December 2023 | Oceanography
surveys and program reports, and in proj-
ect reviews, and it offers new information
that we wish to make widely available
to the broader community of students,
employers, government officials, faculty,
and administrators.
By compiling the ocean sciences com-
munity’s
collective
experiences
and
knowledge into one open-access volume,
our aspiration is that this special issue will
(1) serve as a resource for building diver-
sity, equity, and inclusion in the ocean sci-
ences; (2) inspire people and institutions
to earnestly review practices and commit
to meaningful positive changes to achieve
a truly equitable, inclusive, and diverse
ocean sciences field; and (3) encour-
age underrepresented and marginalized
scholars to become and remain ocean
scientists. We also hope that this special
issue will stimulate discussion within the
ocean sciences community as to how we
can collectively create a more welcom-
ing, safe, secure, and inclusive environ-
ment for underrepresented and margin-
alized scholars and encourage colleagues
to look beyond the ocean sciences for
creative solutions.
SPECIAL ISSUE CONTENT
Instead of inviting authors to write arti-
cles on narrowly defined topics, the
guest editors asked The Oceanography
Society, the publisher of Oceanography,
to issue a broad call for letters of inter-
est in submitting articles on five topic
areas: (1) Numbers and Trends: What
Do The Data Tell Us?; (2) Barriers to
Entry, Persistence, Advancement, and
Success; (3) A Look at Some Federally
Funded Programs; (4) Other Initiatives;
and (5) Your Ideas. We received more
than 80 letters of interest, which were all
guest-editor reviewed. Final decisions
were made with the goal of inviting arti-
cles that span a range of programs and
initiatives. An equally important objec-
tive was to include voices of the next
generation of scholars to complement
authors who have been pioneers in pro-
moting diversity, equity, and inclusion
in the ocean and related sciences. In the
end, we sorted the articles into three of
the five initial topics, as seen in chapter
titles of this special issue.
Because of the great interest in contrib-
uting to the special issue and the wonder-
ful variety of letters of interest we received,
we invited many more authors to contrib-
ute articles than originally planned. In
some cases, we asked groups who sub-
mitted letters of interest on similar types
of programs to collaborate, with the
hope that by combining experiences they
would suggest novel ways to move for-
ward that would have more impact than
publishing several individual articles. By
combining forces in some articles and
inviting numerous shorter “spotlights,”
we were able to include even more voices
than initially anticipated. This approach
also allowed us to display a wider range of
programs, collect additional perspectives,
and capture more diverse identities, add-
ing richness to the volume. We gave voice
to as many people as our budget permit-
ted because of our desire to highlight
the range of barriers underrepresented
scholars face to advancement and reten-
tion in the ocean sciences and to empha-
size the experiences of the people who are
developing, running, or participating in
various programs.
For the spotlights, we asked authors to
limit their articles to roughly 1,500 words,
BOX 1. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
As part of this special issue, we are including an
online supplement that contains autobiographical
sketches written by ocean scientists from under-
represented and marginalized backgrounds. These
sketches highlight people’s careers, some bar-
riers they have encountered during their career
journeys, and how they mitigated those barri-
ers to find success. These sketches are mod-
eled on the one-page profiles that appear in the
two Women in Oceanography volumes published
by Oceanography (Autobiographical sketches of
women in oceanography, 2005, 2014) that have
been the source of inspiration for a generation of
women oceanographers.
https://oceanographydigital.tos.org/
flip-book/110286/787099