Indigenous participation in peer review publications and the editorial process: Reflections from a workshop

Photo | Lisa Loseto

The goal of this special issue was to highlight, via the use of peer-reviewed publications, the collaborative research occurring between Indigenous organizations and non-Indigenous scientists in the Arctic.

While Arctic-based research moves towards a paradigm shift to include local Indigenous Peoples, their priorities, and knowledge throughout the research process, the guest editors asked how the editorial and peer review process of research publications support the participation of Indigenous Peoples?

To discuss this issue, a half-day workshop at the 2019 ArcticNet Annual Scientific Meeting was held with diverse Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants involved in Arctic research.

Read this open access paper on the Arctic Science website.

The workshop discussions revealed that improving the involvement of Indigenous Peoples in the peer review and editorial processes largely begins by addressing the challenges of achieving equity in the research process generally.

While one of the major outcomes of the workshop was a call for further conversations and the recognition that no single approach will work in all cases, there are several concrete actions that researchers, universities, funding organizations, and publishers can take to begin addressing this issue.

Actions include having the journal or publisher request authors include a section in the manuscript with details on community partnerships, communication, or validation that occurred (not common in the natural sciences).

Word frequency cloud, showing the 80 most frequent words, the position and size of the font is reflective of the frequency with those in largest font closest to the center used most often. The words “community”, “research”, and “publish” had the highest frequency of use during discussion at the workshop.

Another idea raised was to have representative Indigenous organizations provide a confirmation of the communication or validation of partnership that occurred.

Co-authors are aware of the challenges of both approaches but suggest Arctic researchers attempt these concepts and share experiences as we grow in this new area of research equality.

Selection of key themes, outcomes, and recommendations:

· Communities/organizations/regions determine their involvement in the publication process. Regarding co-authorship by Indigenous Peoples, care must be taken to not lend to tokenism or false representation of Indigenous engagement.

· A community involvement statement could be included in a publication. The process of community involvement could be reported in the body of the article, and/or the community could provide validation of appropriate engagement (i.e., receive a badge of community approval).

· Consider community capacity for involvement in peer review and editorial processes. Although inviting communities to play a more active role in peer review may be a laudable/desirable goal, it is important not to overburden communities and Indigenous organizations, who are often overwhelmed by requests for their time. This highlights the need for capacity to be built to enable equitable participation, including fair compensation, and the role of the research community to support this.

Read the paper — Indigenous participation in peer review publications and the editorial process: Reflections from a workshop by L.L. Loseto, K. Breton-Honeyman, D.N. Etiendem, N. Johnson, T. Pearce, J. Allen, A. Amos, J. Arqviq, J.E. Baak, É. Bélanger, M.P.T. Bourdages, J.R. Brammer, D. Fawcett, J. Gérin-Lajoie, G. Gilbert, K. Hansen-Craik, E. Loring, A. Perrin, and M. Slavitch.