Our Responsibility

We aim to decrease our environmental footprint and impact on the planet through a number of initiatives.

• All of our books are printed climate neutrally in cooperation with our printing partner CPI.
• We minimize plastic usage by no longer using shrink wrap for our books.
• We are the proud sponsor of the Green Library Award, an award given to libraries, which best demonstrate their commitment to environmental sustainability.

We believe we have a responsibility, not just to the scholarly communities we serve, but also to society. We are committed to disseminating new knowledge and supporting academic learning.

• Our staff in Berlin support reading programs for children and other selected social programs of their choosing – colleagues are allowed and encouraged to donate two hours per month to a social project.
• De Gruyter is a member of the Research4Life initiative, which gives access to peer-reviewed academic content to researchers in low-income countries.

• As part of German Librarians' Day, we sponsor the Future Designers in Libraries award.
  

We prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion and want to create an environment that respects and values difference. We aim to foster cultures that minimize bias, value inclusion, and address systemic inequities by investing in resources for equal opportunities.

• As part of the Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing, we are working with 51 other publishing organizations to ensure a more inclusive and diverse culture within scholarly publishing.
• Through our own IDEAL Committee (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Anti-Racism, Lived), we host a programme of events, initiatives and workshops to raise awareness for diversity, inclusion and equity among De Gruyter staff and with our authors, editors, editorial boards and academic communities that we serve.

We have signed the SDG Publishers Compact as part of our commitment to sustainability. The Compact is a voluntary commitment to sustainability goals for the publishing industry. It is based on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and includes 10 steps that the publishing can take to help achieve the SDGs.

We are happy to be among the DE&I Movers of 2022. The DE&I Mover is a signet for companies that care about the topics of diversity, equity & inclusion. Companies with this signet have made a strong commitment to change and progress in these areas.

We are the founder and sponsor of several academic prizes through The Walter De Gruyter Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes research and scholarship.

This includes:

• Funding research in the humanities
• Providing scholarships for promising young talents in academic publishing
• Awarding prizes for outstanding academic achievement in the humanities
• Donating books to academic libraries abroad

The Foundation also funds:

• The Walter de Gruyter Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences and Humanities
• The media prizes of the German Mathematical Society
• The De Gruyter European Librarianship Study Grant for the American Library Association
• Walter de Gruyter Seminar of the Mommsen Society

As one of the world’s leading global publishers, we have launched eBound, an initiative that aims to provide support for not-for-profit open access and mission-driven scholarly monograph publishing.

eBound's support is given through but not limited to various means, such as

• Offering open access funds to help increase the open dissemination and usage of the mission-driven scholarly monograph globally
• Granting publication subsidies to cover editorial and production costs, and help getting projects off the ground
• Publishing original studies and publications that help key actors in the industry (publishers, authors and researchers, librarians….) to develop new solutions to improve the publication, sustainability, and accessibility of the mission-driven scholarly monograph
• Fostering an open exchange and thus engaging in active collaboration on projects that support De Gruyter eBound’s mission with all stakeholders in the academic community