The EASE Environment & Sustainability (E&S) and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committees have jointly created a new SDG Checklist to help editors and publishers monitor and report on their progress towards achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs).
The SDG Checklist provides practical, potential actions an organisation or individual journal might take, and was produced in response to:
- the E&S Committee’s joint survey with the HESI SDG Publishers Compact Fellows, which revealed that ‘annually reporting on activities’ was the second least actioned of the 10 SDG Publishers Compact commitments, and that publishers and journals had often not completed a baseline of their SDG activities,
- the EDI Committee’s survey, which revealed that more guidelines are needed for the implementation of the EDI principles, and that transparent reporting, mentorship, and inclusive promotion structures are key priorities.
The actions in the SDG Checklist are grouped under 4 high-level themes (Strategy, Environmental, EDI, and Communicating SDG knowledge) with sub-areas for easy navigation. The Checklist walks you through these themes to enter and save your status. A brief walkthrough and examples of the Checklist being used by two editors were presented on 16 May 2025 at the 18th EASE Conference in Oslo.
Editors and publishers are encouraged to complete the SDG Checklist at different times: first as a baseline, and then perhaps annually to track their progress over time.
An organisation might complete the Checklist:
- at the organisational level,
- for its journal portfolio (if there is consistency across titles),
- for any of their journals that want to track their progress individually.
An editor of an individual journal would usually complete the Checklist at the journal level.
To use the SDG Checklist, you will first need to create a free account. This will allow you to save your checklists while working on them, return to edit and complete them, and store and access completed versions to track your progress over time.
Your data will not be shared with EASE or anyone else. EASE will only use the data in an aggregated and anonymized way to help us learn more about the way our community is progressing with actions of supporting the SDGs.
We hope you will find the SDG Checklist a useful tool for assessing and reporting on the SDG progress. Try it out and send us your feedback to: [email protected]
Visit our SDG Checklist user guide to help you get started.
