Last week, I attended the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s Equitable Partnerships in Global Health meeting and learned a lot!

The Keynote Speaker at the meeting was Dr  Jimmy Volmink —the Executive Director for Equity at the Wellcome. His lecture kickstarted the meeting and laid the setting for why he himself states, “Equity is science’s greatest opportunity”.

Partnerships between research groups is commonplace—even the norm—in many scientific fields. As a publisher, I see this in practice every day—just by looking at the author list on submitted manuscripts. I agree that collaboration progresses science faster than scientists working in silo by themselves. (Actually, thinking about it, even a single scientist is not truly working on their own. Simply by reading and learning from published papers, using published dataset, going to meetings and conferences, they are collaborating- albeit passively- with published authors and other researchers.)

What was eye opening in Dr Volmink’s lecture was that whilst partnerships and collaboration may be commonplace—equitable partnerships were often not. Frequently, there is one lead organisation in a research collaboration, and the priorities of the other partners are not met. He used as an example a case from his time at Stellenbosch University when his department was invited to be part of an international collaboration. However, he found that the research outlined did not consider the South African perspective.

Throughout the meeting, it was clear that, time and again, it is the Global South’s interests that suffer in global heath partnerships. It is, therefore, not okay to just have partnerships—we need to have equitable partnerships, where all partners’ priorities are recognised and addressed.

According to Dr Volmink, to achieve equitable partnerships in global health in practice, we need to:

1. Move towards shared commitments and purpose – this means agreeing on priorities together and recognising what success looks like for all partners.
2. Move away from consultation to co-creation. All partners create the research question and design the research plan.
3. Focus on group achievements rather than individual achievements.
4. Move towards long-term partnerships rather than ad hoc collaborations.
5. Implement accountability for all partners.

From my perspective as a publishing professional, what can journals do to facilitate equitable partnership? Many journals have processes in place to implement Group authorship—where the group name is listed as the author. This removes potential inequity in the author list.

Journals often have authorship policies that prompt authors to ensure all appropriate individuals are included in the author list. BMC’s authorship policy specifically states:

“BMC journals encourage collaboration with colleagues in the locations where the research is conducted, and expect their inclusion as co-authors when they fulfil all authorship criteria described above. Contributors who do not meet all criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.”

Editors are thus empowered to push back on manuscripts where local researchers are not recognised.

Overall, at the meeting, delegates had a positive attitude and drive to move towards equitable partnerships, which goes a long way in making them the norm and not a dream.