Welcome

Welcome to the C4DISC Toolkit for Disability Equity in Scholarly Communications! This is a community-led project designed to curate resources and answer common questions, in an effort to make the scholarly communications industry more inclusive to people with disabilities. It’s intended to be an evolving resource, so if you have a question, resource or case study you’d like to share, please contact us.

Who is the Toolkit for?

The toolkit is for everyone who works in scholarly communications. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 16% of the world’s working-age population has a disability. This means that you almost certainly work with someone who has a disability. What’s more, given that 80% of disabilities are ‘hidden’ (i.e., not immediately apparent), it’s likely that you don’t even know it. Specifically, this is a resource for people with disabilities, their coworkers and managers, and people who have caretaking responsibilities to get information that will help them resolve challenges both for themselves and to help others. There are plenty of general disability inclusion guidelines out there, but we felt that there was nothing that particularly focuses on the scholarly communications industry. Therefore, the content of this toolkit aims to specifically serve people working in the scholarly communications industry.

Who do we mean by ‘the scholarly communications industry’?

We mean everyone who is involved in the creation, dissemination and reception of scholarly research and reference. This includes, but is not limited to, publishers, societies, librarians, vendors, researchers, marketers, HR professionals, teachers and students.

What are the aims of the Toolkit?

The toolkit is designed to be interactive, so everyone can access information in a way that suits them. We hope the toolkit will:

Help individuals become better informed about disability inclusion
Raise awareness about what organizations can do to become more disability inclusive
Build a community around disability inclusion in the scholarly communications industry

How can I get involved?

If you have a question about the Toolkit or have a suggestion for a resource to include, please complete the form here and we will get back to you.
If you have a specific question about your own circumstances, or would like to discuss anything to do with disability inclusion, please join our closed LinkedIn group (forthcoming) and participate in the conversation.

One of our goals is to build a community around disability inclusion – to bring people together, to learn from each other, to share and to learn from one another. No question is too small or too basic – if you’re asking it, someone else is probably thinking it!