All academic journals and presses need to think about what structures are limiting access and hindering the full participation of scholars of color. After all, how academic journals structure their practices reflects their values.

Our continued belief in this meritocracy has very real outcomes for women in science; without change to this system, efforts to recruit and retain women in the sciences will fail.

An author, literary agent, marketer, publicist, editors and booksellers talk about how race affects their careers — and the books you read.

Miller-Kleinhenz et al. highlight the risk of science and academia’s general neutrality to discussions around race and social justice. Their collectively-developed course represents a framework to begin these important discussions and improve conversations on race in academia.

Both Web of Science and Scopus are critical components of our research ecosystem, providing the basis for university and global rankings, as well as for bibliometric research. However, both are structurally biased against research produced in non-western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities and social sciences. This viewpoint emphasises the damage that these systematic inequities pose upon our global knowledge production systems, and the need to research funders to unite to form a more globally-representative, non-profit, community-controlled infrastructure for our global research

Higher education has a problem. It’s called White supremacy.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, white people in cities across the global are using their privilege to stand up
and with Black and Brown people to protest systemic and institutional racism. If you watch some of the peaceful
protest footage in cities like Minneapolis and New York, white people are literally using their bodies as shields to
protect Black and Brown residents from the police. Other white people are marching in front of Black and Brown
residents during peaceful protests. All I could think about while watching was, “I needed some white people like
that at St. Olaf.”

In June of 2021, Lorisia MacLeod, a librarian from the James Smith Cree Nation, published an article called “More Than Personal Communication: Templates for Citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers,” presenting citation templates to recognize Indigenous knowledge in academia. Because both APA and MLA style guides encourage writers to cite any oral communication that does not have a written or audio recording as “personal communication,” Indigenous oral teaching gets put “on the same footing as a quick phone call, […] while even tweets are given a reference citation.”

Wane examines African indigenous knowledge as a form of epistemological recuperation for peoples of African ancestry. Furthermore, he dissects the academic imperialism that currently controls and shapes the social, economic, and political expressions of Africans and then create indigenous tools for teaching, learning, and educating future generations.

In 2019, Black sociologists are still less likely to get published in discipline-specific peer-reviewed journals, less likely to hold tenured or tenure-track positions at predominately white institutions, and less likely to be awarded tenure than white sociologists. This is, in part, because the traditional positivist approach to sociology favors an epistemology rooted in world building from a white perspective and subsequently prefers white sociologists to do that work. Overvaluing empirical research emphasizing objectivity through marked distance between researcher and participants, in the tradition of the natural sciences, also undervalues the importance of investigators’ perceived connections to marginalized communities in the reliability of collected data, and the use of qualitative methods to scientific study. This conceptual paper connects public discourse on the devaluing of “me-search” done by Black sociologists, research studying communities of which the principal investigator is also a member, to professional advancement data to explore the economic penalties for Black sociologists whose “me-search” expands the limits of what is useful and noteworthy in the production of sociological knowledge while simultaneously impacting their professional advancement in the discipline. Patricia Hill Collins’ (Soc Probl. 33: S14–32, 1986) epistemological stance laments the positivist approach and attempts to move sociological research of the oppressed away from the gaze of the oppressors. The academy’s colonial focus on “objectivity,” and subsequent third person research writing, maintains a white normative framework for the entire discipline. But in the twenty-first century, a disciplinary focus on research about marginalized identities by white sociologists inherently devalues the scientific validity of research on Black communities by Black researchers, aiding in racialized gatekeeping in sociology. Low numbers of tenured Black faculty, promotion policies focused on the number of peer-reviewed publications, and low journal publication rates for Black researchers highlight the negative impact on professional outcomes for Black sociologists and illustrates a perpetual devaluation of the perspectives of Black researchers.

