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Looking Beyond the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The SDGs provide an excellent roadmap for beginning, but they aren't the end of this journey.

Published onJun 17, 2024
Looking Beyond the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Dr. Haseeb Md. Irfanullah is an independent consultant from Bangladesh working in environment, climate change and research system.

When I think of sustainability in scholarly publishing, three points come to my mind.

First, I see sustainability issues from two different perspectives: i) inward looking, and ii) outward looking. By inward looking, I mean that individual publishers and their societies are working to achieve sustainability within themselves. Nowadays, this effort is often translated into contributions to achieving one or more Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDG Publishers Compact is very useful here to identify actions and stay focused. The inward-looking actions also include ensuring Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) along the publishing workflow by focusing on people involved at different stages. It further includes our environmental and climate actions through reducing carbon/environmental footprints by changing working modalities, marketing strategies, and overall production systems, for example.

Different tools are now available to facilitate our inward actions. Examples include the SDG Publishers Compact Fellows’ 10 sets of Top Action Tips for a wide range of stakeholders; the STM’s SDG Sustainability Roadmap—a 5-phase action plan for publishers; and the International Publishers Association’s (IPA) SDG Dashboard—a SDG-wise compilation of useful tools.

By being outward looking, on the other hand, I mean how publishers and their journals and books take sustainability knowledge forward by documenting, communicating, and distributing new solutions, innovations, and discoveries. This in turn may contribute to the SDG17, which expects collaborations to attain all of the 17 SDGs by 2030. More importantly, it is linked to ‘research impact’ on the ground, not just ‘journal impact’ (e.g., Citescores and Impact Factors) or ‘academic impact’ (i.e., advancing the knowledge of a discipline), as my fellow Chef Charlie Rapple wrote in a The Scholarly Kitchen piece last year.

These two perspectives bring us to my second point—how do we measure our contributions to the SDGs or progress towards sustainability, for that matter? Rachel Martin wrote about it in her latest piece for EON to some extent. The UN/IPA and the EASE (European Association of Science Editors)/HESI (Higher Education Sustainability Initiative) conducted two surveys on the adoption of the SDG Publishers Compact and related matters in 2022. The results were mixed. The UN/IPA survey found that most of the signatories to the Compact had decided on which SDG to focus on, expressed their commitment in virtual public domain, and assigned a SDG focal person, but they were lagging behind in allocating budget designated to SDG-related activities and in aligning content-acquiring strategy with the SDGs. The EASE/HESI survey identified a few issues which are different from the UN/IPA survey: low awareness of the Compact compared with the SDGs, which led to not joining the Compact. UN/IPA survey respondents identified climate action (SDG13) as the most prioritized SDG followed by quality education (SDG4). The latter was the top SDG identified by the EASE/HESI survey.

In December 2023, Kudos conducted a survey for the SDG Publishers Compact Fellows to measure publishers’ awareness of and attitude towards the SDGs. While almost all of the 167 respondents showed very positive attitude to the SDGs, around half of the respondents expected their employers to be more active about the SDGs.  In the same vein, I attended a few webinars discussing sustainability in publishing over the last three years. Watching the number of attendees, poll results, and engagement from the audiences makes me think that, while interest in the topic is increasing, informed and active participation in the SDG conversation is still low.

But, to measure research impact—linking to the outward aspect of sustainability—we need real time data, not overdue surveys (e.g., the UN/IPA survey was conducted in mid-2022 and the results were made public in October 2023). The SDG Compact Fellows developed Top Action Tips to translate research into action by linking research with practitioners, policymakers, journalists, and general mass. Harnessing the progress in AI, we could install a ‘SDG Meter‘ on our journal websites to show how each paper we publish directly contributes to the SDGs, quantitatively—but not just by searching keywords in an article, but rather by analyzing the research implication and conclusion sections. Asking authors to write a note on their article’s SDG contribution may be useful but may add additional burden to them. Nevertheless, publishers and journals should also track how published research is changing institutions, systems, policies, and practices, qualitatively. Once again, AI’’s strength could be capitalized on, since a prototype has been built in medicine discipline (e.g., BMJ Impact Analytics). We must go beyond our ‘citation culture’ to measure research impact. Sustainability in publishing demands more from us.

Third, we also need to realize how our actions towards sustainability or the SDGs are already affecting certain systems not initially intended or how they could potentially affect them. For example, some latest university rankings are now based on the SDGs (e.g., THE Impact Ranking). This in turn influences concerned academics to ensure certain ‘SDG-friendly’ words are used in their articles, so that an automated system doesn’t miss their articles during the evaluation of their universities’ ranking applications. The SDG Publishers Compact Fellows’ Top Action Tips for academic authors give some ideas as well in this connection.

We are also not thinking about sustainability from a ‘resilience’ point of view, which seems to be a missed opportunity. To sustain, we need to be resilient against shocks and stresses affecting the publishing industry. Examples of shocks include natural disasters (e.g., heatwaves, floods, and pandemics), economic depressions, wars, mergers and acquisitions, or significant changes in donor and government policies towards research communications. Stress, on the other hand, may include mass scale unethical practices like paper mills, prevalence of back-dated philosophy like ‘publish or perish’ pushing young researchers to the edge, and a surge of AI misuse.

We can show resilience against these phenomena at least by building our capacities to cope with these shocks/stresses so that we can maintain stability and avoid any permanent damage to individual publishers or the industry as a whole. Retracting articles in respond to paper mills’ invasion is an example of a coping mechanism. We can also go a step further and make our capacity stronger by adjusting to long-term social, economic, and environmental changes happening around us. We can show such strengths by making incremental adjustments within our organizations and also in systems we operate in. An example of such action is employing a range of open access models in response to the on-going open access movement. The ultimate way to tackle shocks/stresses and show resilience is transforming ourselves to the core. Such shift requires structural changes in our current system—the way we govern our businesses, publicly disclose our business model, decide on investments, and appreciate voluntarism, for instance.

While initiative like the SDG Publishers Compact aims at a journey until 2030, it and other recent instruments noted above indeed make a humble effort to prepare us for other opportunities in the post-SDG era.

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