Lessons learned from an evolving DEI programme within a global publisher

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is at the core of Springer Nature's mission. Prioritizing DEI helps us become the business we aim to be: one that enables millions of people to access, trust and make sense of the latest insights, to improve and enrich both our lives and the planet. We are committed to championing DEI across our content, communities and organization—and also across the whole set of businesses that make up Springer Nature Group—education, health, professional and research. Working across our business to harness the varied reach, business capabilities and resources of all our colleagues has been important in this journey, but so too is accountability and the collective efforts of pan‐publisher initiatives. From editorial guidance to internal mentoring programmes and sustainable development curriculum programmes, our DEI work has been varied and successful, but we have learnt lessons along the way—and still have a way to go. This piece looks at what we have done so far, and our priorities for progress moving forward.

enables millions of researchers, educators, clinicians and others to access, trust and make sense of the latest insights so that we can all improve and enrich our lives and the planet. We believe that DEI is a vital part of how we make progress as a business: within Springer Nature that means building a strong and vibrant organizational culture where everyone can thrive, and also working externally in order to build trust with future generations of researchers and consumers of our educational and professional materials so that our content, products and services will reflect the diversity and needs of the communities we serve.
In order to produce and share content that is useful and usable by all, whether that is educational resources, professional content or research, we need to more fully represent the societies we work in and with and ensure our coverage whether in our published research or our science journalism, addresses issues of direct relevance to our diverse and global communities. We need an inclusive internal culture so all members of our teams can thrive. We need communities who feel they can work with us and be supported to create the work they want to do with us. We need content that reflects the society it will be a part of-inclusive, diverse and ethical.
As one of our highest priorities, we have developed strategies, implemented policies and made changes to turn that commitment into a reality for our content and our communities.
But to initiate change, we have taken important steps internally to ensure everyone in our organization can contribute at their best and has access to equitable opportunities for success (Jacobs, 2020). To do so, we have focused on education and culture change to promote more inclusive behaviour. For example, all of our 9000+ employees complete mandatory training on unconscious bias, and on bullying and harassment. In 2021, 1200 colleagues took part in a Practising Inclusion Learning Campaign (Springer Nature, 2022b).
As an evidence-based organization, we emphasize the use of data to understand where we are, and set goals to drive progress.
We track and share our results to ensure transparency and build trust. At the end of 2021, 41% of our senior leadership are women, en route to our goal of 45% by 2023 (Springer Nature, 2022b). 62% of our colleagues took part in our first global inclusion and diversity survey in 2021 and we used insights from this to develop a targeted mentoring programme for groups who are underrepresented in leadership or experience lower levels of inclusion (Springer Nature, 2022b).
Inclusion scores across Springer Nature are typically at or above benchmarks across industries and in our second global inclusion and diversity survey in 2022, we found they have increased since 2021. Within work teams, inclusion has improved for employees belonging to many traditionally marginalized identity groups. For example, non-binary or gender diverse respondents and transgender respondents had increased scores regarding people's comfort expressing opinions that diverge from their work group. There are also areas that need more work. We will focus our efforts to continue building an inclusive environment that provides fair access and equal opportunity. For example, Springer Nature is participating in Generation Valuable, a Valuable 500 programme that aims to support the next generation of leaders with disabilities (Algiachsousi, 2022). We will also launch a new strategy focusing on equitable recruiting, promotion and succession in 2022 and offer training on inclusive hiring. Despite the progress we have made, significant challenges remain and we are actively looking for ways to address them. For example, we need to continue to address representation at senior levels. This requires structural change that is unfortunately slow, despite our best efforts. We need to ingrain equity and inclusion in all processes; be that how and who we hire and promote, respond to structural inequities in people development or ensure pay equity.
After looking internally, our focus then broadened to our external activities from across the business, including the furthering of our commitment to DEI in research and solutions (Swaminathan & Inchcoombe, 2021). In our research and solutions business, our DEI strategy has four key pillars of action.
These pillars were developed with a view to building the values of DEI into our processes for publishing content, for creating products and services for researchers, building enduring bridges with the communities we serve and building alliances across the industry and the community for sustainable change.
1. Becoming intentionally inclusive: We know that for science to be more inclusive the research community needs to be more representative, and we are committed to amplifying underrepresented voices and perspectives.
