Publisher–Society partnerships to further image accessibility and global inclusivity in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Comparing top‐down and bottom‐up approaches

Collaboration between publishers and learned society partners can accelerate and amplify DEIA outcomes. 97 HSS titles have adopted alt‐text publication workflows and this change has been welcomed by journal authors and editors. Efforts to promote global inclusivity do not always result in greater membership diversity, retention and growth. Top‐down, publisher‐led DEIA initiatives are effective when they are aligned strategically to pre‐existing society initiatives. Bottom‐up, member‐led DEIA initiatives benefit from publisher support to mitigate financial and time‐based barriers to active participation. To reliably track DEIA outcomes, publishers ought to adopt systematic data collection strategies through initiatives like C4 and the Joint Commitment.


INTRODUCTION
Learned societies and associations (hereafter Societies) are facing increased pressures, internal and external, to improve diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) across their activities. Evidence is emerging of falling satisfaction with gender and racial representation in Societies (Roscoe, 2022), alongside wider challenges of journal editorial team diversification. The 2020-2021 Brave New World report spotlighted the special challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, which intensified pre-existing gender and racial inequalities among Society members due to work-based pressures (Brave New World, 2021). The 2021 and 2022 Wiley Society Member Surveys (Nightingale, 2022;Roscoe, 2021), forming part of this evidence base, highlighted the DEIA priorities of Society members as a motivating factor when buying or renewing memberships. In 2021, 50% of respondents cited '…access to a varied and cross-cultural global community' (Roscoe, 2022, p. 484) as the main reason for renewing, with 75% of survey respondents, in 2021 and 2022, believing that it is '…important for societies to take an active lead on DE&I' (Anderson, 2022;Roscoe, 2022, p. 484); a belief shared, in 2021, by 85% of students and 84% of early career researchers (Anderson, 2022;Roscoe, 2022). Both surveys support closer working partnerships between publishers and Societies, with Society members actively encouraging publishersociety collaboration to further DEIA (Roscoe, 2022, p. 487).
This case-study article will describe two Publisher-Society DEIA partnerships. It will compare a top-down, publisher-led approach, involving strategic alignment between publishers and learned Society partners' pre-existing DEIA commitments, with reference to the implementation of an 'alt-text' workflow to improve image accessibility. The second case study will describe a bottom-up, Society member-led approach to improving global inclusivity in the field of industrial archaeology, with reference to the creation of a Young Members Board. Both case studies emerged from a programme of DEIA initiatives at Routledge, Taylor & Francis during 2021. In addition to exploring outcomes and obstacles, this article offers recommendations for the wider adoption of practices that support longstanding and successful DEIA partnerships.

