I joined the Scholarly Kitchen Chef’s panel at the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time this year, and gave a quick talk about my recently published study of the SDGs and research / scholarly communications. I’ve written up my talk here for those who couldn’t make it to the Messe (probably a wise choice since everyone who did seems to have had a worse-than-usual dose of Frankfurt Flu x COVID x bronchitis).
I’ve spent a lot of the last couple of years working on initiatives related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I’m a Fellow of the SDG Publishers’ Compact. I’ve drunk the Kool Aid, got the badge, even bought the t-shirt👇 But on my occasional forays into the wider world I am reminded that not everyone knows what the SDGs are — and not everyone is bought into them.
So I’ve taken to starting conversations on the topic with a quick recap of what the goals actually boil down to — because although some may be skeptical about the UN, or think the timelines of the SDG initiative are unrealistic, I’ve never yet met someone who doesn’t ultimately agree that we should be trying to end poverty and inequality, and ensuring that everyone has fair access to health, justice, peace, and prosperity. Which is basically all the goals are — a set of smart objectives attempting to focus our efforts, including research and its communication / application.
Many of the answers we need to solve the SDG challenges already exist — they’re just not evenly distributed.
For most publishers to date, the topic of sustainability has been an internal one — focused on things like carbon footprint, and on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). But scholarly publishers are uniquely well positioned to take a more outward focus (as Haseeb Irfanullah has argued eloquently here). Many of the answers we need to solve the SDG challenges already exist — they’re just not evenly distributed. Broader communication of research publications has massive SDG potential, in terms of making sure that a successful initiative in one community is known about and acted on by other communities — whether it’s bringing down rates of child mortality (SDG indicator 3.2.1), increasing the proportion of the population that has access to affordable housing (11.1.1), or any of the other 247 specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound objectives that make up the SDG indicators. We have a lot of low-hanging fruit at our disposal.
Where to start?
Part of the issue is knowing where to start. The top-level labels for the goals (“no poverty”, “zero hunger”, etc.) are so all-encompassing as to be overwhelming. Zooming in on the specific indicators is helpful, but raises additional questions as you try to define your action plan — to what extent, for example, are these issues gaining prominence in the research sector? Which authors are looking for more support here — which fields are most engaged with the SDGs? How does it vary by country? Etc.
I set out to try and answer some of these questions with a market research project that I’ve been working on for the last year, with thanks to support from sponsors ACS Publications, BMJ Group, Cabells, Crossref, De Gruyter Brill, and Wiley. I’ve recently written up the findings from this work, which has included a survey of over 4,500 researchers; teleinterviews with policy makers; and deep dive web research into governments / funders in different countries. I shared some snippets from the survey in my talk at Frankfurt.
Note: the survey respondents were self-selecting from invitations sent out by the various sponsors. We made it very clear that awareness of / support for the SDGs was not a pre-requisite to completing the survey. When asked about their familiarity with the SDGs, 77.7% indicated some level of familiarity — for context, GlobeScan’s 2023 analysis found that approx. 50% of the global public are aware of the SDGs. It’s reasonable to expect that academics (the majority of survey respondents) would have a higher level of awareness of the SDGs given that the Goals have been actively adopted or promoted by funders, institutions, academic societies, conferences, etc. I would think it reasonable to estimate that 60-65% of academics are familiar with the SDGs so the survey responses reflect a cohort that is more engaged with the topic than the norm. That said, GlobeScan’s figures for the global public show growth from 38% in 2017, and the consensus from teleinterviews etc suggest continued growth in awareness among academics is likely.
Snapshot of survey findings
We asked about 25 questions including demographics (country, subject area, career stage, type of organization), awareness of / involvement with the SDGs, funder and institutional expectations, budgets, publishing choices and barriers, audiences, and impacts. I picked out 5 questions to focus on in my talk at Frankfurt.
Respondents think the SDGs should be shaping how funding is allocated — almost three quarters (74.0%, n = 4,250) consider that the SDGs should be a factor in how research funding is allocated.
