Supporting Career Progression in Publishing Through Systematic Analysis of Job Descriptions: A Cross-Industry Initiative

Abstract

Little consistency exists in how individuals enter scholarly publishing, let alone advance their careers. More transparency and documentation can help increase diversity in an industry that wrestles with its privilege. In this article, we report on a project initiated by three publishing industry associations to aggregate, normalise, and analyse public job postings and internal position descriptions in scholarly publishing. After gathering more than 1000 unique descriptions, a group of knowledgeable volunteers qualitatively coded them. Researchers from the University of Michigan checked for data consistency and analysed the job description corpus. Preliminary visualisations highlight the skills that suit potential applicants for various publishing positions and the skills that are most important to build for advancement. The findings can inform the development of products to make publishing a more equitable industry, such as interactive tools to match individuals with types of publishing jobs, well-formed template positions, and training programs that address skills gaps.