BACKGROUND TO ROUTLEDGE'S 2021 DEIA INITIATIVES IN HSS JOURNALS EDITORIAL
Routledge, like many publishers, has committed to advancing DEIA in scholarly publishing (Kinthaert, 2023), as a signatory of the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications' (C4DISC) Joint Statement of Principles (C4DISC, 2022), the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) and Publishing Accessibility Action Group UK (PAAG) charters, and with recent companywide efforts to address DEIA concerns, including the introduction of a name-change policy (Taylor & Francis, 2022a), and changes to review terminology, from 'double-blind' to 'double-anonymous' review (Taylor & Francis, 2022b).
To advance these DEIA commitments across Routledge's scholarly journals, in 2021, editorial team members trialled smallscale DEIA interventions across a selection of titles in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). These interventions consisted of a four-step process to first identify and review titles and associated scholarly communities along defined DEIA criteria, taking in geography, gender, race, disability, sexuality and age, among other characteristics, and then to design and evaluate DEIA-advancing initiatives to achieve specific, measurable outcomes. The framework for this process is described as follows: 1. Identify: eligible journals to trial new DEIA initiatives were identified by Routledge, with eligibility determined by the potential for collaboration and implementation by external journal stakeholders. A working group was created, responsible for designing and circulating resources and methodologies adapted from previous initiatives. The working group coordinated company-wide DEIA briefings, webinars and drop-in sessions and ensured that these initiatives aligned with wider organizational DEIA efforts across the Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
2. Review: the selected title, or group of titles, were reviewed according to specific areas for improvement. Reviewing criteria included the composition of editorial boards, reviewers, authors, readership, citation practices, language guidance and policies, submission criteria, editorial decision-making processes and the presence (or absence) of DEIA-oriented initiatives, such as journal prizes, early-career mentorship and outreach. 3. Design: editorial teams and journal stakeholders designed and implemented an intervention to address the specific DEIA objective identified in the Review phase, along with appropriate measures and timelines to support successful progression. 4. Evaluate: the effectiveness of the interventions were evaluated and outcomes shared with colleagues in a series of online presentations attended by all editorial staff and wider adoption across the Taylor & Francis Group encouraged.
The most common form of journal-level review activity involved the composition of editorial boards. Of the 18 of case studies that were circulated as part of the company-wide evaluation phase, 10 involved (as a minimum) a review of the editorial board and targeted restructuring, usually along lines of gender, ethnicity and/or geographical location of affiliation. In many HSS fields, this activity was centred around addressing legacies of colonialism and disproportionate editorial board representation of scholars in the Global North (Collyer, 2018;Ifranullah, 2022Ifranullah, , 2021. To take African Security Review as an example, following the 2021 initiative, Africa-based scholars constitute 60% of the editorial board, with eight newly appointed board members and representation across Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda and South Africa. Other interventions were aimed at addressing barriers to authorship, including a contribution to the Women Writing Pakistan project (International Islamic University, 2021), in partnership with editorial team members associated with the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and supported by the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund. This involved an online workshop, aimed at tackling gender inequalities in academia, with a focus on academic writing for female academics and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) in Pakistan who are non-native English speakers, with attendees receiving a year's free subscription to the journal.
Unlike the majority of journal-level activities, however, which were predominantly led by editorial teams at Routledge working directly with academic editors and editorial boards, the two case studies that form the basis of this article deal with an underexplored facet of DEIA work in scholarly publishing: forming successful and long-lasting DEIA partnerships between publishers and learned Societies.  While improvements have been made in recent years to make publisher platforms and associated content more accessible, for example introducing text-to-speech functionality and adopting EPUB file formats (Scott & Walker, 2022), images and other non-textual material in journals remain inaccessible to those with a visual impairment, with many researchers relying on automated solutions that produce brief and incomplete image descriptions (Conrad, 2021). Much of the literature regarding alttext centres around figures, graphs and other visual material in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medical (STEM) journals (Jambor et al., 2021); however, accessibility concerns in the HSS are equally important, with HSS fields involving distinct objects of study that are typically represented visually, such as artworks and cultural artefacts.
Many of Routledge's flagship HSS journal publications are published on behalf of learned and professional Societies, and Routledge's Society partners often opt for bespoke journal designs and production workflows to allow their publications to retain a distinctive visual identity. Sometimes, these customizations can cause difficulties when forming scalable solutions to addressing accessibility concerns across a large corpus of The alt-text workflow for participating Routledge journals. A flowchart displaying the steps of the alt-text workflow: author supplies alt-text at revision; alt-text transferred to production on acceptance; alt-text tagged in XML and PDF; author reviews alt-text at article proof; article is published with alt-text in XML, EPUP and PDF. titles. Therefore, as a leading HSS publisher, one of the persistent barriers to developing production solutions to address accessibility concerns in HSS, such as alt-text, is the high level of customization across HSS journal portfolios.
The Publisher-Society partnership activities described below aim at shifting perceptions around adopting standardized workflows and systems by linking these changes to the stated DEIA commitments of partner Societies in museum studies and visual arts.

