gms | German Medical Science

Description: In recent years, there has been an increasing debate on how scientific journals represent sex, gender, ethnicity and other aspects of human diversity. Moreover, the hegemony of the English language in scientific publications lays the foundation for structural inequalities for non-native speakers. As a result, there is a call to authors, editors, and reviewers to ask themselves: How can we minimise our biases and be more inclusive?

Planned methods:

The objectives of the workshop are:

• To debate the main emerging challenges in diversity and academic publishing.
• To analyse the role of language when discussing sex, gender, and ethnicity, among other topics, in scientific communications.
• To identify strategies to acknowledge diversity at the different stages of the publishing process.

Contents

• Initiatives for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).
• Current guidelines on sex, gender and ethnicity.
• Diversity in research teams and the context of research.
• Common problems related to language when submitting, reviewing and editing a manuscript.

Based on the discussion of real-life anonymised cases from the BMJ and the input of the participants, this workshop aims to promote debate and analysis on this topic while thinking of possible solutions to some of the emerging challenges in this area. In addition, we will collect and summarise the participants' input into themes that will be disseminated in further communications.

Competing interests: Juan Franco is a family physician and researcher with expertise in evidence-informed healthcare, knowledge translation and patient-centred care. He is the Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine and Clinical Editor at the BMJ. He also works as Managing Editor of the Cochrane Metabolic and Endocrine Disorders Group at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and is a member of Cochrane’s Governing Board.