to a dedicated page under the menu sub-rubric “editors-resources and tools.” Here, editors are addressed directly and throughout the page, short introductory texts of two to three sentences guide the viewer through available resources. Notably, SN has a second website which is linked as “Corporate Site” at the bottom of their web page. On the corporate website (https://group.springernature.com/), they list “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” under the rubric “Taking Responsibility” in the main menu. On this page, they deploy statistics on their DEI-related achievements and separate the further provided information into three categories: organization, communities, and published content. Both websites include short statements and articles on DEI-related topics, data reports on demographic studies and educational briefings for editorial staff and editorial board members. In the analysis, I synthesize the contents of the two website branches and treat them as one corpus of SN's DEI policy.

Overall, SN’s materials demonstrate limited engagement with broader societal power structures. Their approach centers broadly on their mission to “open doors to discovery, enabling millions of researchers, teachers, clinicians and other professionals to access, trust and make sense of the latest insights so that together we can improve and enrich lives and help to protect our planet for future generations” (SN, “Taking Responsibility-organization”). They primarily frame the organization as a neutral facilitator rather than critically examining how academic publishing perpetuates societal inequalities.

The organization acknowledges that “as the global research community grows in geographic and cultural diversity, and Early Career Researchers, in the US, Europe and beyond, become the most diverse generation of researchers yet – it is imperative that stakeholders in research publishing reflect the make-up of the research community” (SN, “DEI in Publishing”). This suggests that they recognize the global research community as their societal context, which they perceive as growing, rather than recognizing historical marginalization and invisibilization of researchers. They further frame themselves as a rather passive reflection of growing diversity than as active drivers of societal change. In another example, their Global Research Pulse report on China states that „Chinese research outputs have been steadily on the rise, and a shift from quantity to quality is apparent” (SN, “DEI in Publishing”). While recognizing China as the largest contributor to global research output, the report singles out China as a curious case and the emphasis on quality concerns exhibits a rather paternalizing perspective than critically examining Western-centric publishing standards or geographical hierarchies (SN, “Global Research Pulse: China”).

The analyzed documents show minimal engagement in the historical analysis of inequality in academic publishing. While SN acknowledges ongoing underrepresentation, they frame these as problems to be solved rather than examining their historical roots. One notable exception appears in their case study on Nature’s guest editorial on racism in science which states: “Shortly after the tragic murder of George Floyd in 2020, Nature committed to producing a special issue of the journal on racism in science under the guidance of external experts and joined the #shutdownstem movement” and that “science needs to reckon with its history of racism” (SN, “Taking Responsibility-contents”). Here, SN shows critical awareness of the need for an engagement with the past and opens space for expert voices to do so. However, the analyzed material suggests that they do not generalize this approach to their overall DEI activities, making the guest editorial an isolated response rather than systematic historical analysis. For instance, their Editor Diversity report states, “We recognize that to facilitate change we must first understand our current editor demographics” (SN, “DEI in Publishing”), focusing again on present-day benchmarking without examining how historical exclusions created current patterns of underrepresentation.

SN's change strategy primarily employs what critical diversity scholars term “diversity work” (Ahmed, 2009) – creating policies, procedures, and initiatives that make diversity visible without necessarily transforming underlying structures. Their comprehensive framework includes recruitment modifications, training programs, and representation tracking, but does not entail collective reflection on power asymmetries or reference emancipatory sources. Their strategic approach, laid out in the analyzed data, includes “Share our DEI ambition,” “Data-driven” approaches and “Increase representation” (SN, “Taking Responsibility-communities”). These strategies are systematic, concrete and actionable. However, they clearly focus on social diversity as an end goal, instead of engaging with epistemic justice. They further developed “inclusive hiring checklists and training to support hiring managers to make fair decisions” and partnered with organizations like “Black Young Professionals Network” (SN, “Taking Responsibility-organization”). These interventions modify processes and feature marginalized voices, but do not question underlying meritocratic assumptions.

