Launching a new online open access journal with the RGS-IBG and Wiley has been an exciting and interesting process. It has also, at times, raised some unexpected issues. Not least, what does it mean to launch an online journal that, as yet, has no content? How best to share the news that we are now open – really open – as well as signal the content we are hoping to publish?
The opening editorial has been a key part of this early exchange. This sets out what we want the journal to achieve with research papers, agenda-setting review essays, and innovative data papers, which advance opportunities for interdisciplinary, online and open exchange.
We are also delighted to be sponsoring the following sessions at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International Conference 2014. We have been inspired by their commitments to collaboration, their conceptual inventiveness, their interest in digital and visual methods, and their desire to push the boundaries of academic exchange in productive ways. This is very much in the spirit of what we want Geo to publish and promote.
- Chair’s Early Career Panel: Co-Production, Participation and Precarity
- Co-production and transformation: power, knowledges, activism and social change in disability research
- Geoaesthetics
- Geographies of sound, radio and participation
- Hazards and Disasters: Learning, Teaching, Communication and Knowledge Exchange
- Learning from Small Cities
- Spatialities of Co-Creation, Collaboration and Peer Production in the Digital Age
- Visualising Economic Geographies
We would like to thank the organisers of these sessions, and the contributors to them, for joining us in widening awareness of the launch of Geo. We hope to attend many of these sessions and contribute to the exciting conversations around them.
The conference will be also be an occasion for attendees to meet the editors and publishers of Geo, ask questions and explore opportunities for submission. The Wiley stand will be open during conference hours and we will be joining them on Wednesday morning. We are happy to answer your questions about our activities, at any time, during the conference, and of course by email after.
Finally, no journal launch would be complete without the sponsored conference drinks. We are delighted to invite you all to the opening drinks on Tuesday 26 August, at about 19.45, after the Chair’s Opening Panel on Co-Producing Public Geographies.
We look forward to celebrating the journal launch later this month and to continue working with you on generating the content that will realise the journal’s aspirations into the future.
Gail Davies, co-Editor
Geography Directions 