For everything there is a season …

Abstract

Since December 2015, it has been my singular privilege and pleasure to serve as editor-in-chief of this journal, to work with and for the Institute of Australian Geographers Council and our publisher, Wiley, and to champion geography in any way I could through such means. At the end of November this year—10 years in—I will lay down that service and step into a new role as senior associate editor.

It is time, and it is good to know that it is time.

My decision to encourage rejuvenation on the team has been made and staged over several months. In Brian Cook, Patrick Moss, Clare Mouat, and Miriam Williams, we now have a group of associate editors with diverse disciplinary and academic and other skills and energy aplenty. In Alexander Burton, we have a committed early career academic as book editor. Kirstie Petrou has been with me for the full decade and has been a wonderful editorial assistant throughout and will continue in that role. I am in her debt. Our editorial board includes diverse and dedicated members on whom we can rely. And I have had the absolute pleasure of working with Wiley staff who are fully focused on the merits of journal publishing. In recent years, that team has included Rebecca Ciezarek, Simon Goudie, Emy Rubano, Eden Batol, Lilly O’Scanaill, Martha Rundell, and Ashlinn Theroux. Huge thanks to all and to the many unseen staff at the publishers, as well.

I have been incredibly grateful to work with successive supportive IAG Councils, which have allowed me great creative freedom and autonomy, aspects of working life I value most highly. And while I leave it to Council, rightly, to announce my replacement I am delighted that my recommendation has been endorsed. Readers of our journal will learn more about that person in weeks and months following the publication of this, my last issue at the helm. Watch this space!

For my last editorial reflections, and before turning to introduce the papers in this issue, I wanted to share insights I gained from attending a Wiley editors’ workshop in London, fortuitously held the day before I left the UK after a month in the archives in September [thanks Simon!].

There, I learned a great deal that I think will shape publishing in general and in this journal in coming years—and I think the pace of change will only increase, requiring of us both the energy to seize opportunities and the nous to do so critically and creatively.

The full-day workshop was held on 18 September in a lovely four-storey building on the corner of Fitzroy Square, within “coo-ee” of University College London, which is enticingly embedded among the streets of Camden. Among the 100 or so in attendance were Wiley staff, editors from journals across the span of disciplines from humanities to physics and medical science, and consultants such as James Butcher—who has a long track record of academic publishing with Nature and a business and a fascinating blog, Journal·ology. It was also a little sobering to learn that Wiley works with around 50,000 editors whose tenures range from 1 to 50 years’ duration. Below, I refer to three of presentations because I think they are likely to be of most interest to this journal’s broad readership.

Allyn Molina, lead of the publishing development team, reminded us of the crucial importance of a vision for all journals and of the need to reflect that vision in journals’ statements of aims and scope. In coming weeks, our team will be looking hard at our own statements in light of that insight—again, there are seasons for such reflections and now is a great time for that work in our circle of influence. Allyn also spoke about how challenging publishing is, and her descriptions reminded me of the strong headwinds we face in the academy. Many perturbations are held in common—AI, market forces, or the need for vigilance in relation to ethics and proper conduct. Many of the qualities needed to deal with those headwinds also have parallels across our two entangled sectors. Among them are adaptability and flexibility, qualities that are decidedly different from tendencies to be undirected or unreflexive. There is also a need to be innovative while respecting longstanding traditions that aren’t simply bolted on but have a robust logic behind them.

Liz Ferguson, Senior VP, Research Publishing, then spoke about Wiley’s work to shape scholarly publishing. Responsible for 2000 journals, Liz focuses on transformational change in research and publishing infrastructures and on rapidly changing expectations of publishers from among authors, reviewers, editors, and readers. New technologies should allow for greater transparency, integrity, and simplicity of process but all that has to be road-tested. Editors and their teams are crucial collaborators in that work. Liz also referred to the well-publicised uptick in plagiarism and the abuse of publishing in paper mills. In that, AI is clearly both a blessing and a bane and Wiley staff are constantly asking how to use it in detection, but also in a vast array of work processes meant to complement and enhance human decision-making. She said that everyone is sharply cognisant of the need for stringent care in how Wiley engages with these developments.

