Established in 2002, eScholarship Publishing is a comprehensive open access publishing program for the University of California (UC) academic community with almost 100 open access journals. Our team is working to embed diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in its training materials, starting with a required webinar for all journal editors that provides an overview of major DEIA topics in scholarly publishing. These topics include diversifying editorial boards, staff, author pools, and peer reviewers; implementing inclusive language and style guides; and meeting accessibility standards.

In this informational session, we describe our goals for creating and conducting this webinar, the level of editorial participation in the training, the opportunities and challenges we have encountered, feedback we have received, and the impact of this program so far.

Libraries strive to increase diversity in the workforce and foster equity and inclusion through the resources and services we provide. Recognizing the inequities and biases that exist within the scholarly publishing ecosystem, the authors created a publicly accessible online resource on the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication website to guide stakeholders to actions they could take to create more equitable scholarly communication environments. The resulting site offers distinct sections for peer reviewers, editorial boards, authors, scholarly publishers, and libraries, each summarizing research into the equity challenges for that group and suggesting actionable steps for addressing these challenges. We hope that, by interacting with this resource, scholarly communication stakeholders will gain a better understanding of the landscape and know how to take action. This poster will present our model for raising awareness of the inequities in the scholarly publishing ecosystem and encouraging participants to take concrete steps to reduce barriers and inequities in scholarly publishing. We will describe how we first identified the need for such a resource, engaged stakeholders in a review of the initial draft, modified that draft in response to feedback, and are currently implementing our recommendations in our library-based publishing setting. We will explore some of the challenges we face in ensuring that the resource remains up-to-date and relevant over time. Suggestions will also be provided for linking to this resource on library and publisher web pages and for contacting the group with suggestions and feedback.

Presented at the American Library Association 2024 Conference.