Although science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors remain male dominated, women’s greater enrollment in STEM is one of the greatest transformations to occur in U.S. higher education in the past half century. But to what extent have women’s gains in STEM enrollment translated to greater parity in labor market outcomes? Although the challenges women face in STEM have been well documented, questions about the influence of gender for STEM employment and earnings differences remain. In the present research, the authors use data from recent birth cohorts in the American Community Survey between 2009 and 2018 (starting with the first year college majors were available in the survey) and a reweighting technique from labor economics to track the evolution of gender inequalities in STEM employment and earnings inequality among STEM work at the onset of labor market entry. Even among a sample expected to produce highly conservative gender differences, sizable gender inequalities in STEM employment are observed. The authors show that despite women’s gains in STEM education among recent cohorts, women with STEM degrees face employment prospects in STEM work that more closely resemble those of men without STEM degrees than men with STEM degrees. Moreover, although modest gender earnings gaps eventually emerge for those without STEM degrees, large gaps occur at the outset of employment for STEM workers. Thus, although STEM education provides important opportunities for women’s earning potential, it may be less effective in itself to address significant gender inequalities among STEM employment.

While it is recognized that language can pose a barrier to the transfer of scientific knowledge, the convergence on English as the global language of science may suggest that this problem has been resolved. However, our survey searching Google Scholar in 16 languages revealed that 35.6% of 75,513 scientific documents on biodiversity conservation published in 2014 were not in English. Ignoring such non-English knowledge can cause biases in our understanding of study systems. Furthermore, as publication in English has become prevalent, scientific knowledge is often unavailable in local languages. This hinders its use by field practitioners and policy makers for local environmental issues; 54% of protected area directors in Spain identified languages as a barrier. We urge scientific communities to make a more concerted effort to tackle this problem and propose potential approaches both for compiling non-English scientific knowledge effectively and for enhancing the multilingualization of new and existing knowledge available only in English for the users of such knowledge.

We are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat. Social stratification is particularly visible in times of crisis and the current pandemic has made manifest many social distinctions. One of these is the disproportionate amount of domestic labor done by women: women do more parenting in partnered heterosexual relationships and are more likely to be single parents. Shelter-in-place orders have sent more than 1.2 billion learners across the world from the classroom back into the home and they are met by their mothers, as women are more likely to have shifted to remote work. The scientific workforce has moved into the home, where the unequal distribution of domestic labor follows societal norms (even in academic couples) and where male faculty are four time more likely to have a partner engaged in full domestic care than their female colleagues. The context suggests that women scholars may be more likely to face an intensification of domestic responsibilities during confinement and, consequently, a reduction in scholarly production.

Given the significant uptake in the incentives and use of preprints and registered reports, a few early analyses have used those to document the phenomenon: women economists were shown to have a drop in production of preprints and registered reports in March and April and were less likely to work on COVID-related topics. Similarly, over the last three months male authors on arXiv and bioRxiv increased at a greater rate than women authors. Our own analysis builds on data from 11 pre-print repositories and three platforms, for a total of 327,902 documents. This work demonstrates the disproportionate effect on early career researchers (using authorship position as a proxy for seniority in science).

We have created this dynamic and interactive website to allow policy makers, scientists, and administrators to monitor this evolving situation. As of May 18th 2020, the data covers 284,842 pre-prints and registered reports, which will be updated on a regular basis.

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing.

from the financial barriers that restrict access to scholarship, library-based publishing has emerged as a site of intervention for many academic libraries. In publishing open access scholarship, often at no cost to authors, libraries provide an alternative to commercial publishers that charge exorbitant subscription fees, article processing charges, or both. The discourse around open access, however, has largely focused on eliminating financial barriers to access. This colorblind approach to transforming scholarly communications fails to consider the obstacles faced by those seeking to publish knowledge by and about communities of color.

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)—an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

This study addresses stratification in the global higher education research community and the changing geography of country affiliations in six elite journals. The distribution of country affiliations is analyzed from a longitudinal perspective (1996–2018), and full-time and part-time authors in the field are contrasted. The prestige maximization model and principal-agent theory provide the theoretical framework for the study, which examines 6334 articles published in six elite journals in the context of 21,442 articles in 41 core journals. The findings indicate that about 3.3% of academics have authored at least five articles (full-timers). These authors constitute the publishing core of the research community, while the 80% who have authored one article (part-timers) constitute its periphery. Higher Education (HE) and Studies in Higher Education (SHE) emerge as elite global journals, with an increasing share of non-Anglo-Saxon authors. Previously globally invisible countries became visible almost exclusively through HE and SHE. Global trends include the diminishing role of American researchers and the increasing role of researchers from Continental Europe, East Asia, and the cluster of 66 “other” countries. The single biggest affiliation loser is the United States, which had 42.5% of country affiliations in 1996–2003 but only 26.9% in 2012–2018. This reflects both the increasing share of non-American affiliations and the increasing yearly volume of HE and SHE publications, in which US academics tend not to publish massively.

