Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: A Conversation About De Gruyter Brill’s 2025 in Sustainability

Earth Day 2026 will mark the publication of De Gruyter Brill’s first shared Impact Report. This report aims to review not only the progress we have made around sustainability, but also the processes behind it. It reflects on what we have learned along the way and on the challenges we face both within and beyond our organisation – from small, practical questions to issues of real scale and long‑term relevance. The following conversation explores these themes in depth.

Dominique de Roo is De Gruyter Brill’s Chief Strategy Officer and leads the Corporate Strategy Department. Foresight & Sustainable Development, part of this department and headed by Fia Pathan, is the organisation’s central office for reporting on sustainability progress, coordinating activities around our material topics and responsible for bringing this report to you. Sustainability consultant Luisa Zabel has closely supported the reporting process over the past year.

What follows is a synthesis of the many conversations, discussions, and exchanges the three have had in recent months – an attempt to capture sustainability in motion.

Luisa Zabel: This is De Gruyter Brill’s first joint annual Impact Report, which is a real milestone. Looking back at all the work that has preceded its publication, what has the journey to this point been like?

Dominique de Roo: When Brill and De Gruyter merged in 2024, one of my priorities was to make sure sustainability was woven into the way we think as a new, combined company and to make sure that our strategy is built on long term thinking. That also meant creating a shared understanding across teams that had previously operated in different contexts.

Brill, being a listed company, already had a tradition of reporting on sustainability progress in its annual report, which helped to define key themes and drive annual progress. It was important to carry that forward and strengthen it. Seeing how naturally this has taken root across De Gruyter Brill, and how it has become central to the overarching strategy, is something I’m really proud of.

LZ: The last year has been a challenging one in terms of regulation and political developments. We experienced a lot of turbulence and back-tracking, countries stepping back from climate commitments, DEI being questioned in some places. How does that affect a medium‑sized publisher like De Gruyter Brill?

Fia Pathan: The discourse around sustainability certainly has become a lot more politicised, affecting not only policy but also how we communicate about sustainability, both internally and externally. This has made clarity and precision in how we talk about sustainability even more important. Whilst we are not engaging in green hushing like many others, there is a need for extra care in our approach and messaging. And although consumer engagement in this area is ever growing, building communication primarily around the narrative that sustainability is the right thing to do no longer works on its own – instead we need to focus on what makes sense for us as a business long-term.

In this sense, the reduced regulatory pressures, for instance around the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), have given us the space to do precisely that. Instead of compliance requirements, business impact is top of mind again, which is helpful for a company of our size. Last year has also shown that there were some useful learnings from that compliance-focussed approach in the beginning.

DdR: For instance, the materiality assessment we conducted early on still reflects what is important to us as an organization, and it gives us a stable compass in a landscape where rules and requirements shift quickly. That stability is especially valuable in times of uncertainty.

If we think about the origins of ESG: it was always intended as a framework for risk management, guiding investment decisions and providing a tool to improve companies’ resilience, whilst providing impulses for innovation and adaption of business models for long-term success.

LZ: Zooming in from these large-scale contextual challenges to the internal side of things – what were the biggest challenges in that context over the past year?

FP: Data collection remains a central challenge. After the merger, it felt a lot like starting from scratch: we had to build new processes, often in new systems and bring people together in a way that wasn’t just technical but also cultural. A newly merged company naturally has changing structures, systems, and roles – and data structures are equally inconsistent, with no accurate or even indicative historical data available for many areas.

On the other hand, historical data is not necessarily a prerequisite for progressing on sustainability targets in a meaningful way. Quite often, we are working on new frontiers, so collecting new data is even more important. Practically, it’s not about perfect data – which is an illusion in itself – but about critically interrogating what’s available to us, whilst extending the evidence base and transparency around reporting.

LZ: You mentioned that the challenges were not just technical but also cultural. Can you elaborate on that?

FP: When we talk about internal challenges in relation to sustainability, we can’t forego the topic of employee engagement. The success of anchoring sustainability and its strategy firmly in an organisation is primarily determined by how engaged employees are on these topics. This is particularly true in a newly formed organisation like ours. A key learning from last year is that we need to take a more networked approach to rolling out sustainability in the business. Instead of working with a rigorous structure based on functions alone, we need to identify those colleagues who are intrinsically motivated – and there are many – to work with us on different topics and drive them forward collaboratively.

