Perceptions of fairness and bias in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: a global survey
Author: Ritu Dhand and Sowmya Swaminathan
Published today, Perceptions of fairness and bias in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: a global survey, is a new report from Springer Nature, sharing insights from a global survey of over 8,000 researchers on how they perceive bias and where they believe it shows up in the publication process.
The global research landscape has diversified dramatically in the past decade. Researchers from emerging regions now represent an ever-greater share of research output, yet benchmarking shows that some of the most active countries producing research – especially China and India – remain underrepresented among academic external editors who are usually also practicing researchers in universities, editorial boards, and peer reviewers. This disparity risks reinforcing country-related bias in publishing outcomes.
These disparities are not unique to any single publisher, and for that reason, this research engaged a broad international community of researchers. The sheer number of responses from researchers is an indication of the strength of feeling on this topic. The findings are clear: most researchers perceive bias in the publishing process, and that this is especially strongly felt in relation to the region and location of the researcher(s), followed by affiliation and network bias. Experience or perceptions of bias affect researchers’ trust and their decisions about where to publish. Encouragingly, researchers also believe that publishers have both the responsibility and the means to act.
At Springer Nature, we are committed to supporting our editors and reviewers in recognising and reducing bias, to ensure a fair peer review process as well as a more complete and representative global knowledge base. We continue to advance our efforts across key areas identified by researchers in this survey: increasing the regional diversity of our external academic editors to better reflect the global diversity of the research landscape, expanding bias awareness training for editors, increasing transparency through initiatives such as transparent peer review (now available across all Nature family journals and the BMC Series journals) and supporting authors with language-focused services.
We hope these findings stimulate discussion, reflection and collective action to broaden participation and create greater inclusion and fairness in research publishing.
Author: Ritu Dhand and Sowmya Swaminathan
Ritu Dhand is Chief Scientific Officer at Springer Nature.
Ritu is responsible for representing Springer Nature externally, focusing on promoting and driving external editorial excellence, in partnership with all the journal publishers across Springer and BMC journals.
Before taking on the role of Chief Scientific Officer in January 2022, Ritu served as Nature Editorial Director, overseeing editorial strategy and management of Nature, Nature Communications and the Nature Research and Review Journals. Ritu studied Genetics at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London and undertook a masters in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University College, London.
Dr. Sowmya Swaminathan is Director, Global Inclusion, Research at Springer Nature. She leads Springer Nature’s efforts to bring global inclusion to research publishing activities across the journals and books publishing programme.
She was previously Head of Editorial Policy & Research Integrity for Nature Portfolio where she was responsible for policies and initiatives that advance transparency, integrity, open research practices and inclusion in scholarly publishing.
She began her career in scholarly publishing as an editor at Nature Cell Biology where she subsequently served as Chief Editor for 6 years. Prior to entering scholarly publishing, Sowmya completed her PhD at the University of Chicago and carried out postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.
Our categories