Research shows that an oppressive classroom environment impairs learning and academic performance for students with oppressed identities. Less research examines faculty perceptions of their classroom, but such research could reveal whether an oppressive environment impairs teaching effectiveness. Although the literature shows that women faculty of color spend a disproportionate amount of time teaching, researchers have not systematically examined their classroom experiences. My study relies on transcripts of 17 in-depth interviews with women faculty of color at a large, predominantly white research institution. Despite their legitimate authority as professors, these women describe gendered racism in their classroom interactions with students. Specifically, they depict white male students as challenging their authority, teaching competency, and scholarly expertise, as well as offering subtle and not so subtle threats to their persons and their careers.

Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first and last author positions. Moreover, women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers. Academics should be aware of the subtle ways that gender disparities can occur in scholarly authorship.

This study uses multilevel modeling to analyze data from a national sample of full-time, undergraduate faculty at four-year institutions to examine the connections among race, gender, sources of stress, and productivity in the areas of research, teaching, and service. We find that stress due to discrimination has particular negative salience for faculty of color By contrast, stress due to family obligations significantly and positively correlated with faculty's adoption of student-centered teaching practices and participation in civic-minded activities.

Despite efforts to promote diversity in the biomedical workforce, there remains a lower rate of funding of National Institutes of Health R01 applications submitted by African-American/black (AA/B) scientists relative to white scientists. To identify underlying causes of this funding gap, we analyzed six stages of the application process from 2011 to 2015 and found that disparate outcomes arise at three of the six: decision to discuss, impact score assignment, and a previously unstudied stage, topic choice. Notably, AA/B applicants tend to propose research on topics with lower award rates. These topics include research at the community and population level, as opposed to more fundamental and mechanistic investigations; the latter tend to have higher award rates. Topic choice alone accounts for over 20% of the funding gap after controlling for multiple variables, including the applicant’s prior achievements. Our findings can be used to inform interventions designed to close the funding gap.

In this collection of essays, the authors examine how racial considerations have affected the way social science is conducted; how issues are framed, and data is analyzed. With an assemblage of leading scholars, White Logic, White Methods explores the possibilities and necessary dethroning of current social research practices, and demands a complete overhaul of current methods, towards multicultural and pluralist approach to what we know, think, and question.

n the scientific world, there is an unspoken rule that researchers must be fluent in English in order to obtain international recognition for their work. Even if one does not speak fluent English, the researcher should at least possess a certain level of understanding in the language in order to access and read scientific literature, which are usually only available in English. In fact, it has become one of the main characteristics that employers actively seek for in young research talents. As a result, it is common for scholars to publish their academic work in English, even though English is not their native language, whereas scientists who are not fluent in English struggle to gain recognition for their work, or even survive in the ever increasingly competitive world of academia.

Audre Lorde’s provocative admonishment, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” is a fitting caution for Black and other scholars of color who seek to use traditional social and behavioral sciences research as a tool to achieve social justice and health equity in Black communities. Invoking Lorde, I use the “master’s tools” as a metaphor for conventional theoretical and methodological approaches and “dismantle the master’s house” as a metaphor for intersectional structures and systems of oppression that created and sustain health inequity in U.S. Black communities. Using a blend of personal narrative and insights from a 23-year career as a Black critical health equity researcher, I share 10 critical lessons for Black and other health equity researchers of color. And because the personal typically reflects the structural, I recommend system and structural-level mitigation strategies for departments, universities, extramural institutions (e.g., journals), and the government, for each critical lesson.

This bi-weekly podcast features reflections and conversations about the politics and praxis of acknowledging and centering Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions inside and outside of the academy through citation.