Delivering the SDGs requires applied research or research with a strong focus on societal impact. In both cases, researchers find it harder to get this kind of research funded and published, particularly with respect to publishing in “prestigious” journals.
Different regions have different priorities: respondents in Africa were much more likely to select Zero Hunger as one of the SDGs shaping their research. Reduced Inequalities was more likely to be selected by researchers in Australasia. Respondents in Asia and the Middle East were more likely to select Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure.
Effectiveness of journals: Respondents in Business and Management and Environmental Research were most likely to say that journals are effective at addressing and promoting SDG-related research. Respondents in Education and in Medical and Health Sciences were most likely to say that journals are ineffective.
What does all this mean for publishers?
I’m a great believer in trying to digest walloping great reports down into actionable recommendations. Here’s some examples of what I make of the information we gathered during this project (not only the data points I’ve picked out above but the full set). These are roughly in order of easier to harder to implement.
1. Multi-journal special issues:
Many of the Goals are interdisciplinary by nature, combining fields like environmental science, sociology, economics, and public health. It isn’t always obvious where to publish findings from research that can straddle some unusual disciplinary combinations. One solution is multi-journal special issues with journal / society brands coming together around specific topics and themes. In some of the more ‘popular’ / more strongly funded areas there may be opportunities to launch new interdisciplinary journals.
2. Recognizing the potential of local-scale studies:
The very specific nature of the SDG targets lends itself to specific, often localized research / interventions. How do you learn what increases the “Proportion of population that feel safe walking alone around the area they live after dark” (16.1.3) without starting with small-scale social experiments? The key is then scaling up successful initiatives, which becomes a question of communication — I think there’s a huge latent opportunity for publishers to help scale awareness and application of initiatives that are achieving the Goals’ objectives. How can we as a sector help square this for authors who are still incentivized to publish in journals based on Impact Factor or other journal-level prestige measures? I’ve been thinking about article types / journal sections and whether we can expand acceptance policies for prestige journals that might otherwise reject some of these local-scale studies because of a lack of a perceived significance. Can we start talking more about ‘impact potential’ than significance?
3. More effort to reach and track broader audiences:
Given their pivotal role in the communication of research, publishers play a massive part in whether research achieves its full societal impact potential. That is to say, the audiences that publishers / journals reach is key to how widely that research is applied. Kickstarting the societal impact value chain requires a more active approach to targeting, reaching and tracking broader audiences. As well as the article types / journal sections I mention above, this could be about creating an agreed format for briefing practitioners, policy makers, and others (“this project brought about this change — here is how to replicate that in your community”) and purposefully promoting that into those communities. That could mean partnering with relevant organizations and institutions (our survey respondents and follow-up research identified some great examples of potential partners); targeting tailored communications to reach those audiences; perhaps even sponsoring / celebrating research collaborations that bridge academia and policy.
4. Redefining “prestige”:
What can we do to ensure that applied research is seen as equally prestigious as more traditional, theoretical research? Publishers could work with editorial boards and indexing / ranking entities to increase the profile / recognition of authors and articles that tackle real-world problems, contribute to societal impact, and align with global challenges, such as those outlined in the SDGs, thereby shifting the focus from purely theoretical contributions to greater value being conferred upon practical, transformative research.
The SDGs are really just a very actionable framing of the societal challenges that research could usefully address
5. Better metrics for societal impact:
Not unrelated to the above, perhaps we need to have the metrics argument. Again. I do get that publishers are not the obvious cohort to be lobbying institutions to broaden / update their research assessment mechanisms. It’s like turkeys arguing for Christmas (though you can extend this metaphor by remembering that not all countries eat turkey for Christmas dinner, and indeed not all have Christmas, and thus a more global approach / solution may make commercial sense anyway). But as I keep saying, the SDGs are really just a very actionable framing of the societal challenges that research could usefully address. Better mechanisms for recognizing societal impact, and better proxies for measuring it, are urgently needed. Tracking contribution to the SDG indicators would be a good place to start, though I emphasize “contribution to indicators” should not be interpreted as “rough relevance to top-level goals”. As above, overstating the relevance of articles to the SDGs just makes it harder to see the wood for the trees; building the indicators into impact criteria will make SDG research more appealing to do and more rewarding to publish, as its real-world applications often extend beyond traditional academic impact measures.
