Editors as allies: Our two-year experience at PLOS Global Public Health

Two years ago, PLOS Global Public Health began publishing articles with a bold vision:

The mission of PLOS Global Public Health is to address deeply entrenched inequities in global health and make impactful research visible and accessible to health professionals, policymakers, and local communities. We are committed to amplifying the voices of underrepresented and historically excluded communities and are deliberate and intentional about equity, diversity, and inclusion at all levels–editors, editorial boards, peer reviewers and authors—to broaden the range and diversity of perspectives we learn from and advance the health of all humankind.

We launched this journal in a time of great turmoil: the COVID-19 pandemic was raging with a woefully inequitable distribution of vaccines, Black Lives Matter and Women in Global Health were advocating for urgent change, and the discourse around decolonizing global health shone a brighter light than ever on the way that global health as usual perpetuates systemic inequities. In sum, there was a need to disrupt the way a journal publishes and presents global health research, and we sought to do just that. We created a journal armed with data [2] on how global health journals are not really global, nor seen as safe spaces for Global South, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). We wanted to create a journal that was in and of itself an ally to these communities and to intersecting movements and to the arc of social justice, and we wanted our editors to serve as allies as well.

We set ourselves ambitious goals, beginning with diverse leadership all the way from our Editors-in-Chief (EICs), but also including our Section Editors and, crucially, our Academic Editors, who would assess and improve the research submitted to PLOS Global Public Health. We wanted to “amplify the work of BIPOC experts, especially people from the Global South, Indigenous scholars, and individuals working and living within their impacted communities,” ensuring that our journal was a welcome home for work about the Global South, by the Global South, as well as to amplify research about inequities wherever they occur. We reaffirmed our commitment to tackling parachute research and removing article processing charges as a barrier to publishing rigorous, peer-reviewed research.

So two years on, how are we doing? Are we truly, as we sought to be, walking the path of allyship? Are we truly diverse and inclusive? Where can we do better?

Robinson J, Kyobutungi C, Nyakoojo Z, Pai M (2023) Editors as allies: Our two-year experience at PLOS Global Public Health. PLOS Glob Public Health 3(11): e0002644. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0002644