Maverick Publishing Specialists and ground-breaking AI diversity monitoring and analytics provider, Umbrella, have announced a new partnership to provide diversity and inclusion analysis, monitoring and advice across the publishing industry.
“A strong stance on diversion and inclusion is becoming a must-have for businesses,” said Nancy Roberts, Founder of Umbrella. “The reputational risks associated with bias in the editorial process are high and publishers need to act to ensure they are taking positive steps to reduce bias and discrimination. We know many publishers face challenges in understanding the diversity of their editorial boards, peer reviewers and author base.”
“AI and emerging data analytics technologies such as we provide at Umbrella present great opportunities to improve the industry data at scale and at an affordable cost for publishers. Partnering with Maverick enables us to offer our Diversity Analysis package to a wider range of publishers, societies and information specialists.”
Martin Marlow, President of Maverick Publishing Specialists said, “Nancy’s ground-breaking work in analytics will help publishing chart a course to being more representative and ensuring that the full diversity of voices and output are represented in academic discourse and among those making critical editorial decisions. Given the current landscape, it is vital that publishing, as a leading force in communicating the latest ideas and analysis, is providing the widest and most balanced thinking and insights from the academic community.”
Umbrella offers a Diversity Analysis package that takes raw data from publishers and generates demographic insights, benchmarked against global publishers’ metrics. “The analytics packages allow publishers to react to insights about editorial board composition and diversity of reviewers and authors to focus on ensuring quality in publishing outcomes,” commented Nancy Roberts, “With an evidence-driven approach, publishing can focus on making equality of publishing outcomes for authors, editors, editorial boards and reviewers a key commitment, inform publishing policies and reinforce fair and equitable treatment for everyone involved in the publishing process.”