The documents display mixed approaches to responsibility allocation. They mainly position individual actors as key agents: “As editors, you play a pivotal role in championing inclusive practices” (SN, “DEI in Publishing”) and encourage employees to “set an objective focused on DEI, recognizing personal impact on positive cultural change” (SN, “Taking Responsibility-organization”). Additionally, their signatory status to the JC can be seen as an acknowledgement of organizational responsibility through institutional commitments and a systematic DEI approach. Their employee networks receive “robust governance structure, sponsorship by senior leaders and advice and resources from the DEI team” with “setting aside a percentage of work time for employees to use on network activity” (SN “Taking Responsibility-organization”). This demonstrates organizational support in the form of material resources while distributing responsibility across the organization.

SN’s approach to difference reveals tensions between celebrating diversity and maintaining institutional norms. They mostly frame diversity as functional and beneficial to the aim of scientific excellence: “Publishing research that is representative of the entire research community and reflects the growing diversity among researchers, enriches our ability to find solutions to challenges in research and beyond” (SN, “Taking Responsibility-contents”). Further, they advise aiming for diversity of reviewer pools, for instance by “Encouraging peer reviewer inclusivity at your journal” in the guide for editors-in-chief (SN, “Guide for EiCs”). The text calls on EiCs to foster a diverse pool of reviewers, explaining that “Actively considering a wider and more diverse reviewer pool improves our chances of finding appropriate and willing reviewers“ and benefits the journal “by increasing the visibility of the journals and by building relationships with new groups of researchers“ (SN, “Guide for EiCs”). Here, the business rationale becomes evident in the emphasis of benefits for the publisher, rather than for the community. Also, their list of categories to be considered when looking for diverse reviewers stands representative for a functionalist approach to difference:

Here and in other points of their materials, they invoke multiple dimensions of diversity, such as social and cognitive diversity, and often treat differences as individual attributes rather than examining how differences are constructed and hierarchized. On the other hand, their inclusive language guides and sensitivity reading materials suggest awareness of how language constructs difference (SN, “DEI in Publishing”). Yet, also here, the focus remains on technical communication improvements, instead of deeper epistemological deliberations, such as how particular assumptions shape editorial and review processes.

PLOS is a nonprofit publisher that operates as a tax-exempt charitable organization. In contrast to commercial publishers owned by shareholders, PLOS presents itself as a “community-owned” organization, founded “by scientists, for science.” The organization's mission is explicitly transformative, with a focus on Open Science advocacy as it aims to “drive open science forward with measurable, meaningful change in research publishing, policy and practice,” and it positions itself more generally as a “catalyst for better.” PLOS emerged in 2000 from an open letter signed by 34,000 scientists from 180 countries who pledged to boycott journals that didn’t provide free access to research within six months of publication. Their headquarters are based in San Francisco, USA and further offices are located in the UK, Germany and Singapore.

PLOS’s DEI policies are presented in multiple ways. Explicit references to DEI appear under their website's (https://plos.org/) rubric of “Sustainability”, in their blog, and in educational materials specifically directed to Editorial Board members and reviewers. The PLOS blog area hosts comments and opinions of organization members. As of July 2025, three blog posts could be found that directly relate to DEI, all published in 2021.

PLOS explicitly connects their understanding of DEI to a vision of open science addressing global research inequities, with open science being the central concept of their mission. Open science, in turn, is understood to embed scholarly communication into society and benefit “everyone, everywhere”: “We aim to learn from, and partner with, different communities to build an open science system that ensures everyone, everywhere benefits from unrestricted access and reuse of research and has the opportunity to contribute their knowledge” (PLOS, “Sustainability”). The stated openness to learning suggests sensitivity to a collective effort as opposed to mere action-oriented solutions. However, the communities addressed here remain unspecified, and no reference is made to structural injustice, thus remaining fully power-agnostic in their overall communicated DEI conception.