We are undertaking development of resources that will help us become more representative in the groups we work with-editors, editorial board members, peer reviewersincluding an inclusive language guide and an intentional content strategy. We have also made efforts to support this process in our events: in the past year we have achieved a near 50/50 gender balance (Nature, 2021) for the organizing committees and keynote speakers of Nature Conferences. Our journey to gender balance at Nature Conferences began with the introduction of a Diversity Policy and Code of Conduct for Nature Conferences in 2019, which was included in our contract with partners ensuring a shared understanding of gender goals. This, together with the sustained commitment of our colleagues working on the Conference programme, helped deliver the gains we saw in 2021. We believe that the switch to virtual programming as a result of the pandemic also helped in achieving greater gender balance. 2. Engaging our communities and stakeholders: We know that to bring about systemic change, we must work together across the research community and publishing industry.
Data is crucial to making evidence based decisions but also to monitor the impact of our decisions for communities and stakeholders. In 2021, we signed up to an external initiative called the Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2020) to address biases in scholarly publishing. The first, of four, commitments it outlines is to 'Understand our research community' by collaborating to enable the self-reporting of diversity data in a way that can be consistently analysed across the sector. To progress our commitment, we have set up a DEI data collection workstream to provide insights and create baselines for the benefit of different DEI projects across our organization. The workstream has devised a framework for collection of self-reported data at the time of writing, and we are also exploring AI-driven options. The data we collect will help us to identify priority areas, take appropriate actions, plan initiatives and measure success.  Nature, 2022c). This year, Nature hosted its first diversity conference to highlight the role of research towards achieving gender equity, and create new opportunities for networking and mentoring (Priyadarshini, 2022). should only be the first of many (Priyadarshini, 2022).
3. Improving research and publishing practice through policy: A further instrument for change we have at our disposal is our editorial and publishing policies, which we have successfully used to encourage take up of reproducibility and open research practices.
We have a responsibility to publish ethical researchmaking sure those involved in producing research are treated correctly but also that the end result does not cause harm. We take this incredibly seriously and recently announced new editorial guidance for content that could be harmful to population groups (Nature, 2022a), a new approach to improve inclusion and ethics in global research collaboration (Nature, 2022b) and a new guideline for reporting sex and gender across Nature journals (Nature Metabolism, 2022). We have also created a policy to allow transgender authors and others to update their names on their published works (Springer Nature, 2021). 4. Communicating our position and ambition: Our community needs to know that we stand firmly behind the need to improve DEI in science and are developing new resources, including communications toolkits to support colleague engagement on DEI, featuring our positions on DEI in our contractual agreements and developing recruitment frameworks on how to encourage Editorial Board and peer reviewer inclusivity as well as best practice recommendations for the recruitment of peer reviewers.
Across Springer Nature Group, our professional and education businesses are also championing DEI with their audiences.
As part of their objective to produce inclusive content that supports all students and teachers, Macmillan Education has created DEI guidelines for all of their editorial, marketing and digital teams. These are available in English and Spanish and are being used across their various Curriculum and ELT publishing teams. They have also created internal training that helps employees understand how to use the DEI guidelines to create inclusive educational content as well as introduce them to different DEI concepts. Finally, they have also created a new curriculum for sustainable development and citizenship with the UN called Advancing Futures (House, 2022) that will reach over 30,000 teachers worldwide and launched Únicos (Macmillan Education Iberia, 2022), a Spanish podcast series on classroom diversity with nearly 6000 listens.
Meanwhile, in our professional division, Springer Nature Medizin has changed the name of 21 journals to become more clearly inclusive (Springer Nature, 2022a). The titles had been named after the profession to which their content was targeted and in the German language the gender-neutral titles for professions is usually identical to the masculine form. They now focus on the specialist field it is publishing research in. For example, Der Internist is changing to Die Innere Medizin (Internal Medicine) and Der Chirurg (The Surgeon) to Die Chirurgie (Surgery). The content concept, thematic focus and viability of each title will remain unchanged.
There is certainly more to do, and keeping ourselves accountable but also talking about our achievements, challenges and lessons in equal measure is a helpful exercise for us and for our industry peers. Sharing our experiences can help us reflect and maybe inspire others. We are also deeply grateful to the many people across our organization dedicated to DEI in myriad ways-through DEI teams, committees, working groups, employee networks and more-who help us to be proactive and move forward every day.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
SS and TS conceived the project, TS, SS and JG collated the content and wrote the article.