IJURR Editorial

Abstract

Since our first issue in 1977, with founding editor Michael Harloe, IJURR has been at the forefront of critical urban debates. The year 2015 marks an important moment for the journal since we stand at a crossroads between an increasingly corporate publishing environment, in which many journals are becoming online only, their academic content trapped behind expensive electronic pay walls, and an alternative pathway towards a defence of the modern journal as a printed publication, affordable and accessible to a wide range of readers. Many libraries, for example, especially from the global South, continue to rely on print-only subscriptions. At our most recent editorial board meeting held in Mexico City we had a wide-ranging discussion about the future of academic publishing and reaffirmed our commitment to IJURR as a high-quality academic journal available in both print and online formats. The cornerstone of our defence of IJURR in an increasingly challenging publishing environment is our comprehensive redesign. This has been developed over the last two years in collaboration with the Austrian designer Paulus M. Dreibholz, who has extensive experience with cutting-edge architectural and cultural publications, across a variety of different formats. As part of the IJURR redesign each article will work effectively either as an individual electronic document or as a printed version contained within a specific journal issue. The dual approach extends to precise details of the font, layout and pagination. Given the intense pressures on space we have had to find a solution that does not significantly affect our annual page range for the journal. A key element of the redesign has involved changing the existing typefaces. We have replaced the Times New Roman typeface, which is amongst the least distinctive available, with the clearer and more contemporary Mercury (1997), developed by the New York based typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler. For the headings, captions and block quotes, which had been set in Interstate (used for American road signage), we have switched to Avenir Next (2007), a typeface developed by Adrian Frutiger and Akira Kobayashi, which adds greater versatility between print and digital formats than Frutiger's original Avenir (1988) but retains key elements of geometric sans-serif typefaces such as Erbar (1922) and Futura (1927). With our new look we are aiming to make IJURR more distinctive, more readable, and also more closely engaged with cutting-edge developments in design and publishing, including the necessity to connect with wider audiences such as practitioners and urbanists outside the academy. Our redesign also marks a more serious engagement with the use of visual materials ranging from architectural sketches, film stills and photographs to various explanatory figures and tables. We are not only interested in the quality and legibility of these materials, both for print and online readers, but also their precise role in the context of key urban debates. Additionally, each issue of the journal will feature three images on the cover, connected to the articles, but also providing an opportunity to reflect on broader themes in urban culture. We also intend to use this ‘gallery space' to signal the distinctiveness of key debates or symposia. In parallel with changes to the journal we have also worked with the German web designer Corinna Reetz to revamp our website: gone is the clutter and garish maroon banner. In its place we hope that readers will find the site clearer and more navigable. We will be making greater use of our website in future to enable complementary commentaries and shorter interventions to accompany themes developed within the journal itself but also to allow faster interaction with contemporary debates of potential interest to our readers. As part of our commitment to improving IJURR we have also upgraded the paper quality for the printed journal––contrary to recent publishing trends––to ensure that the journal is attractive, readable, and earns its place on our bookshelves. We are keen that the journal should be available for sale in individual bookshops, alongside other critical journals, and we have negotiated a special single-issue price to facilitate this way of reaching wider readerships. We are also introducing a choice of referencing systems between the Chicago (footnote) and Harvard (in-text citation) models to reflect our commitment towards widening the range of disciplines we wish to feature in these pages: we hope that scholars from anthropology, history, science and technology studies (STS) and other disciplines will consider IJURR as a suitable outlet for innovative work that has hitherto been largely published elsewhere. This flexibility is important because it enables us to handle a wider range of data sources, methodological approaches and styles of writing: we are interested in countering the creeping uniformity of academic scholarship and the tendency towards highly formulaic modes of exposition. Another important area of change in academic publishing that affects IJURR directly is the introduction of ‘open access publishing'. This change is being driven mainly by demands that publications derived from publicly funded research activity should be freely available in digital format. At present, there are two ‘open access' options available: ‘green' and ‘gold'. Under ‘green open access', authors can make the peer-reviewed version of their article (i.e. the accepted version before copy editing and formatting) openly available in institutional and not-for-profit repositories after a set embargo period. Under ‘gold open access', authors who have institutional funds available to pay the so-called ‘Article Publication Charge' can make the published version of their article openly available immediately upon publication. IJURR fully embraces the move to green open access. However, our editorial board has raised significant concerns that the payment of exorbitant fees for gold open access is an integral part of the neoliberal drift in higher education and academic publishing. It is also discriminatory, since it will disproportionately benefit scholars from wealthier institutions in the global North with access to sources of research