Emergent landscapes of research publishing

I am writing this editorial late on a Monday afternoon as welcome spring sun streams through my study window in Hobart, Tasmania. In this final missive from me for 2023, I want to reflect on insights gained from attending the annual Wiley research seminar. Held on Thursday 5 October at the Melbourne Museum, the gathering was the first I had attended since the onset of the pandemic, and I learned a lot that I hope will be of interest to readers.

The seminar’s focus was on innovation, ethics, and transparency in research publishing and began with a session on research metrics by Justin Zobel, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Graduate and International Research) at the University of Melbourne. After summarising trends in quantification of research outputs and impacts, Zobel explained why his university had decided to sign the Declaration on Research Assessment to better support diverse contributions from personnel and recalibrate its institutional approach to recognition and reward. DORA both unsettles ideas about the efficacy of measures such as journal impact factor and its architects recommend diverse actions leading to change in how research is valued by varied stakeholders, and I note that Wiley is also a signatory.

Alice Wood, Wiley’s Director, Open Research, APAC and China spoke about the publisher’s approaches to open research and engagement with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Wood also referred to how transformational—including open access—agreements between Wiley and other organisations have shaped publishing in recent years; that with the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) was one important example of such change—and Geographical Research is a beneficiary of that. Wood underscored the need for adaptive approaches to writing and publishing and pointed to several outcomes of transformation. At Wiley, among those outcomes are new and very welcome forms of integrity checks and work to “harmonise” article categories across journals—down from several thousand types to mere hundreds—which seems sensible. But there is also work to standardise journal styles, some of which I think embeds into copy-editing a range of suboptimal outcomes. Witness unnecessary changes to perfectly lovely words such as minute (m), hour (h), or second (s) in papers oriented to the humanities and social sciences, or an arbitrary insistence on removing the comma from numbers between 1000 and 9999—which is problematic in tables with columns of numbers and can lead to confusion where sentences include numbers and reference to specific decades or years. This observation is not pedantry on my part. Be that as it may; Wood’s larger point is that publishers need to remain author-centred and focus on speed, free formatting, and interjournal transfer options, and I concur.

I was particularly taken by Stuart Glover’s presentation on the relationship between Australian government policy and research and publishing. Government Relations and Policy Manager at the Australian Publishers Association, Glover outlined the ways in which literary policy shapes our knowledge communities and social life more generally. He referred to the influence of legislation, regulation, policy, and distributive and redistributive functions such as library services. And he explained several of the key characteristics of publishing policy more generally: copyright and open access; disjointed incrementalism in policy formulation and implementation; and the effects of adjacent policy dynamics in the creative arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences or in relation to the Australian Universities Accord. Glover also referred to a range of multiscalar challenges pertaining to global technology platforms, jurisdictional arrangements, generative and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI), and the tensions inherent in truth claims in writing and publishing. His own “crystal ball” pointed to the need to stay vigilant about varied forms of cultural nationalism, educational reform, sustainability, data management and protection, open access, AI, and diversity and accessibility.

Last but not the least, we heard from Karin Verspoor, RMIT University’s Dean of the School of Computing Technologies and Victorian Node Leader and Co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in health. She was then joined by Gary Delaney, Research Director for Data61’s Analytics and Decision Sciences programme at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Individually and together, their focus was on AI, research, evidence, literature reviews, and ethics and the conversation ran the full gamut of what might be dystopian and utopian futures. In the mix were questions about big data, deep learning, natural language models, large language models, generative and other forms of AI, and what is and can be known. It was suggested that there are two epochs, which I have captured as follows: before-AI, a period where human creativity is verifiable, and after-AI, a period in which, and from now on, we cannot verify human creativity de novo. I will leave you with that thought.

This issue leads with work by Elodie Aime and Daniel Robinson that reveals a range of local and international policy challenges pertaining to Indigenous biocultural rights—in this instance, in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. Underscoring the criticality of Indigenous knowledges in responses to environmental crisis, the authors draw on qualitative research to identify barriers to Indigenous people’s full participation in managing world heritage properties. They also call for the “Australian government … to better resource and support Indigenous leadership and co-management in the park” at the centre of their case study (Aime & Robinson, 2023, p. 414).