“The success of anchoring sustainability and its strategy firmly in an organisation is primarily determined by how engaged employees are on these topics.”

Another mechanism to foster engagement is incentives. Usually, making colleagues’ contributions widely visible and acknowledging them as a positive reinforcement of our values is incentive enough, but a more formalised approach is on the horizon too – for instance, encouraging colleagues to include sustainability and thus core strategy in their personal targets, or name specific SDGs that their projects support. Before then, though, we need to establish a shared language and knowledge base around this highly complex topic, and that is a key priority for 2026.

Senior management is usually a reliable tailwind for advancing sustainability throughout the organisation, but in order to create lasting and effective anchoring, we need to think beyond a top-down approach and engage colleagues in all areas and at all levels. The groundwork is there, but 2026 will be the year we really fine-tune and improve. Sustainability is always a balance of – and constant negotiation between – long-term thinking and short-term reality. And quite often it’s also about deciding what not to do as a business.

LZ: You’ve spoken a lot about engagement, shared understanding, and building a common culture. Where does the Impact Report itself fit into that picture internally?

DdR: For us, the Impact Report is very much part of that cultural work. It’s not just a document that looks back at what we’ve done, but a way of making sustainability more tangible across the organisation. In a newly merged company, people come with different backgrounds, expectations, and reference points. The report helps us create a shared frame: it shows what we mean when we talk about sustainability at De Gruyter Brill and how it connects to our overall strategy.

FP: I see it as a tool for learning as much as for reporting. This report provides a shared language around our material topics, which helps establish a more productive dialogue. Sustainability can easily feel abstract or overwhelming, especially given how broad the topic is.

What we talk about in this report will be familiar to most of our colleagues, but some might have never placed it with sustainability. By pulling our priorities, data, and examples together in one place, the report helps colleagues see where we are focusing our efforts and why. It also makes clear that this is not something done by one team or function, but a distributed effort that cuts across the entire organisation.

LZ: How do you want colleagues to use it in practice?

FP: Ideally, it should spark conversations. Whether that is teams recognising their own work reflected in the report, or colleagues seeing connections they hadn’t considered before. It gives people a starting point to ask questions: how does my role contribute, where do I see opportunities, and what could we do differently? Over time, that kind of engagement is what really embeds sustainability into everyday thinking.

DdR: And that links back to trust. By being open about where we stand, including the areas where things are still evolving, we create a basis for honest dialogue, internally and externally.

FP: Exactly. The question: What do we want colleagues to know about our sustainability efforts? should be immediately followed up by: What do we want colleagues to be able to say about our sustainability efforts, when they are talking to authors, editors and business partners?

LZ: This is the first joint report following the merger. How do you see its role developing over time?

DdR: This first edition is about establishing clarity and coherence. As our systems mature and our data improves, the report will naturally become more detailed and more integrated into how we steer the business. But even then, its core role will remain the same: helping us reflect, learn, and stay aligned as an organisation.

FP: Sustainability work is a continuous process, and the report will evolve with that process. What matters most is that it remains a living point of reference, something that supports engagement, encourages critical thinking, and helps us keep moving in the right direction.

LZ: About moving in the right direction, that is of course something you cannot achieve alone. How do you engage with your partners and networks?

“It is crucial that we show where we stand and how we want to move forward.”

DdR: We’re very aware that we don’t operate in a vacuum. As academic publishers, the biggest impact we make is through the publications we bring into the world, the research that informs policy, strengthens scientific debate, and helps society tackle issues like climate change and social injustice. And we see that momentum growing: in our network, sustainability is becoming more important, and in many cases even a prerequisite for doing business.

Universities increasingly expect clear sustainability commitments before they spend money with publishers, so it is crucial that we show where we stand and how we want to move forward. For us, it is not just about meeting these expectations but about shaping them in a way that reflects our values and the role we want to play in the ecosystem.

FP:  In the big picture, a lot of the recent push back on sustainability can be attributed to the trade-offs between different stakeholder groups becoming more tangible, with conflicts sharpening. Within our work, albeit on a much smaller scale, we need to face this challenge.

