LSHTM Press Statement of Intent

Overview

Launched in 2022, LSHTM Press is committed to accessibility and inclusivity for authors and readers. Centrally funded by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), with no shareholders, our aim is to increase the breadth of published research and its dissemination and accessibility worldwide, so that people globally can find and access the information they need without barriers.

Additionally, we aim to promote equitable partnerships, for instance by questioning primary research that is conducted within a country yet the published outputs fail to recognise local researchers or infrastructure. We acknowledge that in recent years improvement have been seen in the inclusion of local authors; however, the persistence of structural barriers and inequalities in authorship arrangements on academic papers, the selection of peer reviewers, and editorial boards still remain.

Coming into existence at a time when the colonial past and the ongoing legacy of many global public health institutes, such as LSHTM, have been brought to the forefront of discussions on equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), LSHTM Press has the unique opportunity to address some of the challenges to EDI in academic publishing head on, as well as to developing in accordance with the needs of researchers, and not shareholders.

The role of publishers and journals

The issue of equitable partnerships and entrenched inequalities within global public health extends well beyond publishing; however, as a publisher, we acknowledge our role and power in promoting EDI and strive towards positive change.

Journals and their editors have a key role in driving research agendas, through the selection of which articles are published and which are rejected. These decisions can impact the career progression of researchers, with publications often used as a metric of success in academia.

LSHTM Press recommendations

LSHTM Press is committed to acknowledging issues of inequity in academic publishing, and to our role in promoting EDI in all that we do. We will do this by requiring authors and editorial boards to adopt practices that seek to remove barriers and promote equity. We specify these practices below.

Author recommendations

• All first authors conducting primary research outside their country of origin will be asked to incorporate reflexivity statements into their submissions. These statements will provide an explicit description of the measures taken to promote and develop equitable partnerships.
• Articles reporting research based in a specific country to include authors from that country.
• Author names to be displayed in an accurate and culturally sensitive way.
• Appropriate credit to be given for authorship, and the use of ICMJE authorship criteria to promote the inclusion of authors.
• No limit to be placed on the number of authors who can be listed by either software limitations or editorial decisions.
• Students and other early-career researchers to be actively encouraged in publishing and research.

Editorial Board recommendations

• Promotion of diversity of editorial board, including members from both low or middle-income countries (LMICs) and HICs.
• All board members provided with the opportunity to receive EDI training, including an awareness of the risks of unconscious bias in editorial decision making.

In addition to these recommendations, the LSHTM Press will commit to the following principles of accessibility and reusability

• All research outputs will be published fully open access with a licence that promotes reuse.
• Support will be provided for publishing abstracts, if not complete articles, in multiple languages wherever possible.
• New and alternative formats to traditional journal articles will be explored.
• Article processing charges (APCs) to be kept to a minimum, and removed completely wherever possible.
• Quality to be assessed in alignment with the principles of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) using a range of indicators and not relying on impact factors alone.

LSHTM Press is committed to fairer and more equitable publishing. Thus, we commit to:

• Encouraging our methods and actions to be challenged.
• Acknowledging that this will be a continuous process.
• Reviewing our actions annually to determine if they are having an impact.
• Publishing the composition of editorial boards for all LSHTM Press journals.
• Keeping an open dialogue with LSHTM Press journals, other LSHTM affiliated journals and other publishers generally, and with a specific focus on EDI.