Conversation then turned to peer review and Liz noted—as did we all—that it is increasingly challenging to secure reviewers, partly because of the volume of submissions and partly because of workloads and growing numbers of submissions from regions not part of the traditional authorship base. Wiley is apparently on target for receiving a million submissions a year and—with 300,000 journals in total in its “stable”—is seen as a relatively small publisher in comparative terms. Overall, there are reportedly 4.2 million papers submitted for review each year and Liz thought that AI is, and will be a significant force in how initial vetting processes and reviews are handled in the [near] future. As readers may appreciate, that conjecture was one of the more contentiously debated points made during the day.

James Butcher, whom I introduced above, then spoke about his journey from editor to international publishing consultant before turning to consider several questions. I confess that I was sufficiently rivetted that I wrote down almost every word on his slides—so please consider the next paragraph largely verbatim and credit him.

What do journals do? Filter, enhance, amplify. What makes a journal impactful? Leadership; convening power or a space for conversations that matter; vehicle for cross-pollination across disciplines; an early warning system for important advances for readers; capacity to enhance recognition and visibility; and a method to train the next generation.

What do authors and readers want? Authors want to be published and read by peers; have their message amplified to and by a wider research community; get career credit; have quick decisions—especially first decisions; have fair treatment; have research as part of their personal academic histories both registered and preserved; and be published in open access sources. Readers want to save time; get trustworthy content; have easy access to research; understand trends and topics in their field; and “stand on the shoulders of giants” by doing their own research. James also emphasised the point that open access models have shifted the balance from readers to authors, and argued that we forget the former at our peril. Writers write to be read, after all.

How do technologies support editors? Some do not! Peer review systems such as Clarivate, ejournal press, and editorial manager date from the 1990s and have reached their shelf-life. However, their replacements are so difficult to orchestrate that some operations—Frontiers and MDPI noteworthy among them—built their own bespoke systems and appeared to have no legacy challenges. Two other ventures, IOP Publisher and Morressier, have partnered to develop new submission and peer-review systems. Kotahi is another to watch, alongside the ChronosHub author interface. I confess all that was absolutely news to me, and it shows the crucial importance of continuous professional development for editors and their teams.

What about research integrity systems? According to James, new tools are being launched at pace, among them Proofig, Geppetto and SnapShot, and Dimensions Research Integrity—none of which I had heard of and all of which I am still trying to learn about. Clear Skies and Signals apparently detect paper mills. For me, the important point James made at that juncture in his talk is the need for editors to collaborate rather than compete in monitoring paper mill activity. In aid of such conduct, just launched is a new tool called Argos, which uses data from CrossRef’s retraction watch database to provide visibility on problematic papers, authors, journals, and publishers. It should soon provide journalists and research integrity sleuths access to such information, and James was confident that, shortly, there will be nowhere for unconscionable authors to hide, especially at point of submission.

After that slightly deflating part of the conversation, I was pleased that James asked what does your journal stand for? He suggested that all editorial teams should be able to articulate “we believe x, y, and z” and “we support those beliefs by a, b, and c”. I am confident that we do such work in our journal and that we can always do more and better.

Editors were also asked how will you make your journal impactful? As part of the ensuing conversation, we explored what impact might be: attracting high quality submissions; amplifying authors’ messages; encouraging well-crafted and compelling special sections or issues; leading editorial teams; and training the next generation (and here I made the comment that “next” is not default for “young” since many academics are in mid-life by the time they enter their early career stage, and we should remember that). For James, rightly I think, the upshot of all of the content he had shared required that journal teams find ways to attract those writers and readers; make sound decisions about content; engage in creative outreach; be constructively critical and innovative in how we respond to change of various kinds, technology not least among them; and be unfailingly trustworthy.

This issue leads with work that continues our special commentaries on COVID-19, the fallout from which includes a new variant and the challenges its poses. Specifically, Rosina Moreno and Esther Vayá (2024) have written a fascinating paper on an epicentre of the original pandemic, considering its geographical distribution and evolution in waves across Spain. [If readers are interested in viewing the backlog of papers, we assembled a first virtual issue in 2023 and will do so again in 2025. Check out the virtual issues section under “browse” on the journal homepage.]

