Happy New Year! It's strange to write these words at the end of the first month of 2021 but it is also important to be reminded of the fact that it is a new year and, while for many of us it started in the same way as the previous year ended, there is an urgency to be hopeful that it will be a happier and healthier year compared to the one that just elapsed.
2020 has been, on the whole, a rewarding and challenging year for our journal. On the one hand, we have received an unprecedented number of submissions, which we have welcomed as evidence that coaching research is steadily growing in strength, quantity and quality. On the other hand, the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on everyone's professional and domestic life have caused a dramatic slump in peer-review capacity, as colleagues are struggling to juggle increased workloads with caring responsibilities, alongside any other challenges imposed by the global pandemic. Indeed, anecdotal evidence is steadily being replaced by peer-reviewed publications explicating the difficulties faced by professionals, especially working mothers, in balancing work and life (see, for instance, Collins et al., Citation2020; Myers et al., Citation2020).
The new status quo imposed by all these restrictions has meant that it has taken longer than usual to process submissions, since it has taken a lot longer to find readers who are willing and able to review manuscripts. We have accepted this challenge as an opportunity to become more empathetic and to acknowledge our colleagues’ challenges in working with us to promote excellent coaching research. This has meant offering our authors and reviewers longer periods of time to review and revise manuscripts. Moreover, we have striven to expand our team, by recruiting a team of wonderful, new associate editors, who will be introduced to you in our following issue. Armed with patience, compassion, enthusiasm and new collaborators, we are excited about 2021 and the fresh and exciting research that we will be asked to bring to publication. In our efforts to achieve this worthwhile goal, however, we ask for your patience, as we are doing our best to see manuscripts from submission to publication as swiftly as possible. We also kindly ask our authors to be open to returning the favour of having their manuscripts reviewed by considering reviewing other colleagues’ papers themselves. In return, we promise to work with you at your own pace, respectful of the additional challenges you might be faced with during these turbulent times, and offering ample time to those colleagues who are willing to engage with our community of learning by contributing to the peer review of submissions.
As we close this editorial, we are mindful of the challenges this New Year is bound to bring, as we are fighting – all of us in our own way – the global pandemic. Still, we are optimistic that this New Year will usher in new beginnings that will enable high quality coaching research to bud and flourish. Happy writing! Happy reading!
Ioanna Iordanou and Julia Yates
References
- Collins, C., Landivar, L. C., Ruppanner, L., & Scarborough, W. J. (2020). Covid-19 and the Gender Gap in Work Hours. Gender, Work & Organization (Online First).
- Myers, K. R., Tham, W. Y., Yin, Y., Cohodes, N., Thursby, J. G., Thursby, M. C., Schiffer, P., Walsh, J. T., Lakhani, K. R., & Wang, D. (2020). Unequal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists. Nature Hum Behaviour, 4(9), 880–883. doi:10.1038/s41562-020-0921-y