6. Lowering barriers for access and dissemination:
This is probably the ‘outward-looking’ area with which publishers have most actively engaged, in terms of waiving read and publish fees for e.g., researchers in the Global South, but it’s also the most challenging area in which to bring about meaningful change, given that it basically means rebuilding our entire scholarly comms system. Notwithstanding the huge achievements of Research4Life, INASP et al., there is recognition that (a) waiving of fees must be only a short-term approach (it reeks of epistemic imperialism; can we find a more equitable global model), and (b) it’s not just about enabling readership. Global North publishers do not publish enough Global South research; is the answer for them to publish more — which potentially just perpetuates the Global North’s control of knowledge — or should the focus be on empowering journals from the Global South? This wider debate has relevance to the visibility and impact of SDG-related research. It has to be mentioned in this context (elephant in the room) but I have deliberately put other recommendations first as any progress on this one is going to be constrained by the bigger picture of re-inventing the business of scholarly communication.
In conclusion
The growing engagement of researchers, institutions, funders and policy makers with sustainability goals (whether or not specifically the SDGs) presents many opportunities for publishers to help accelerate and maximize societal impact of the research they publish. I hope our new report can help spark some change. For access to the full findings, analysis and recommendations, feel free to contact me. Let’s work together to make sustainability research reach further and resonate more widely.
Discussion
10 Thoughts on "How the SDGs Are Shaping the Research Agenda, and What Publishers Need to Know and Do"
Hi Charlie. Great post! I’m replying because, I had been thinking recently, about the “problem” we have in the Global North (incl. here in Australia – even though we’re geographically south!), regarding the publication of scholarly literature arising from the Global South.
Right now, the academic publishing world is awash with paper mills and junk papers, making it harder and harder for researchers (& librarians, like me), to filter the wheat from that ubiquitous chaff. We also have a major critical appraisal literacy issue in that, most non-trained people cannot tell a junk paper or papermill journal from a reputable one online under Open Access. It is *really* easy to personally bias Global South publications out of concern that we might be promoting what could be a papermill publication. This is its own form of racism and needs to be stopped in its tracks… but wowsers, those papermills and junk science articles make that hard! So very hard. It means that many of us instinctively, head to Global North literature we feel we can “trust” when seeking evidence – even if that’s not always true (Global North junk science & papermill publishing is, every bit, a problem, too). Biases towards literature, research, data and analysis produced in the Global South is not only wrong and deeply troubling, they won’t stop until academic publishing addresses the fundamental problem of junk publishing and builds a far more equitable system for scholarly communications than “Publish or Perish”!
To improve our capacity to normalise and promote Global South research, the North needs to actively assist to combat the pirate “takeovers” of academic publishing across both North and South. The SDGs will always struggle to improve human life and wellbeing if we consistently allow good science (especially in the South) to be swallowed by the freely accessible junk.
To combat the rise of junk information. It is clear there is greater need to teach information literacy and critical thinking skills to students. This is where A.I. can come to our aid to assist us to find the useful from the junk that is flooding our informatin feeds.
Hi Michelle, yes I agree, there is prejudice towards Global South articles and an assumption that Global North journals are publishing “better” content – this of course is not true, and there is both good and bad research everywhere. The flood of junk science is both clouding the picture and making it increasingly urgent that we deal with the problem, at source. Partly that is about rooting out bad actors, partly it’s about changing institutional incentives (redefining prestige, point 5 above) and partly it’s about business models (point 6 above). It’s hard for our sector to find the capacity to do this in an environment of budget cuts.
“Many of the answers we need to solve the SDG challenges already exist — they’re just not evenly distributed.” Great adaption of Gibson’s (or somebody’s) quote. I appreciate the shout-out for Research4Life and similar efforts. In response to Michelle’s comment, I would point out capacity development efforts underway with journals in LMICs so they can meet the criteria for inclusion in DOAJ. In addition, Research4Life has a network of almost 12,000 institutions across 125 countries. I wonder how to marshal that network to bring regional expertise to the quality questions you have noted.