funding and institutions that can support (and indeed demand) the payment of gold open access fees. Nevertheless, we had to weigh our deep concern about gold open access against the need to find a solution that will not deter publicly funded research from being published in IJURR. Within this complicated publishing terrain we decided to offer green open access to all our authors, and gold open access to those authors who have to comply with gold open access requirements posed by their institutions or research funding bodies. At the same time, we actively explore ways in which gold open access fees can be redistributed to benefit authors from different institutional and geographical settings, in consultation with the charitable wing of our activities, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies. In recognition that academic publishing, along with its wider institutional and public policy context, is in a state of flux at present we shall regularly review these developments to try and mitigate some of the more iniquitous effects. We are conscious that IJURR is embedded in an asymmetrical environment but do not wish to exacerbate these inequalities further. One additional question linked to the open access debate, is the way in which open access content can be handled in the print version of the journal. As noted earlier, we remain committed to retaining a high quality well-designed print journal, in an era in which commercial and technical advances push for the full ‘digitalization' of academic publications. But what does ‘being open access' mean to subscribers of the print only version of the journal, or to readers who do not have access to digital formats? Although it hinges upon addressing complex legal and institutional issues, we are committed to continue exploring ways for offering equal opportunities for open access to authors and readers alike independently of their geographic location or institutional setting. The significant increase in the quantity of submissions, combined with the increase in quality of papers we receive is a welcome development. Although in 2013 and 2014 we published almost twice our normal content in order to accommodate the increasing number of excellent papers we received, we are now also very close to accepting just 10% of articles submitted. This means we publish only articles that are judged to be truly exceptional in terms of empirical, methodological or conceptual originality and critical insight. What is also important to note, however, is that the journal's high quality is the result of the collective effort and labour put into it not only by authors, editors, and the editorial board and office, but also by our referees, who offer critical comments to improve papers. IJURR is one of the few journals that engage referees at every stage of the reviewing process by communicating all comments and editorial decisions to referees as well as authors. This is made possible thanks to the outstanding support offered by Mel Goodsell and Angela Yeap, under the guidance of Terry McBride, our managing editor. By sharing the anonymized version of the decision letter we send to authors with our international body of referees, we hope to foster the growth of an international community of critical scholars who are sometimes trained in different reviewing traditions. As they can see the comments written by their peers, our reviewers can engage in an international dialogue. Problems of urban and regional development are of growing visibility on a world scale, in rich and poor, socialist and capitalist countries alike. Often … they directly derive from processes which operate on an international level. This journal will compare and contrast such problems as they occur in widely differing situations and social systems. International dialogue has been our mission since the very beginning, a dialogue between scholars from various disciplines and origins, and a dialogue between scholars and activists (and they are oftentimes the same people). In 1998, the editors published a statement reflecting on how IJURR developed with regards to its original objectives. They wrote: ‘Despite the recurrent taste for simple universal models (which can be seen as an indirect form of intellectual domination), we have respected the diversity of urban experience and the usefulness of comparative analysis to enable understanding of the more familiar by contrast to the less familiar'. In 2009, the editors highlighted that international dialogue was more and more reflected in the composition of the editorial board, as well as in the range of articles published in the journal. Moreover, they note that technological changes now allow the journal to be accessible around the world. But, as they note, ‘internationalization is surely above all about acknowledging that theories derived from the experiences of North-West Europe and North America may not be universally applicable, and that those regions may be exceptional from a global perspective. Internationalization is thus a process of reconsidering and challenging theory on a range of levels'. Over the years, the very meaning of IJURR's international mission has changed because the world has profoundly changed. If the language we use to speak of the world has evolved, we remain stuck in dichotomies, despite many calls to break them down. Our efforts in the last decade have been placed on fostering scholarship that attempts to do away with these capitalist/socialist, first world/third world, developed/under-developed, core/periphery, north/south dichotomies in innovative ways. This has meant opening our pages to new epistemological traditions produced outside Europe and North America and in the new transdisciplinary frontiers of social knowledge production. The challenges are great because of language barriers and the continued dominance of English-speaking ways of writing papers and conducting research, which transpires in the reviews we receive. But the journal pursues its work towards internationalization by, for instance, relying on more and more reviewers from outside of Europe and North America. We have recently begun to organize IJURR lectures in other languages than English. The first of such, held in Mexico City in October 2014, will be available online shortly.