Editors As Allies: Our Two Year Experience at PLOS Global Public Health

Abstract

The mission of PLOS Global Public Health is to address deeply entrenched inequities inglobal health and make impactful research visible and accessible to health professionals,policymakers, and local communities. We are committed to amplifying the voices of under-represented and historically excluded communities and are deliberate and intentionalabout equity, diversity, and inclusion at all levels editors, editorial boards, peer reviewersand authors to broaden the range and diversity of perspectives we learn from and advancethe health of all humankind.We launched this journal in a time of great turmoil: the COVID-19 pandemic was ragingwith a woefully inequitable distribution of vaccines, Black Lives Matter and Women in GlobalHealth were advocating for urgent change, and the discourse around decolonizing globalhealth shone a brighter light than ever on the way that global health as usual perpetuates sys-temic inequities. In sum, there was a need to disrupt the way a journal publishes and presentsglobal 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 inand of itself an ally to these communities and to intersecting movements and to the arc ofsocial 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 ourEditors-in-Chief (EICs), but also including our Section Editors and, crucially, our AcademicEditors, 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 GlobalSouth, as well as to amplify research about inequities wherever they occur. We reaffirmed ourcommitment to tackling parachute research and removing article processing charges as a bar-rier to publishing rigorous, peer-reviewed research