The analyzed documents show limited engagement with historical analysis of exclusion in academic publishing. In discussing their commitment to DEI, they reference “five key areas in which PLOS would redouble its efforts to make our journals a home for diverse voices” (Farley, 2021, p. 2), recognizing past shortcomings, but refraining from systematically examining how historical editorial biases or citation practices continue to shape contemporary publishing inequities. The page “Redefining Publishing” suggests engagement with earlier publishing paradigms that are to be redefined, but the text sticks to a rhetoric of problematizing current structural conditions, especially APCs, that are deemed exclusionary for “those in resource-limited settings, early career scientists and underfunded fields” (PLOS, “Redefining Publishing”). While thus acknowledging the role of unequal resource distribution, reflection on the historical emergence of these inequalities and questions of justice are missing.

Here, the PLOS blog area in particular provides insights into how change is discussed among organization members. As stated above, PLOS mostly combines procedural DEI interventions with broader open science innovations. On the procedural side, they report: “we’ve started to manually collate demographic data, while building new tech to streamline the process and ensure personal privacy is protected” (Farley, 2021, p. 2). On a content level, they present recently launched journals as new platforms for addressing global challenges through diversity:

Here, their emphasis on co-creation exhibits awareness of epistemic justice as it is also connected to the partnership with an African training organization, showing a serious commitment to South–North learning. Further, PLOS has implemented a policy against what they call “parachute research” or “neo-colonial science” in another 2021 blog post where they state their commitment to ensure best practices in research that benefit communities (PLOS, “Announcing new policy”). They again highlight their learning process through partnerships:

These recurring demonstrations of collective thought and partnership with historically marginalized actors indicate a progressive understanding of DEI-related organizational change, at least at the level of South–North collaboration. A more robust assessment of the justice-oriented character of these initiatives needs to be established through further ethnographic research, since the documents do not specify concrete strategies for ensuring epistemic justice.

Responsibility for DEI at PLOS is distributed across multiple stakeholders with organizational oversight. On the individual level, editorial board members are explicitly charged with DEI responsibilities through the PLOS Code of Conduct, where they are called upon to: “Be aware of your own bias, including unconscious bias, and how it might affect your work. Be inclusive and encourage others to be as well. Take action to prevent bias toward any individual, group, or region” (PLOS, “CoC for EBM”). On the organizational level, they have established governance structures to monitor progress: “A newly-created Steering Committee will oversee all PLOS' DEI-related initiatives, and we'll continue to report our progress to you” (Farley, 2021, p. 3). Furthermore, PLOS is a signatory of the JC, which indicates their commitment to institutional accountability. Concrete strategies on how to hold individuals and the organization accountable, for instance, how the Steering Committee will work with organization members, are not specified beyond the announcement to report publicly. Further progress updates since 2021 were not found during the data collection of this study.

In the analyzed documents, PLOS operationalizes difference primarily through demographic tracking and targeted initiatives, yet with limited intersectional analysis. Their progress report notes: “Goal: Increasing the number of historically underrepresented external contributors (e.g. authors, editors, reviewers) and strategic partners” (PLOS, “DEI goals”). They report success in specific demographic representation, particularly referring to their newly launched journals: “we're pleased with our progress to create representative editorial boards for our newly launched journals,” and highlight the success of their journal PLOS Global Public Health because “they managed to assemble this truly global and diverse editorial board” (PLOS, “DEI goals”). In their celebration of diversity in a “global” sense, it is not clear what is meant by that in this post and who are the people on the editorial board. They refer to a video link in which the journal's editors discuss their mission. While further ethnographic research could examine such video statements on specific DEI interventions, the case of PLOS Global Public Health still seems to stand out as a particular case in the overall DEI policy of PLOS. More generally, their approach largely treats difference as categorical rather than exploring how multiple identities intersect. The materials focus on counting representation rather than examining how social categories are constructed and hierarchized within scholarly publishing systems.

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) traces its roots to the founding of the Chemical Society in London in 1841, later merging with the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the Faraday Society and the Society for Analytical Chemistry to form today's RSC in 1980. From its role in promoting chemical knowledge and professional standards, the RSC has expanded into a global learned society and leading publisher in the chemical sciences. Today, the RSC publishes over 70 peer-reviewed journals covering the full spectrum of chemistry and related interdisciplinary fields. Their headquarters are located in two offices in London and Cambridge, UK, with further offices in the US, China, Germany, India and Japan.

