Information Industry News
Scholarly communication is a multi-billion-dollar global enterprise, however recent surveys suggest that it remains characterized by gender inequality and lack of ethnic diversity. Remediating these deficiencies is not only a moral imperative but it also offers an opportunity to improve research outcomes since diverse teams have been found to outperform homogeneous groups.
The Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) was founded in 2017 to address these challenges and opportunities. Since that time, the organization has worked relentlessly, mobilizing committed volunteers, enrolling 100 trade and professional associations to adopt its Joint Statement of Principles, and developing a series of groundbreaking training guides, or Toolkits for Equity to aid in transforming scholarly communication workplaces and organizational cultures.
In recognition of these achievements, C4DISC was recently awarded the Council of Science Editors’ (CSE’s) Meritorious Achievement Award. CSE grants this award to individuals or organizations that made significant contributions to advancing the broad goal of CSE: to improve scientific communication through the pursuit of high standards in all activities connected with editing.
The award was accepted on behalf of C4DISC by the convener and the co-founder, Melanie Dolechek, during CSE Annual Meeting Awards Luncheon on May 3rd, in Phoenix, Arizona.
“As the convener and a founding member of C4DISC, I am proud of how far C4DISC has come in a few short years and the work that we’ve accomplished so far. The response and support from the scholarly communications community has been inspiring, to say the least. The passion that our community has for doing this work is reflected in the countless volunteer hours that have already been dedicated to developing community resources.
The Coalition was built for our community, by our community. It exists because we’ve collectively acknowledged that to ensure sustainability, equity, growth, and access, our industry must commit to long-term efforts to curb the deeply ingrained patterns of exclusion and inequity in our practices, policies, and frameworks.” – Melanie Dolechek, Executive Director, SSP.
About This Organization
About C4DISC:
C4DISC was founded by representatives from 10 trade and professional associations during the 2017 SSP annual meeting in Boston. Its vision is a socially just community that welcomes, values, and celebrates all who seek to contribute to scholarly communications and its mission is to work with organizations and individuals to build equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility within the community. C4DISC members meet monthly to address its areas of focus, including: developing a joint statement of principles; conducting market research; providing training resources, best practices, toolkits, and documentation for our collective memberships; and establishing outreach programs, curricula, events, and publications.
The 10 core members are the Association of University Presses, the Council of Science Editors (CSE), the international Society of Managing & Technical Editors (ISMTE), the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ/ACRS), the Library Publishing Coalition, NASIG (formerly the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc.), the Open Access Publishing Association (OASPA), the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP).