02/09/2022

Connecting Sustainable Development, Publishing Ethics and the North-South Divide

Contextualization is vital

Recently, I was preparing a talk for a NISO Plus 2022’s (Feb. 15-17, 2022) panel on "Working towards a more ethical information community." I started asking myself, if sustainable development works towards a just and ethical society, how does it deal with the Global North-South divide in the ethics of scholarly publishing?

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Framework connects a wide range of social, economic and environmental challenges — be it inequality in wealth distribution, food and water insecurity, or rapidly disappearing wetlands. The framework also inspires us to work together towards 17 common goals and 169 targets. Research and access to information and knowledge are not only crucial for national and global efforts to attain the SDGs by 2030, but also to measure our progress against the 232 SDG indicators. As part of a responsible industry, scholarly publishers acknowledge their role in sustainability actions. In addition to individual publishers, we see initiatives, such as the SDG Publishers Compact and the ALA adopting sustainability as a core value of librarianship. A couple of recent pieces on The Scholarly Kitchen have looked into the roles and opportunities for libraries and publishers in supporting the SDGs.

Research communication connects our research system with our efforts towards sustainability. Attaining the SDGs is essentially a result of appropriate use of research achieved through translating knowledge into action, like changes in our policies and practices — often branded as research impact. As a core component of our research ecosystem, research communication has a wide range of practical ethical dimensions. The COPE guidelines, for example, show that through guidance on diversity in managing authorship, editorial and peer-review processes, and retractions; ensuring diversity, equity, inclusion & accessibility (DEIA); managing relationship among societies, their journals and publishers; guiding research integrity; and investigating into potential misconducts in scholarly publishing.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.