Their DEI policy is not explicitly stated as such on their website (https://www.rsc.org/). DEI-related resources can be found under the rubric “Policy and campaigning” in the sub-rubric “Science culture”. Here, they provide definitions for each term: equity, diversity, inclusion and inclusiveness, as well as implicit bias. Further, DEI-related campaigns are listed, and further links lead to other resources, including mainly commitment statements, but also guidelines for organization members. At the center of the DEI policy is a 14-page document on their “Inclusion and Diversity Strategy” that can be downloaded in PDF format.

Based on the analyzed material, the RSC positions inclusion and diversity as essential to its role in the chemical sciences community. In the foreword to the Inclusion and Diversity Strategy 2025, Acting Chief Executive Officer Helen Pain expresses concern about data showing that “there are many groups of people who face barriers to entering and staying in chemistry in the UK, and they are under-represented compared with the general population” and that “the issues of bias and discrimination are real, current, and harmful; that these biases are baked into the systems and institutions that chemistry is built on” (RSC, “2025”). She thereby sets the tone for defining the primary societal context of RSC's DEI efforts, which is the UK, and establishes that DEI issues concern the systemic level and frames DEI as a cross-sector societal imperative. Later on, the strategy document points to a more global understanding of the community that RSC serves:

They herein specify the societal sectors they consider relevant for their DEI efforts. They also proclaim that they aim for “empowering and influencing partners,” without further elaborating on where they are located or problematizing power asymmetries between them (RSC, “2025”).

In their definitions of each term included in DEI, the organization remains ahistorical in its framing. History is not mentioned, nor is justice a relevant dimension of these definitions. Instead, they reference the Equality Act 2010 as a legal framework to introduce a list of “protected characteristics” of an individual, based on which any harassment would be considered unlawful (RSC, “Science culture”). In their strategy document, they refer to their own recent historical data: “Our Diversity landscape of the chemical sciences report, published in early 2018, provided evidence that the chemical sciences were not fully representative of the diversity of wider society”; however, the 2025 strategy does not seem to pick up on the gaps identified earlier to measure progress, but turns to focus on more data-gathering as central to the DEI program:

The following text does not refer back to the 2018 report, but continues to emphasize that “more data and evidence are needed to inform and underpin our work” (RSC, “2025”).

Several drivers of change emerge from the documents. In their policy for inclusion and diversity in peer review, for instance, RSC displays both a market logic and research quality-oriented argument for diversity: “Having a large, diverse peer review network can reduce the time it takes to find the right reviewer for a submission and help expedite publication times. It also lessens the risk of implicit biases having an effect during the assessment stage” (RSC, “Peer review”). Moreover, the organization presents itself as a “thought leader” that distinguishes itself through its lead on the JC, which is considered an impulse for change on a collective level:

Other aspects of their envisioned change include “supporting individuals to fulfil their potential and, in doing so, ensuring the retention and development of diverse talent across the chemical sciences” via “career paths, role-modelling, and representative publishing” (RSC, “2025”). RSC thus pursues change on both the individual and structural level, involving individual members of the society and also stakeholders of the broader publishing landscape in their DEI activities. Their strategies refrain from mentioning power asymmetries, but emphasize overcoming given inequities for the sake of better science.

Responsibility for DEI at RSC is distributed across stakeholders and anchored by leadership. As pointed out above, the Acting Chief Executive Officer has given the foreword to the strategy document, making it the only case in the analysis that displays a consolidated DEI policy document signed by a leading member of the organization. Furthermore, an emphasis is put on increasing social diversity, framing organization members as potentially embodying and executing diversity: “A key step for action is to recruit and train reviewers, editorial board members and associate editors from diverse groups to better reflect the community we serve” (RSC, “Peer review”). Notably, as the founding organization of the JC, the RSC stands out as also allocating responsibility horizontally, assuming its role as advocate for DEI in the broader publishing landscape and calling upon fellow publishers to engage in DEI efforts.