That paper is followed by an article by Davidson et al. (2023) that sets an important agenda for geography education. The authors invite readers to consider how young people might be more effectively served by those of us working in schools and universities as we respond to their expressions of eco-anxiety in the face of unrelenting change. They place geography education at the centre of their analysis of three doctoral candidates’ own experiences of such existential angst. And they conclude that such education is profoundly important for making sense of the world and for empowering people’s agency in the face of change.

Gordon Clark and Phillip O’Neill then share crucial insights about how Australia’s superannuation industry forms a particular economic and financial geography. Those insights include pinpointing Melbourne’s rise as a dominant centre of activity where superannuation is concerned. Importantly, too, they suggest four specific avenues for further research related to “the future of Melbourne as the centre of the superannuation industry, the role of digital platforms in service delivery, pension adequacy, and the increasing importance of Australian funds in global financial markets” (Clark & O’Neill, 2023, p. 443).

Other economically oriented spatial distribution patterns are considered in work by Park and Lee (2023) in relation to Seoul’s metropolitan area. Comparing the distributions of high- and low-skilled occupations, the authors use spatial autocorrelation to identify patterns, finding that industrial economic influences have differential spatial effects. Those findings, they argue, should inform policies to support specialisation and foster regional centres of professional talent. Such insights are, they suggest, extensible to other regional settings.

New spatial science work on power line detection from point clouds by Danesh Shokri and colleagues is also included in this issue. Methodologically interesting, the paper provides alternatives to manual information extraction from mobile LiDAR point clouds. Those alternatives include “preprocessing, descriptors extraction and selection, and classification” (Shokri et al., 2023, p. 481). Their advantages include the need for less training and an increase in computational speed, and they also point to how these new methods can be applied to other cases.

Another paper in this issue focuses on what supraspecies richness can reveal. Studies on “macrofauna in the Far Eastern seas, eastern Arctic seas, and adjacent waters of the Pacific and Arctic Oceans” provide insights on correlations among habitat, higher taxa, and species, according to Igor Volvenko et al. (2023, p. 503). Their supposition is that certain laws known to exist at the species level might be discoverable at the supraspecies level and that ideas about supraspecies richness would benefit work in several disciplines allied to geography.

Kiran Maharjan’s work follows and is on transboundary river governance and climate vulnerability. Maharjan argues that vulnerability is relational and has found that, in Nepal’s Koshi river basin, it is shaped by local socio-economic practices. Beyond those practices, it is also influenced by multidimensional and multiscalar political economic processes that extend over varied lengths of time. Maharjan has also established that transboundary river governance actually produces vulnerability among riverine people affected by climate change and suggested that a “better understanding of relationships between water governance and vulnerability is necessary to enhance people’s lives and livelihoods” (Maharjan, 2023, p. 514).

We also publish in this issue a commentary by Philip McManus (2023), in which the key focus is living with anthropogenic climate change. In his provocation, McManus argues that there is a need to understand long- and short-term environmental and social changes and to find ways to navigate three prevailing narratives of home, doom, and urgency as individuals and collectivities. More than these needs, and following Gillespie (2020), McManus also points to the possibilities that may arise when we choose the climate stories we shape and live with and by.

Then, following two useful book reviews by Gabriel Camară (2023) and Feng Kong (2023), we respectfully note the passing of Dr Philip Courtenay and thank Peter Griggs (2023) for a comprehensive and moving reflection on Courtenay’s life and contributions to geography.

Finally, it is my ardent wish that you—our readers, authors, reviewers, editorial board members, publishing teams at Wiley, colleagues from the Institute of Australian Geographers, and friends in our larger networks—all stay safe, well, and engaged in convivial and interesting pursuits over what is our austral summer. On behalf of the team, huge thanks to everyone who makes the journal what it is and best wishes until next year. I cannot wait to see what volume 62 has to reveal.