How to Advance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Your Organization: A Look at Successful Initiatives in the World of Scholarly Publishing

“Building a More Connected Scholarly Community” The last 19+ months have been a fascinating contradiction, making us feel both painfully disconnected and also perhaps more bonded than ever before. How can we take the strengths we already possessed as a community, fold in lessons learned during the pandemic, and aim for being an even stronger, broader, and more connected community? Our Annual Meeting brings together academics, funders, librarians, publishers, service providers, technologists, and countless others with a communal interest and stake in the dissemination of scholarly information. We look forward to the 44th Annual Meeting as an opportunity to reconnect and to connect anew.

April Kates-Ellison oversees the American Dental Association’s member and client services, driving member growth strategies that leverage the collective ADA System (national, state and local) to increase membership and drive revenue. Her focus centers on growing membership, especially in key member segments, while ensuring a commitment to both diversity and inclusion. She is also responsible for delivering a portfolio of service offerings to state and local ADA societies and dental schools. Ms. Kates-Ellison provides strong leadership and develops effective collaborative partnerships between national, state and local ADA societies to maximize value and service for the members. She strategically leverages volunteer leadership to impact member growth efforts and support strategic marketing and sales efforts through consulting relationships. Additional services are provided to members through the Member Service Center. Prior to the vice president role, Ms. Kates-Ellison served as the senior director of Client Services where she led a team of eleven that was charged with strategic service delivery to state and local societies. She has managed the Association’s diversity and inclusion strategy for members and supported its Diversity and Inclusion Committee; a committee of the ADA Board of Trustees. Ms. Kates-Ellison holds a Master of Science in Public Service Management from DePaul University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Illinois. In addition, she holds the Certified Association Executive (CAE) credential through the American Society of Association Executives. She is a recipient of the Workforce Diversity Scholar Leadership Program through Association Forum of Chicagoland and also a recipient of the Women of Excellence Award through the Chicago Defender. Ms. Kates-Ellison works closely with women and youth organizations. She is the founder of the New Year’s Women’s Conference, Vent & Reinvent Women Group Sessions, the Reach Back Project and cofounder of the We Care Community Outreach Initiative.

Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, is the Vice President, Research Intelligence with the Global Strategic Networks team, currently on secondment with Strategy, at Elsevier. Her key role is giving voice to research and library leaders at universities, funders, and science policy organizations to help deliver the most impactful and inclusive research information solutions to support research globally. Dr. Falk-Krzesinski has been Co-chair of the Gender Equity Taskforce since its inception six years ago, advocating for greater diversity in the STEMM workforce, promoting sex/gender/intersectional-based analysis in scientific research and scholarly publications, advancing journal editorial board diversity, and co-authoring Elsevier’s two global gender analytics reports. Dr. Falk-Krzesinski's engagement activities include building partnerships around DEI issues with a focus on intersectionality – notably Gender, Race & Ethnicity, and Age. She has been leading Elsevier’s efforts, in collaboration with the 52-member, multi-publisher Joint Commitment for Action in Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing group, to develop a global framework to consistently collect Gender Identity and Race & Ethnicity data across scholarly communication and editorial workflow platforms. The intention is for this data to lead to actionable insight that advances diversity and inclusion and addresses bias, discrimination, and systematic racism in research. Prior to joining Elsevier, Dr. Falk-Krzesinski was a faculty member and administrator at Northwestern University. She helped launch the Chicago Collaboration for Women in STEM program to address institutional underrepresentation of women in both pre-and post-tenure faculty positions across STEM disciplines at Chicago-area universities and Department of Energy National Labs. For more than a decade, Dr. Falk-Krzesinski has been an influential contributor to a growing community of research development professionals and the international community of practice for team science and the ‘science of team science’ field.

Shirley Decker-Lucke is Director of Content, at SSRN, Elsevier's preprint server. She has leads innovative cross-departmental initiatives that ensure Elsevier is understanding and meeting our customer needs. She is responsible for ensuring the SSRN platform supports content and researcher needs for the dissemination of early stage research (preprints). Throughout her career she has focused on merging content and technology in innovative ways that serves the research and those who rely upon it. Before this role she was Publishing Director at Elsevier.