Business as usual? Taking stock of submissions and reviews two years after the first coronavirus lockdowns

Abstract

Academic publishing is under increasing scrutiny for its role in reproducing gender inequality among academics (Lundine et al., 2019) and other inequalities related to such differences as authors ’ ethnicity and geographic context (Collyer, 2018). Not only are scholarly publications a critical success factor at various stages of the academic career (Winslow & Davis, 2016), but they also constitute the very corpus of our knowl-edge, which may therefore directly suffer from given biases. This reality imposes a responsibility on the institutions and individuals involved in producing and selecting academic publications to re fl ect on their part in perpetuating or countering existing inequalities. Beyond public academic discussions (e.g., #CommunicationSoWhite), such introspection within the fi eld of communication research has been realized through investigations into the differential representations of genders (e.g., Trepte & Loths, 2020) and geographic contexts (e.g., Demeter, 2019) in scholarly publications. The need for such investigations has further gained urgency through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic since disasters generally tend to increase existing cleavages (Bolin & Kurtz, 2018; Ward & Shively, 2017). Institutions and individuals have indeed reacted to the situation by producing rich evidence, from individual fi rst-hand accounts of scholars ’ personal experiences, shared through social media or elaborated into auto-ethnographic studies, to analyses of massive data that was publicly available.