Some of the decisions we have to take to accelerate progress will require negotiation. The conversations we have with suppliers and partners in our value chain shouldn’t be based on “Sustainability is a moral imperative, so here’s a list of our requirements,” but “How can we move forward together?” – that’s when we can foster real, lasting change.

We need to collaborate on identifying and communicating win-win situations to ensure the transformation takes root through the relationships we have in our ecosystem. In that context, policy – which is often framed as restrictive – can be rethought as an enabler, providing a handrail of reliable guidance on navigating business issues in alignment with our strategy and values, internally and throughout our ecosystem.

LZ: Can you give a specific example to make that more tangible?

FP: One of our priorities for 2026 is deepening our understanding of author demographics – who publishes with us, who doesn’t yet, and why. This will inform our approach to new markets and our progress on making publishing practices, in Open Access for instance, more equitable.

If we want to increase the diversity of our author base, we need editors’ insights and collaboration. They know their communities well, and finding common ground with them is key to making progress. As with employee engagement, engaging our partners will rely on a shared understanding of the issues at hand, and on incentivising the types of behaviours that reflect our strategic objectives.

LZ: What are further current and future focus areas?

“It might be a cliché, but you can’t spell sustainability without AI.”

DdR: It might be a cliché, but you can’t spell sustainability without AI. It is already changing the way we work and it’s moving incredibly fast, and we need to understand how to use it in a way that supports our strategy—including our sustainability goals—without compromising the human side of what we do. Human in the loop will be our default mechanism as we roll out AI. We embrace innovation, but we also differentiate ourselves with our focus on being the human partner in a world where this personal connection is becoming scarce.

FP: Beyond employee engagement, we are working on removing barriers to success across the board. That means calibrating our purpose and profit agendas – including the targets we set and the activities we invest in. This requires bringing financial and non-financial reporting closer together, especially in day-to-day business and not just once a year.

We need to reliably map how KPIs on both sides are linked, to properly measure business performance against strategy and vice versa. Once we achieve this, it will become more apparent that investing in sustainability ultimately just means investing in the future of the business.

LZ: Thinking beyond 2026 – what do you see on the horizon for DGB, in terms of sustainability?

DdR: Looking beyond 2026, I think the balance between mitigation and adaptation will become an even more central theme for us. The world is changing quickly—climate risks are becoming more visible, resources like water are becoming more contested, and geopolitical uncertainty is something every international business has to take seriously. AI will be a big part of this picture, too: not just as a productivity tool, but as a force that reshapes how knowledge is created, validated, and used. For a publisher like us, the question is: how do we stay true to our values in a world that is shifting under our feet? And how do we make sure that the systems we build today will still make sense for authors, readers, and institutions ten years from now?

We are committed to reducing our CO2 emissions. At the same time, new technology such as AI will change our business considerably in the coming years and this also brings its own CO2 footprint. We need to find a solution to the energy question. This will be a major theme in our industry and the world at large in the coming years.

FP: Just as the climate system is widely acknowledged as a shared resource that demands protection and nurture, the global wealth of knowledge should be too. Yet publishing – and academic publishing in particular – is a unique industry that requires a unique approach to sustainability. For us it is even less possible to disaggregate the E, S and G to make things more manageable, and at the same time we don’t have many industry or reporting standards to fall back on.

“Just as the climate system is widely acknowledged as a shared resource that demands protection and nurture, the global wealth of knowledge should be too.”

Whilst this is a major challenge, it’s also an opportunity. We can be at the table when policy is shaped and the rules of engagement on sustainability are set. Our size and position in the market, relative to our competition, also bear the opportunity to become a sustainability champion in our industry by promoting engagement within our networks in a way that only we can.

Looking further ahead, I see two more global risks that are crucial to us as publishers: inequality and misinformation. These go right to the core of what we do. We know education is a key lever to combat climate change and social injustice, and we help ensure that reliable knowledge circulates, that a diversity of voices partakes in the crucial debates, and that research can stand up to scrutiny. With that role in mind, sustainability can feel a lot like everything, everywhere, all at once – and that is not a burden. It’s the brief.

Don’t miss out! De Gruyter Brill’s Impact Report 2025 will be published on our website on 22 April.