Implementing 'alt-text' with the Museum Education Roundtable
In 2020, the Museum Education Roundtable's (MER) Journal of Museum Education (JME) became one of the earliest adopters of alt-text and EPUB functionality in museum studies. The alt-text and EPUB functionality trial for JME was a natural fit given the Society's goals and previous work developing the journal's speech-to-text functionality, and the adoption of alt-text aligned well with the MER's stated DEIA values, which include a commitment to increasing the accessibility of visual content across the organization's online platforms (Diaz et al., 2020).
The main workflow adjustment for alt-text (see Fig. 1) involved asking authors to submit alt-text alongside image captions as part of the article revision process in online submission systems. The submitted alt-text accompanies the submission from acceptance, where it is transferred from the journal's submission system to production and alt-text is then tagged in the article XML and added to the PDF. Authors then have an opportunity to review the alt-text as presented at article proof stage, using an online correction tool (OCT), before the article is published in XML, PDF and EPUB formats.
MER's implementation of the alt-text workflow led to a cross-promotional campaign to celebrate the Society's status as a 'pioneer in accessibility within Taylor & Francis journals' as noted in a blog post by the MER and Routledge editorial teams (Diaz et al., 2020). Routledge and the MER collaborated on a set of coauthored guidelines that were posted on the Routledge Editor Resources site (Taylor & Francis, 2021), providing both editors and authors of journals with an overview of alt-text, the benefits of introducing alt-text to journal workflows and examples and instructions on how to submit alt-text.
The expert accessibility guidance from MER ensured that guidelines were tailored to the needs of the target audience of museum studies society members, while supporting the introduction of a smoother submission and peer review process. A dedicated special issue on disability and accessibility in museum studies, 'The Call for Disability Justice in Museum Education: Re-framing Accessibility as Anti-Ableism' (Ware et al., 2022) was subsequently published in JME to highlight the importance of advancing accessibility in the field, and to encourage other journals and partner Societies to adopt new alt-text workflows. Since the introduction of alt-text as a submission requirement for articles published in JME there have been no complaints about the submission process and from the journal's editors or authors.

Promoting wider adoption of alt-text in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Due to the MER and JME editors' enthusiasm for this accessibility initiative and advocacy for its adoption within their subject communities, we were able to build a convincing case for Routledge's largest partner Societies in the visual arts to adopt alt-text across their portfolio of journals. Working with this new partner Society required a change of approach to workflow adjustment as the Society was not using an online submission system. However, the advantage of securing the participation of a high-profile partner to continue the advocacy work for wider adoption of alt-text in visual arts and HSS more broadly was balanced against a loss of efficiencies when using non-standard systems and processes.
Manual workarounds were introduced so that authors could supply alt-text to production directly as a component of article revision. Despite these compromises, the timeframe from initial discussion with the Society partner in the visual arts to alt-text implementation was one month, including discussion between the publisher and Society officers, and subsequent approval through the Society's internal decision-making processes.
As the introduction of alt-text aligned with the Society's own stated accessibility initiatives, both partners moved quickly to adopt new workflows and realize shared accessibility goals. Since piloting alt-text in museum studies and visual arts, Routledge has scaled up this initiative to 136 journals across all disciplines, including 97 HSS journals as part of a second phase of the initial trial (Fig. 2). As of July 2022, Routledge have published over 6600 figures (Fig. 4) with alt-text published across more than 1300 articles (Fig. 3). Securing the involvement of high-profile Society partners, such as the MER and our external partners in the visual arts, was a key component of this implementation strategy. Outcomes and obstacles following alt-text partnerships in the Humanities and Social Sciences One outcome from the HSS alt-text trials has been to allocate responsibilities to a dedicated journal administrative assistant, responsible for checking image files for alt-text upon submission.
The assistant transfers manuscript files, including the alt-text wording and associated metadata, to production teams upon acceptance, minimizing friction and errors caused by additional author or editor interventions. There are additional financial costs involved, as well as occasional guidance from editorial staff to ensure that the division of responsibilities is clear and consistent.
However, using a dedicated assistant mitigates against some of the barriers to adoption by reducing the administrative burden for journal editors, particularly within disciplines where the use of peer-review systems is less commonplace.
Despite the success of the first and second phase trials of alt-text in HSS, barriers to adoption remain. Although 97 journals are now using alt-text, a further 939 titles that meet the workflow and system eligibility criteria are not. For these remaining titles, concerns about workflow changes and perceived inefficiencies or obstacles for authors in the submission process persist among journal stakeholders. As we work towards the implementation of alt-text on all remaining journals in the Routledge HSS portfolio, we will continue to promote co-creation of resources, advocacy and strategic alignment with committed external partners, which was vital to the success of the museum studies and visual arts implementations.