RSC articulates difference through multiple, intersecting dimensions yet often relies on categorical metrics. Especially their definitions of equity and diversity heavily rely on social categories which they draw from the Equality Act 2010 and subsequently expand in their diversity definition, adding categories that eventually list as follows: age, gender reassignment, being married or in a civil partnership, being pregnant or on maternity leave, disability, race (including color, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, career path and stage, communication style, education, experience, first language, geography, job sector, socioeconomic status and political affiliation (RSC, “Science culture”). While being concrete and apparently aiming at comprehensiveness, the organization fails to contextualize what they mean by broad categories such as “experience” and how these categories inform their conceptions of both equity and diversity. Their approach to difference, therefore, remains opaque, mostly alluding to unspecified “underrepresented groups” in their strategy and refraining from reflection on how the listed categories are constructed and intersect in researchers' real lives.

Bringing together the results of the analysis, the comparison of the three publishers’ DEI approaches can shed light on potential similarities and differences across different organizational contexts (see Table 1).

The case of SN provides encompassing materials on DEI on their two websites, including data from studies on their organizational demographics, training resources for bias mitigation among editors and elaborate partnerships with community networks. The documents demonstrate sophisticated awareness of diversity challenges and systematic responses, yet remain largely within what could be termed “diversity management” rather than critical diversity literacy (Ahmed, 2009; Steyn et al., 2018). SN explicitly recognizes that “diversity is a strength, that inclusion requires commitment and that representation matters” (SN, “Managing Peer Review”) and, according to their policies and reports, they operationalize this recognition with financial investments and procedural changes. However, the analysis through the lens of CDL has shown that their framework aligns more closely with what Ahmed (2009) calls the “business-case” diversity arguments than with social justice frameworks that question the underlying power relations in academic knowledge production.

The second case, PLOS, provides resources for editors and publicly reflects on their DEI progress on their blog and in editorials. They focus less on reporting data, studying their organizational demographics or developing training materials than Springer Nature. They have made the first steps toward establishing organizational partnerships with Southern actors for DEI-related change. The evolving nature of such collaborations requires further ethnographic research to determine their potential for organizational transformation in the sense of critical diversity literacy. As of now, PLOS seems to lean toward a diversity management approach with an emphasis on statements and public reporting, rather than fundamentally reflecting on their organizational configurations and review models. The establishment of PLOS Global Public Health certainly represents an exceptional case in the academic publishing landscape, whose impact on organizational structures remains to be seen.

The RSC, as the third case, stands for an explicitly data-driven, process-oriented approach that addresses existing structures while acknowledging the discipline's deeper power dynamics on a surface level. They emphasize data-gathering on structural barriers for “underrepresented groups” and suggest social categories to inform definitions of equity and diversity, including race, ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic background, among others. Similar to SN, the RSC combines market and research-quality rationales to justify its vision of change. In contrast to both PLOS and SN, RSC actively calls for collective DEI efforts and understands its role as advocates for a more inclusive academic system, specifically in chemistry. They have demonstrated their commitment to this role via their leading role in the establishment of the JC. While they commit to measuring the impact of their measures and monitoring the diversity data of their organization, they do not engage with ideas of epistemic justice in their DEI conception.

In summary, all three cases exhibit a conception of DEI rooted in the business case rationale, relying on diversity management tools and measures, and operating based on the recognition of existing social inequalities that affect the academic research system, without questioning their historical rootedness and the continuous impact of power relations. Considering the five hooks of the CDL, the scripts that the analyzed documents display with regard to their view of society, the past, change, responsibility, and difference can largely be interpreted as positive in terms of their recognition that change needs to happen, while largely ignoring the role of power, history and politics. In this, all three cases tend to focus on representation as a key dimension of promoting DEI. Critical social theorists point out that while efforts to increase representation of excluded people can be crucial for recognition (Lamont, 2024), they ought to be tied to reflexivity and the renegotiation of power relations in order to contribute to decolonial change in knowledge production (Sambaiga, 2025; Labib, 2025). In combination with the CDL, these perspectives can show ways for publishers to interrogate their own organizational hierarchies and Northern positionalities with the aim of aligning their ongoing DEI efforts with existing proposals of epistemic justice.

