Diversity, equity, and inclusion in JVS-Vascular Science

There is increasing public recognition that the structure of most professional organizations has aspects that provide advantages to some members of the society at the expense of others. Such inequity is not consistent with the principles, standards, and goals of JVS-Vascular Science, the Journal of Vascular Surgery (JVS) family, or the sponsor of JVS, the Society for Vascular Surgery.¹ Recent changes implemented by the Society for Vascular Surgery, including the move to online officer voting and eliminating discussion panels comprising solely of men from society-sponsored educational programs, reflect the society's new focus on identifying and modifying intrinsic systems that have resulted in prior biases. The standards for experimentation and the publication of experimental results are also evolving as seen in many changes such as the requirement for the inclusion of adequately powered subgroups stratified by sex as a part of datasets in clinical papers.

JVS-Vascular Science, the newest journal in the JVS family, has a mission to provide a home for translational vascular science. Success in this mission includes publications that are broadly inclusive, respect all aspects of diversity, and make every attempt to assure equity. Efforts to emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are present in JVS-Vascular Science as are also present in all other journals in the JVS family, and we expect our authors and reviewers to adhere to these principles in both study design and reporting.^2,3

Existing efforts of the scientific community on DEI and embraced by the Editors reflect a clear position on equity and contribute to avoiding bias and discrimination in scientific writing and publishing. Some of the mechanisms that show transparency and accountability include incorporating DEI into the journal's mission statement, creating a DEI action plan and training, giving attention to issues of DEI during reviewer selection, consideration of DEI among authors for certain types of articles, selection of research participants with attention to DEI, and an editorial action plan to deal with issues of DEI that occur during review of submissions.³ These plans reflect our responsibility to abide by the principles of DEI that will build the journal's reputation for fairness, transparency, and accountability. We also emphasize an ongoing commitment to assessment, change, and reassessment of our policies and practices to meet these goals.

In January 2016, the National Institutes of Health instituted a funding policy requiring researchers to factor sex into the design, analysis, and reporting of vertebrate animal and human studies. This policy arose from the increasing recognition that sex can affect cellular or organism-level reactions to various manipulations including gene expression, drugs, and other experimental treatments. Therefore, results that do not consider sex as a biologic variable may not be reproducible or generalizable; furthermore, aggregated results, with both sexes pooled, may result in missing important differing reactions by sex to experimental treatments.^4,5 Data must be adequately powered to provide rigorous and meaningful comparisons and statistical analysis, not only for sex, but for all variables of interest. In 2019, Peter Gloviczki and Peter F. Lawrence, Editors of JVS Publications, confirmed that our publication policy is consistent with the standards defined by the surgical journal editors that uniform, defined sex-based reporting and sex-based analysis of data of human, animal, tissue, and cell research is required in all manuscripts published in our journals.²

Diversity enhances science as it enhances all of life and should be considered in many different aspects of our professional lives. Most importantly, as in any other profession, scientific leadership should foster the ambition to provide an inspirational, productive, and equal work environment that facilitates the growth and maturation of individuals into scientists built on their qualifications and accomplishments. Successful scientific leadership also recognizes that the power of research increases synergistically when this environment is built on diversity with a mixture of individuals who together create complementary interrelations that enhance group dynamics, creativity, and reproducibility. As such, diversity is the ultimate mechanism of scientific rigor. JVS-Vascular Science is more than a home for vascular scientists; it provides important translational research for all people.