Abstract
The Editors of European Urban and Regional Studies (EURS) are pleased to announce that, as from January 2024, Jürgen Essletzbichler of the Vienna University of Economics and Business has joined the editorial team as an Editor. Jürgen is an economic geographer and Head of the Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience at Vienna.
In addition, we are pleased to announce two new Editorial Board Members for the journal, Andy Cumbers and Hug March. Based in the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Andy Cumbers is currently a Visiting Professor at the Department of Geography, University of Bonn. Hug March is Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Our Board, which includes a diverse range of leading scholars, is an important input to the journal and highly valued in supporting the profile, prestige and contributions of EURS to academic debate in urban and regional studies (Muller, 2021).
In further updates, in the last few years our publisher Sage has been developing a range of initiatives committed to publishing research that is free from bias, is representative of diverse readerships and inclusive and sensitive to their author and readership communities. Examples include a new name change policy (https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/name-change-policy) and, to combat fraudulent activity, new authorship change processes as part of their Research Integrity activity.
From 2024, EURS will be part of two further developments also. First, a language editing service will be provided as a pilot for selected international journals to support journeys to publication and representation of diverse voices in publications. Second, authors using our ScholarOne submission system will see a new option which will provide the ability to collect self-reported user information regarding race, ethnicity and gender, using standardized questions determined by the RSC Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing group (https://www.rsc.org/policy-evidence-campaigns/inclusion-diversity/joint-commitment-for-action-inclusion-and-diversity-in-publishing/diversity-data-collection-in-scholarly-publishing/). Three standardized questions have been agreed with Clarivate – who own ScholarOne – by a number of publishers ‘to create comparable (aggregated and anonymized) datasets between journals and publishers, set subject-specific baselines, and identify where action is most needed’. Each user submitting data in these categories will need to provide explicit consent for their anonymized data collection. Such data will not be surfaced in any identifiable way in the ScholarOne interface and a Data Privacy Impact Assessment has been undertaken.