Some differences emerge from the comparison, putting SN as representative of commercial publishing at the forefront in terms of the scope of their DEI-related initiatives and educational materials. The availability of financial resources, thus, may influence the possibilities of an organization to engage in DEI efforts, adding to and maintaining an aggregation of conceptual DEI materials. From a decolonial perspective, however, the volume of resources dedicated to DEI does not equal the level of critical diversity literacy, as the underlying logic of coloniality remains unchallenged. They are also the only publisher of the three that conceptually separates their DEI approach into multiple dimensions, i.e. organization, communities and published content. This could indicate a more nuanced understanding of diversity in which there is potential for critical perspectives to address each dimension with concrete action steps. At the same time, there is a risk of measures being isolated in the sense of diversity management if there is no reflection on how these dimensions are interconnected.

Further, PLOS stands out with regard to its emphasis on partnerships with Southern actors and its stated openness to learn, thus showing a potentially organic conception of DEI that can evolve throughout its collaborations. This seems to be connected to their disciplinary scope, for instance, with global health publications in their portfolio bringing new visions of DEI into the organization. Further ethnographic inquiry could explore the extent to which such visions are able to disseminate into the organization and institutionalize more critical diversity approaches.

Finally, the RSC is distinctive in its understanding of collective action being crucial for systemic transformation. Such a vision seems more natural for a society publisher that inherently operates across institutions and networks of stakeholders, much more than commercial and non-commercial publishers may need to in order to serve their intended communities.

Coming back to the question of whether current conceptions of DEI in academic publishing entail transformative potential for epistemic justice in academic knowledge production, I derive from the analysis and the comparison of the three different cases that, at least on the conceptual level, the deployed DEI strategies fall short of challenging colonial continuities in publishing organizations. Even though publishers engage in comprehensive efforts for DEI-related reforms in their organizations, their proclaimed goals are set within the logic of existing power hierarchies that remain largely unchallenged by currently employed measures. While some measures show tendencies toward more critical conceptions of diversity, such as engagement in South–North learning partnerships or mobilization of collective action, it remains unclear to what extent these measures affect larger organizational structures and how they engage with power redistribution in practice.

The analysis further suggests that the organizational context matters less than the ideological framework, as commercial publishers, non-commercial publishers, and society publishers all operate within liberal diversity paradigms that, according to CDL theorists, antagonize real change by channeling resistance into manageable reforms rather than challenging fundamental power relations in knowledge production systems and exploring new, emancipatory forms of publishing. However, in this study, I have focused exclusively on publicly available materials through which the publishers present themselves to the outside, leaving internal organizational policies unexplored that could potentially give deeper insight into the particularities of each organization's operations and visions of change. Here, organizational ethnography can provide fruitful approaches for researchers to enter different publishing organizations and critically document and analyze the translation of DEI conceptions into practice. Further research can also uncover those practical dimensions of research evaluation in publishing that directly influence the emancipatory potential of diversity conceptions, for instance, in the daily work of editors evaluating manuscripts and communicating with different actors involved in publishing procedures.

After all, aligning DEI measures with the aims of decolonizing knowledge production and evaluation requires publishers to be held accountable for their claims of an equitable curation and dissemination process. Decolonial scholarship can deliver fruitful ideas for publishers to equip their staff and those in their orbit with the necessary degree of sensitivity for questions of epistemic justice. The publishing landscape can also learn from already existing initiatives that integrate a critical conception of diversity into their change strategies, for instance by focusing on power-sensitive communication between editors and contributors (Ciancolo et al., 2024), or opening dedicated spaces to other languages than English (see, for instance, http://decolonialsubversions.org). Fostering not only critical diversity in representation, but also in practices of research evaluation, may open up new pathways for different knowledges to enter the academic sphere in the spirit of epistemic justice.