Thirty years and beyond … celebrating and supporting our authors

Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, formerly Reproductive Health Matters, marked its 30th birthday in 2023. The journal continues, through its themed and open issues, to prioritise emerging, neglected and marginalised topics across the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Of course, the story of SRHR in that time is not linear, even where progress has been made, but one of continued struggles. In 1993, articles across the two issues of Reproductive Health Matters focused on abortion, abortion law, adolescents, family planning and population policies. In 2023, in our largest open issue to date, articles focused on abortion, abortion law, adolescents and sexuality education and contraception, and the ongoing balance between the rights of the individual and population-level goals.

Other papers in 2023 fell around themes not covered in our inaugural issue and more particular to our time, such as COVID-19 and climate change, and other issues including HIV which have been the focus of themed issues over the intervening years. We are reminded in the statement from the UNAIDS Reference Group on HIV and Human Rights that “AIDS requires that people everywhere have safe, effective access to services for HIV prevention, testing and treatment”, as well as the need to end HIV criminalisation and the criminalisation of consensual same-sex sexual conduct, sex work and related activities, and drug use.¹ The papers on COVID-19 highlight the vulnerability of women and marginalised groups to the impacts of a pandemic and the challenges of protecting and delivering essential sexual and reproductive health services.^2,3

Among our themed issues of 2023, the one on digital technology (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/zrhm21/31/4?nav=tocList) is also illustrative of how progress in technology both creates opportunities and poses challenges for the improvement of SRHR.

The 2024 issue is likely to see the continuance of articles looking at the impact of broader social, economic, political and technological change on SRHR and the importance of the continued strength of the SRHR movement through challenging times. Around half of the world's population will go to the polls in national or general elections this year. Moves to populist and right-wing governments will likely continue with a rise in anti-SRHR and anti-gender agendas. Conflict and humanitarian crises will continue to have a devastating impact on populations in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, among others, and on reproductive health and rights as a consequence. Global challenges such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance will have direct impacts on sexual and reproductive health, while simultaneously presenting an opportunity to ensure that SRHR are central considerations when tackling these issues. Technological change and means of networking will facilitate the creation and spread of misinformation and disinformation, as well as providing the means to form and strengthen SRHR coalitions and movements – these latter opportunities must be taken whenever they arise. Inequities in societies will mean that marginalised groups will continue to be at greatest vulnerability in terms of SRHR. While we can celebrate the fact that global SRHR will receive attention in 2024 through, for example, ICPD30, understanding the local and regional priorities with respect to SRHR continues to be paramount. It might be possible to anticipate future themes for the open issue, but the strength of this issue each year also lies in its ability to respond to and reflect the current priorities of the SRHR community.

An important part of ensuring that we can react and inform change in relation to these priorities is attracting and supporting authors who are best able to do this. Our authors advance our evidence base and the breadth and depth of rights-based analyses that we publish, and they often continue to do so despite challenges in funding and support.⁴ In our 2023 open issue (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/zrhm21/31/1), authors of the 74 articles with individually listed authors had their affiliations in 43 different countries. It is our continuing aim to diversify authorship and regional representation, particularly from the Global South. In 2023, we bolstered our expectations of authors with regard to partnerships and transparency of reporting, and we will continue to implement and review this (https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=zrhm21&page=instructions). Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters strongly advocates for equitable partnerships from inception, throughout the research process, and during the writing and publication of journal articles. Aids such as the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) help us to ensure that all contributions are recorded, and in a consistent and transparent way. It is particularly important that, where there are research partnerships between the Global North and South, partners from the Global South receive appropriate recognition and, where applicable, authorship status – we are fully in agreement with other journals who work to prevent “helicopter research”.

In a context where SRHR issues can be divisive or polarised, the role of Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters in providing high-quality peer review and support to authors in publication is ever more crucial, as is our ongoing commitment to publish work from a wide range of disciplines and methodological approaches; we should not seek to narrow the perspectives we consider. Instead, we seek to continue to support diversity in ways of knowledge creation and voices represented. We have long recognised that alternative article types may be required to support this. Through our themed and open issues in 2023, we have seen commentaries, perspectives, roundtable articles and interview-based articles published, in addition to more standard research articles. These help to promote the views and insights of practitioners on the ground, people with lived experience and activists, in addition to more traditional researchers. In terms of the peer-review process, which is of utmost importance for facilitating the publication of high-quality articles, we endeavour to invite a diverse group of experts, including those who are from or based in the region in which the research was conducted or to which the manuscript pertains. In this way, we aim to avoid a predominance of reviewers from the Global North reviewing submissions from other regions. Calls for “decolonising global health” have thankfully gained more traction in recent years and this is something that we have been committed to since the inception of the journal.

A standout feature of Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters over the last 30 years has been our commitment to translating content into other languages, although the extent to which we have been able to do this has varied according to available funding. The publication of our Right to Sexual and Reproductive Health in Francophone Africa (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/zrhm21/31/5?nav=tocList) issue in 2023 was an exciting achievement in being able to handle and publish articles from new authors in French and then make an English translation available. We will continue to pursue models to enable the publication or dissemination of Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters content in languages other than English. The issue is also illustrative of our commitment to capacity development for early career researchers in the Global South and the importance of successful partnerships to achieve this.

Overall, we strive to publish high-quality research and contributions. We believe that there is an important partnership between authors, reviewers and editors in publishing and that seeking high-quality manuscripts does not have to mean that this is an off-putting experience for authors.

Beyond the journal, the SRHM organisation also supports authors in the dissemination of their publications through, for example, webinars, social media posts and our SRHM podcast (https://www.srhm.org/srhm-podcast/). In challenging times, being able to support authors throughout the publication process and beyond helps us ensure that contributors are diverse, that we are truly tackling important and neglected issues in SRHR, and that that evidence is available to the SRHR communities who need it.