The Publishers Association has issued guidance for publishing businesses looking to gather data on protected characteristics of authors, illustrators, and translators.
The toolkit, prepared by independent researchers following consultation with publishers, aims to help publishers navigate this area. It includes guidance on creating and sending out an author questionnaire, along with template questions aimed at gathering information about ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability and socio-economic class.
An accompanying report outlines the background and context around the creation of the toolkit. The report authors, independent researchers Emma Shercliff and Maiya Grant, conducted a literature review, gathered information about current practices and interviewed publishers to inform the report and toolkit.
The report makes four recommendations, including that an annual survey should be undertaken in the future and the results of it published. It also recommends that the toolkit is widely shared across the industry.
Publishers told the report authors that they were keen to share best practice and work towards consistency across the industry in terms of how this data is collected. They found widespread recognition that the collection of this information, with authors’ consent, was important in terms of better understanding diversity of output. While a few publishing companies have begun to collect this data, the researchers found that many more were keen to do so but would welcome structured guidance.
The first phase of the project focused on gathering information about diversity auditing practices across the industry, and understanding the needs of publishers as they navigated the complexities of monitoring author output by protected characteristics.
An analysis of the data collected in phase one found that only a small number of publishers had developed tools for gathering author diversity data. As such, it was decided that the second phase of the project should involve the development of a toolkit for publishers to enable them to undertake author diversity data collection, rather than aggregating publisher data as originally conceived in the project brief.
Click here to read the original press release.
