Frontiers is very pleased to announce it has become a signatory to the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing.

The action-driven commitment, which has now harnessed support from 28 organizations from across the publishing community, aims to set a new standard by enabling a more inclusive and diverse culture within scholarly publishing.

By signing the commitment, Frontiers reaffirms its commitment to eliminating any and all forms of bias and discrimination and will pool resources, expertise, and insight to accelerate research culture change.

Collectively, Frontiers and all signatories agree to:

• Understand our research community: Collaborate to enable diversity data to be self-reported by members of our community, and we will work towards a collective and compliant system so that researchers only need to self-report data once. We will share and analyze anonymized diversity data to understand where action is needed.

• Reflect the diversity of our community: Use anonymized data to uncover subject-specific diversity baselines, and set minimum targets to achieve appropriate and inclusive representation of our authors, reviewers, and editorial decision-makers.

• Share success to achieve impact: Share and develop new and innovative resources to improve representation and inclusivity of diverse groups. We will transparently share policies, measurements, language, and standards, to move inclusion and diversity in publishing forward together.

• Set minimum standards on which to build: Scrutinize our own publishing processes and take action to achieve a minimum standard for inclusion in publishing, based initially on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Framework for Action in Scientific Publishing. We will engage all relevant stakeholders to improve outcomes on inclusion and diversity, at all stages of the publishing process.

Kamila Markram, CEO and co-founder of Frontiers, said: “Frontiers is pleased to share its experience in tacking bias with our colleagues across the publishing industry, and to learn from their own initiatives. This Joint Commitment will help us all be more effective in building a fairer world for the entire research community – which sits at the very heart of progress – and beyond.”

ENDS

ABOUT FRONTIERS Frontiers is an award-winning Open Science platform and leading Open Access scholarly publisher. Founded in 2007, we have published over 150,000 rigorously certified research articles by leading academics, covering more than 650 academic disciplines. Our mission is to make research results openly available to the world, thereby accelerating scientific and technological innovation, societal progress and economic growth. We empower scientists with innovative Open Science solutions that radically improve how science is published, evaluated and disseminated to researchers, innovators and the public. Access to research results and data is open, free and customized through Internet Technology, thereby enabling rapid solutions to the critical challenges we face as humanity. For more information, visit www.frontiersin.org