Case study B: Supporting bottom-up society initiatives to further global inclusivity in industrial archaeology
This second case study differs from the first in terms of both its DEIA concern and its partnership strategy. While the first partnership was initiated by the Publisher, aiming at alignment with societies' pre-existing accessibility aims, here the impetus originated with the partner Society, the Association for Industrial

Furthering global inclusivity through the Association for Industrial Archaeology's Young Members Board
Learned Societies are facing growing pressures to reach and grow new member communities, due to long-term membership attrition and an overreliance on membership funding to support core activities (Nightingale, 2022;Sidecar, 2021). The AIA is no exception, with low numbers of non-UK-based and ECR members joining the Association; in December 2019, 92% of the AIA's members were UK-based and only 2% of the membership were students. In 2020, the association approved the formation of the YMB, as an incentive for young people interested in industrial archaeology to join the AIA and play a more direct role in shaping the association's organizational aims and strategy.
The founding members of the YMB consisted of 15 student and early-career heritage professionals, appointed with a year's gratis AIA membership and defined responsibilities under the term of their appointment. The YMB's core activities include membership recruitment; arranging, publicizing, and delivering archaeological site visits, webinars, conferences and outreach activities; developing links with relevant universities and professional organizations; proposing and delivering member-led initiatives that support the association's charitable aims; recommending actions to the Association's Main Council on strategic matters; shadowing or assisting its officers; and managing content for a dedicated YMB section of the AIA website.
Early on in its formation, the YMB was identified as a potential partner for developing joint DEIA interventions between AIA and Routledge. One of the central aims that    . 5) and they have been delivered to over 270 industrial archaeologists worldwide. Recordings were made available for those who could attend due to other commitments and no membership or fee required for attendance, promoting equitable access.
Routledge has supported the YMB's East meets West workshops by organizing global social media promotions on platforms including WeChat, Sina Weibo and Twitter. To make the YMB's promotions more inclusive of China-based attendees, Routledge also created a journal card with a QR code and Chineselanguage profiles for the speakers. The first East-West online conference was the second highest attended online event in the AIA's history, with international attendance from over 100 delegates.
Outcomes and obstacles following ECR-led DEIA initiatives in industrial archaeology tion's membership are largely as they were before the YMB was formed (Fig. 6), with 89% of members based in the United Kingdom (Fig. 7). Membership retention also continues to be a challenge for the AIA, with a 6% reduction in fee-paying members between 2019 and 2022.
The potential for young members to advance DEIA within learned Societies is described as an incentive for students and ECRs to join or renew Society memberships in the 2021 Wiley Society Member Survey (Roscoe, 2022), and the role played by the AIA's YMB in furthering global inclusivity appears to support this claim. However, the AIA's young members continually cite financial constraints and-equally important-a scarcity of free time for voluntary work, as an obstacle to more active involvement in the Association's activities. Factors contributing to these constraints include full-time or part-time postgraduate study, low-paid or fixed-term employment in heritage and archaeology, the impacts of inflation on the cost of living, and childcare or other caring responsibilities.
The persistence of these obstacles and the slow pace of change in members composition within the AIA suggest thatdespite member-led initiatives to further inclusion along the lines FIGURE 6 Geographical distribution of AIA members by region, 2019. A pie chart showing that in 2019, 92% of members were based in the United Kingdom, followed by 4% in Europe, 3% in USA and Canada, and fewer than 1% in Australia, China and South America. of age, career level and geography-greater inclusivity does not automatically translate into greater member diversity, retention or growth. Financial and time-based barriers to fee-paying membership and involved participation must therefore be foregrounded when designing initiatives to further DEIA in learned Societies.

