Over the last few years, preparations have been put in place for the handing over of the reins at ESPL, from Mike Kirkby to myself. I have deferred writing this editorial until close to the production deadline, because it cements the end of these preparations and the start, with much personal trepidation, of a new period of the journal’s history. I want to start by reflecting upon the state of the journal, before I explain how the new editorial team will work and identify some of the challenges for the journal that we need to address. Mike has held the reins at ESPL since the journal’s creation in the early 1970s and its first issue in 1976. It is difficult to see how, as he passes on this role, the journal could be any stronger. Not only has the number of issues per year grown from 4 to 14, but it has seen a progressive rise in its ISI impact factor (from 1·230 in 2002 to 1·784 in 2006), placing it in the top quarter of the 130 or so geoscience journals. Although ESPL is the journal of the British Society for Geomorphology (BSG), only 23% of papers published over the last three years came from the UK, reflecting its international standing in the minds of overseas authors. Similarly, ESPL has an exceptionally low level of self-citation (10% in relation to the current impact factor, as compared with 25–30% in competitor journals), meaning that our work is finding itself cited on the pages of other journals to a significant degree. Wiley–Blackwell routinely provide the editorial board with this kind of information, as well as an astonishing array of other data. For instance, there were 82 606 downloads of ESPL articles from the ESPL website in 2006. Wiley–Blackwell also keep the editorial board on its toes, reminding us every 6 months of the average time it takes from submission to first decision, final decision and to turn around reviews. Whilst averages, and the distributions associated with these averages, are highly skewed, we turn around manuscripts from submission to first decision in an average of only 62 days, just under 9 weeks. Similarly, we have been working hard to maintain the standards of the journal, sustaining a rejection rate of about 40%. Once accepted, it takes around 50 days to get a manuscript typeset, proofs issued and corrected, and published online, and so it can be as little as 4 months from submission to on-line publication in some cases. Behind the scenes, Wiley–Blackwell also carry out all sorts of routine activities that they call ‘marketing’ but that, from our perspective, translate into getting the journal read. These activities range from targeted marketing in emerging regions through to using new on-line dissemination methods to bring new publications to the eyes of potential readers. This is all very good news indeed for the journal. But it also reminds me that these figures should be the consequences rather than the drivers of the journal’s core activity: publication of the very best geomorphological science, where both authors and readers can be guaranteed of the quality of the material that they are reading. Central to sustaining the journal’s standards is the editorial team. With the support of the BSG, and following from Mike Kirkby’s retirement, there is to be a major change in the way the journal is run. Up until 2007, Mike Kirkby acted as managing editor, handling about 80% of manuscripts, with additional support from a BSG editor (Steve Darby since 2004) and an editor for the Earth Surface Exchanges section (Stuart Lane since 2005). When invited to take on the role of managing editor, I identified a critical need to broaden out the number of people involved in the handling of manuscripts. Not only is it impossible to replace the breadth and depth of Mike Kirkby’s knowledge, but the discipline itself, as compared with the 1970s, is now bigger, more vibrant, cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, with an ever expanding repertoire of techniques and an authorship that is progressively expanding beyond Europe, North America and Australasia. Thus, we are moving to a system where there will be five associate editors to support the managing
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Dec 3, 2009
Samuel S Lee 
Open Access