Thanks Daniel. I find that quote comes to my mind quite a lot in what feels like our post-justice society.
Thank you Charlie, for sharing the interesting data coming out of the ‘Real World Change’ study. (And, of course including our photo, taken exactly two months back at the ALPSP Conference in Manchester/UK!).
The numbers are indeed quite intriguing, especially when it involved such a large number of respondents. I appreciate all of your recommendations. But want to note if we should focus on bringing out more new journals or should trying to shift the focus of the existing ones towards interdisciplinarity to appreciate the SDGs. (After all, sometimes I think, we have too many journals already!) A few of your six recommendations in fact demand a shift in our mindset and in the ways of doing things, such a redefining prestige and manuscript acceptance criteria. But, your last sentence says it all, scholarly publishing indeed needs a change in its core. I have also talked about such transformative changes in my recent TSK articles on the elephant in the room (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/10/24/scholarly-publishing-the-elephant-and-other-wildlife-in-the-room/) and on resilience (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/08/22/understanding-resilience-in-scholarly-publishing/).
Hi Haseeb, yes, I agree with you that it we should think twice before continuing to launch new journals. I’d love us to focus more on shifting current journals but I’d guess that for some/many publishers the preference would be to launch something new!
This is a great overview of the BIG questions and directions for publishers implementing SD Goals for each organization. In embracing the concept some scholarly publishers have analyzed and chosen those Goals and sub-goals which match their mission and are finding ways to highlight those works, committees, publications, etc. There are several who have chosen to see what they already have published in their collections which pertain either to their selected goals or to the goals overall. In order to find those publications and present them as collections to their active reading communities they needed to find the item, particularly publications which match.
What IEEE https://climate-change.ieee.org and ASCE https://ascelibrary.org/sdg did was to create a taxonomy for sustainability concepts including climate change within their collections, create a rule base to data mine the content to find the appropriate items and then gather those works as a separate and discoverable collection on their web sites.
PLOS took a different approach. First, they built a taxonomy to encourage more submissions to their sustainability related journals PLOS Climate, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, PLOS Water. Then Sept 30, 2024 released Curated Collections in response to the goals for Earth & Environment and Climate Change and Human Health https://collections.plos.org/collection/climate-change-human-health/ by data mining their collections for existing materials.
Scholarly publishers have already done a great amount of publishing which support the UN SDG. They should present the collections of that data to the world. One easy and fast way to do it is to data mine the collections using a taxonomy which showcases their specific publications.
Full disclosure: Access Innovations created and datamined for the three mentions organizations. We fully support those goals.
Thanks Marjorie. What I have found when helping publishers identify relevant content is that it is very easy to overstate the relevance of content to the SDGs specifically. To some extent I think the SDG initiative is a victim of its own success in this respect. They have done such a fantastic job with the top-level branding (17 goal labels – “gender equality”, “climate action”) that many people assume any content on those topics is relevant to the SDGs. In fact, the SDGs are a much more precise set of objectives (e.g. for gender equality, “reduce the proportion of time spend on unpaid domestic and care work, by sex, age and location”). When you focus in on these specifics, you get a much lower quantity of content (by my estimates, about a fifth of what high-level labelling gives you). I don’t know whether Access Innovations is working at that top level, or what metadata it is using to datamine publisher collections, but I’d wholeheartedly wish you to work at “indicator level” (2 levels ‘down’ from the top level labels) to really draw out the content that is going to make a difference!
The beauty of using a taxonomy is that you index at the most specific level. If you take all 247 subcategories of the SDG they are in fact, not detailed enough to cover a topic if it has to do with building a road, for example. So yes, you’re right. It needs to be very, very specific to be effective, which is why organizations are building taxonomies for their own content and cannot jus use the broad SDG alone to build sn implementation plan. The SDG is a good starting point.