INDUSTRY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SOCIETY PARTNERSHIPS TO FURTHER DEIA IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
As part of the evaluation phase of Routledge's DEIA initiatives, we have formed a series of recommendations for wider industry application.
The first is an appeal for scholarly publishers to work with their learned Society partners to overcome barriers to adoption for alt-text production workflows. Alt-text is a form of metadata best-practice for images that is longstanding (Kasdorf, 2021) and increasingly mandated for online content (US Department of Justice, 2022; Web Accessibility Initiative, 2016), which enables publishers and Societies to fulfil their accessibility responsibilities, while improving the discoverability of underlying content.
Authors are best placed to describe their own visual content (Conrad, 2021); unlike article formatting requirements (Carpenter, 2022), authors are not burdened by alt-text, so long as the rationale is clear and appropriate publisher support is available. The introduction of alt-text has not contributed to publication delays or complaints from authors, or other journal stakeholders, for the titles that are using this functionality.
The second recommendation, specific to the Publisher-Society activities reported above, is for publishers to experiment with a range of both top-down and bottom-up approaches to DEIA partnerships. Top-down, publisher-led activities, like our alt-text partnerships in museum studies and visual arts, have the advantage of scale, mapping across entire portfolios of journals and, in some cases, entire fields of study. They also allow for centrally managed design and evaluation procedures, with predefined objectives, success metrics and standardized data capture from the outset.
While initiatives led from the grassroots of smaller partner Societies may not share the scalability of larger top-down undertakings, they have an advantage over publisher-led initiatives when they are designed and shaped by communities that have been excluded historically from scholarly publishing. Bottom-up activities, like the member engagement and outreach events run by AIA's Young Members Board, can enable learned Societies to attract and retain diverse member communities; but to do this effectively, they must also advance '…the economic and social conditions of the communities in which they operate' (Muddit, 2020 Our broader recommendations, arising from the two partnerships discussed above, are summarized as follows: • DEIA initiatives should be co-produced between publishers and Societies. • As for our alt-text rollout, begin by forming partnerships with sympathetic Societies; successful initiatives with high-profile partners can then be promoted (as proof of concept and demonstration cases) and used to scale initiatives to others.
• The intellectual case for DEIA initiatives should be made by academic editors in their editorials, as in the Journal of Museum Education.
• Where DEIA initiatives produce additional work for editors and authors, publishers should provide additional editorial support, for example, by assigning journal administrative assistants to support editors with image accessibility requirements.
• DEIA initiatives often arise from the bottom-up, especially from younger society members, and publishers should support and amplify these activities as part of a joint DEIA strategy.
• Societies and publishers should work together to alleviate financial constraints to membership and participation in Societies and associated events, as a component of joint DEIA strategies.
Our final recommendation relates to DEIA data capture and data-driven evaluation of DEIA initiatives. Routledge does not currently collect demographic information from authors, reviewers, and editorial team members beyond institutional affiliations. In the case of the AIA case study, where one of the aims was to diversify authorship in the Association's journal, Industrial Archaeology Review, we have not been able to systematically measure outcomes along lines of gender or ethnicity, although we are continually tracking trends related to journal author country of affiliation from our joint interventions with the AIA. This limitation underscores the importance of DEIA data collection as a component of journal manuscript submission and the wider initiatives emerging from the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC, 2022) and the joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2022). These initiatives encourage the adoption of DEIA-related questions about, for example, race and ethnicity, as a component of journal article submission (Else & Perkel, 2022). Our DEIA case studies demonstrate a need for effective and ethically robust DEIA data collection, so that interventions aimed at diversifying journal communities can be more meaningfully evaluated over the long term.

CONCLUSIONS
The scope of DEIA activities that were trialled at Routledge, in 2021, was broad, addressing defined deficiencies and objectives, such as the composition of journal editorial boards, editor recruitment policies, English language support for authors, article submissions criteria, targeted commissioning efforts outside of the Global North, reviewing processes, citation guidelines, journal prizes, journal readership and promotions, and stated DEIA policies and codes of practice. The two case studies discussed above demonstrate the value of working in collaboration with Society partners to co-create effective solutions to systemic DEIA challenges. In each of the case studies explored, there is an element of Publisher-Society alignment and support for the implementation of more accessible and inclusive scholarly publishing practices. While these initiatives are ongoing and, in many cases, specific to the society partner, the practices and activities addressed in this article can be adapted for wider application, including journals where a society partner's strategic ambition is not the driver for change; nevertheless, Society collaboration and support for grassroots Society-led approaches has been a vital component of our DEIA partnership strategy at Routledge.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
All authors were involved in writing this article, including original draft preparation, review and editing. George Cooper coordinated the group contributions, wrote the introduction, background, key points and conclusions, and revised the article following peer review comments. Katherine Burton advised on the article content and structure and made substantial edits. Alejandra Black, Mokheseng Buti, Geraldine Richards and Emma Lockwood drafted the case studies. Ginny Herbert drafted the industry recommendations. Janet Remmington provided edits, comments and project oversight for Routledge Journals' 2021 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility initiative.