Measuring Success and Ensuring Progress: Accountability and Metrics in DEIA Programs

Although every year in the scholarly publishing ecosystem is a balancing act of innovation, optimization, and value creation, 2025 is shaping up to be particularly challenging as the pace and scale of change is accelerating more than we’ve ever seen before. There is increasing pressure to provide value to and to meet the incredibly diverse needs of the global research community while maintaining financial health for our own organizations, living our values, and continuing to protect the scholarly record. With AI, open access, integrity, and mistrust frequently dominating the conversation, we are in the midst of an unprecedented shift in both our industry and society as a whole. As always, the SSP community continues to focus on bringing together academics, funders, librarians, publishers, service providers, technologists, researchers and countless others with a communal interest and stake in disseminating scholarly information. We look to the 47th Annual Meeting as an opportunity to continue this tradition and welcome all colleagues and community stakeholders.

Alisa is a creative and data-driven publishing professional who specializes in developing and implementing practical DEIA frameworks. As an inclusive publishing consultant, she guides scholarly publishers, academic institutions, and editorial teams in the design, implementation, and evaluation of equitable publishing practices that center accessibility, representation, and accountability. Drawing on over a decade of experience across scholarly publishing—including as the Head of DEI at Cell Press, where she spearheaded DEI and psychological safety initiatives across over 50 scientific journals—she brings a strategic, intersectional perspective to advancing inclusion in academic publishing. Alisa is a certified Fearless Organization Practitioner who specializes in measuring psychological safety and improving team culture around open conversation, risk taking, and inclusion, with a special emphasis on fostering environments where diverse voices feel valued and empowered to contribute. Whether leading high-impact training for editorial boards or leading initiatives to advance inclusive policy and practice in academic publishing, her goal is to create and implement structures that reflect and support the full breadth of scholarly communities. Alisa is based in Huntsville, AL; she is a French horn player, an avid cyclist, and a fan of sci-fi and fantasy literature. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, playing D&D, practicing yoga, and spending time with her spouse, children, and cat.

Camille Lemieux leads data projects as a Manager of Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) at Springer Nature. Leveraging her specializations in program evaluation and data-driven decision-making, she helps teams track progress on their DEI goals. In this role, she also leads the company's annual DEI employee survey, which helps senior leaders use feedback from thousands of employees to cultivate a more inclusive and equitable workplace culture. She holds a master's degree in learning sciences from the University of Iowa.

Stephanie (Steph) Pollock, MPS (she/her) is the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Lead, Journals, for APA Publishing. In this role she directs and implements EDI initiatives for the APA Journals program, working with APA governance and other groups outside of APA to improve equity and representation in science and scholarly publishing. With more than 11 years of experience in scholarly publishing and a master’s degree in publishing from The George Washington University, Steph is committed to improving equity in both the field of psychology and in the publishing industry. She is a co-author on the C4DISC Antiracism Toolkit for Organizations, a member of SSP’s DEIA Committee since 2018, and she led the creation of APA Publishing’s EDI Toolkit for Journal Editors.