WASHINGTON, DC (November 30, 2023)—When the editorial board and staff of Women’s Health Issues considered how they could use their platform to advance equity in academic publishing, one of the first steps they identified was to give authors appropriate guidance. They’ve now released two new author resources to do so: an Equity Guide for Authors and a Tips for Authors document.
Women’s Health Issues (WHI) is the official journal of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health, which is based at the Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) at the George Washington University.
The Equity Guide for Authors aims to help authors address characteristics on which people are often marginalized — including sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and disability — in a manner that resists reinforcing systems of oppression and marginalization. The WHI editorial board strongly encourages authors to follow these guidelines when preparing manuscripts, and also to consider these elements when designing instruments and studies (e.g., to include survey questions asking about both sex assigned at birth and gender identity).
"The Equity Guide is the product of many months of work by our board members to identify best practices and decide what we want to ask our authors to acknowledge and describe," said Karen McDonnell, Editor-in-Chief of Women's Health Issues and associate professor of prevention and community health at Milken Institute SPH. "We recognize that best practices are evolving quickly, so we are treating this as a living document and plan to update the Guide periodically."
McDonnell also noted that many datasets lack the granularity WHI would prefer to see — e.g., lumping several racial or ethnic groups together in an "other" category — and that different disciplines have different conventions. She emphasized that the editorial team will not reject submissions based on non-adherence to the guidelines, but they are likely to recommend revisions to use WHI’s preferred terminology or acknowledge datasets’ limitations.
The second resource, Tips for Authors, describes WHI’s typical processes for considering new submissions, seeking peer reviews, making decisions based on peer reviews, requesting revisions, making copyediting suggestions, proofreading manuscripts, and coordinating with the publisher, Elsevier, to ensure accurate typesetting and final publication of articles. The document contains advice designed to help authors prepare compelling submissions and revise their manuscripts in ways that increase the likelihood of acceptance, as well as tips about how best to respond to article proofs and publicize published articles.
"One of the way our journal can advance equity is by welcoming early-career authors and authors who might not have had the kind of mentoring opportunities that educate them about how to work with peer-reviewed journals," said Amita Vyas, an associate professor of prevention and community health at Milken Institute SPH. Vyas was editor-in-chief of WHI when the board and staff developed its list of steps they commit to taking to advance equity, and she now leads the process in her role as associate editor. "Although we expect that many of our authors will be interested in the Tips document for the behind-the-scenes look at our processes, we created it primarily to make submission and publication less intimidating to new authors."
Vyas explained that the next step for the editorial board and staff is to identify, create, and share with authors tools for disseminating their findings with those who can benefit from them, such as communities affected by high rates of maternal morbidity and mortality, structural racism, and barriers to accessing various forms of health care services. "When thinking about how we can advance equity, we want to consider authors, reviewers, readers, and the broader community — and we want the findings we publish to result in health improvements."
The Equity Guide for Authors and Tips for Authors documents are available via the WHI website.