Work by Michael-Shawn Fletcher et al. (2024) on reconciling 22,000 years of landscape openness in the Tasmanian “wilderness” is a fine, sweeping example of how geography can be applied not only across borders within the discipline but with others, such as archaeology. Of particular note is their sharp focus on how insights from science can and must inform efforts to decolonise knowledge and land use practices.

Their article is complemented by another about how we are Country and how Country mentors us, led by early career academic, Matilda Harry et al. (2024). They make an important call for relations between Country and First Nations young people to centre on research mentorship practice, policies, and program frameworks and I think there is much for us to learn from in this work and apply in our own.

In a challenging paper on the emotional geographies of roadkill and its cumulative effects on tourists’ experiences of Tasmania, Elleke Leurs et al. (2024) have found that “unplanned, sporadic, unexpected, and confronting encounters with dead animals detract from the tourism experience for most” and especially for women. They have also suggested the need for more research on these animal geographies on mainland Australia, and in Canada and South Africa, where roadkill is also problematic.

Douglas Bardsley and colleagues (2024) venture into the challenges of governing hydrosocial risk in peri-urban South Australia, a pronouncedly dry place and also a centre of viticulture. Focusing on that industry, the authors consider the range of challenges to instituting hydrosocial policies and practices and point to the crucial functions that collaboration, trust, and adaptation will have in such labours. Insights from their work are, I think, applicable to both other sectors and regions.

In recent issues, we have featured work on geography, pedagogy, and learning and teaching, and Jeana Kriewaldt and her colleagues (2024) add to that corpus in a paper comparing teachers’ beliefs and actions during collaborative geographical inquiry. Specifically, they have conducted fine-grain, filmed interactions of the micro-spatial elements of teacher–student interactions during geography inquiry-based learning—a double focus on classroom geographies and geography in the classroom I find immensely appealing [on which, to be briefly self-referential, see Stratford et al., 2022]. Of note, Kriewaldt and her colleagues have found that teachers’ guiding actions in certain locations in classrooms influenced the dynamics of inquiry and educational outcomes.

Two works from Indonesia and China complete the complement of papers in this issue. The first centres on migratory outcomes across localities and generations in Kupang, Indonesia. In it, Fandi Akhmad et al. (2024) have shown how entrepreneurial migration generated sufficient income for workers moving to Kupang to support daily living expenses, children’s education, and investments “back home.” However, migrants were also subjected to certain difficult vagaries that characterise the informal sector in particular. In such cases especially, but in all cases more generally, social networks, knowledge, and reciprocity were crucial for migrants to settle and succeed.

The second paper, by Yang Liu and Ming Luo (2024), is about the search of an imagined China among international students from Europe, North and South America, and Oceania seeking to study there. Students’ ideas about what China “is” vary significantly and motivate their migration decision-making in ways that could inform how their destination choices are shaped and could explain China’s changing status in international student migration trends.

Then, Guy Robinson (2024) has provided a comprehensive, appreciative reading of Peter Wohlleben’s 2023 book The power of trees: How ancient forests can save us if we let them. These kinds of book reviews have remained a part of the journal when many others have stopped providing them and I am so pleased we continue to support critical reflections on works longer than papers!

And finally, Ruth Fincher et al. (2024) have paid homage to the wonderful Janice Monk, Australian-American feminist geographer, who graced the discipline and austral, northern, and international geography organisations for more than five decades. A companion obituary has also been published in our sibling, Australian Geographer, and I commend that to you as well.

And that, as they say, is that … a wrap.

It has been my delight to serve this journal and its associated entities, networks, individuals, and groups over the last decade and I look forward to coming back in the new year in a new and supportive role.

Our collective intention is to continue to provide the highest quality journal of which we are capable, alongside a regular webinar, lectures at the IAG conferences, and Wiley prizes for highly commendable papers published each year.

Given the strong headwinds before us, I am certain that creative and critically constructive changes will characterise the journal’s vision, aims and scope, work, and appearance in coming years, and I think that such refreshing cycles are crucial for all those working on journal publishing in whatever guise.

With sincere best wishes to all and heartfelt thanks for the experience of a lifetime.