A warm welcome to all sections of our various global communities of readers to Volume 47 of Ethnic and Racial Studies. This has been a tricky period for many journals, given the pressures created by the Covid-19 pandemic and broader transformations in the landscape of journal publishing. We have been able to deal with these pressures and transformations in a productive manner, and we are grateful to a wide range of scholars that have supported us through peer review reports and related activities. We are especially grateful to the continued support of our publishers at Taylor & Francis, who have been able to provide advice on how best to deal with the transformations in the journal publishing landscape as well as to navigate a path for the continued development of the journal.
We hope that our readers will find the contents of Volume 47 as exciting and interesting as we do. We have in place plans for a range of regular papers to be published in the journal after they have been accepted through our stringent peer review process. As to be expected for a journal such as ours that has a global reach these papers cover a wide range of topics and issues in various parts of the globe. In addition, we have in place a number of special issues that we have worked on over the past few years with guest editors that we hope will attract interest from our various communities of readers. These special issues are very much the result of close collaboration between us and guest editors, and we are grateful for their efforts to produce issues of the highest possible standard. We also have in place a wide range of regular book reviews, book review articles, articles and symposia that will form the three Review issues of this volume.
Given the ongoing social, political and cultural debates that are going on in various parts of the globe around the core issues that are covered by Ethnic and Racial Studies it is an exciting and interesting time in the history of the journal. Rather than taking a passive role our journal has always sought to be proactive in providing a space for high quality scholarly research on key facets of racial and ethnic relations in the world around us. This is all the more necessary given the need for scholarly research in this field to engage with real-world issues and controversies. We have been pleased to see a steady and increasing number of submissions to the journal, both in the form of regular papers and papers that have been curated for special issues. We have a long standing commitment to providing space for the cutting edge work of both more established and mid-career as well as early career scholars from various parts of the globe, and our experience over the past few years has highlighted the importance of the research carried out by many of the early career researchers in this fast changing field of scholarship.
It has also been pleasing to see that on the key metrics we remain a highly ranked journal in the field of ethnic and racial studies and in the social sciences more generally. Although we are not preoccupied by rankings for their own sake we are deeply aware that as a peer reviewed journal we need to be aware that it is only by maintaining the highest possible standards of scholarly evaluation will we be able to maintain the standing of the journal among the scholarly communities that we serve.
We have a strong commitment to providing a streamlined and efficient peer review process for all papers that are submitted to us. We make an initial decision about which papers to put through a full peer review after a stringent process that seeks to give a fair opportunity to all the scholars that submit their research to us. Once papers are in the peer review process we aim to provide a response to authors within three months. For some papers this timescale does prove to be challenging and if our review process takes a bit longer we communicate with authors to keep them aware of the reasons for the delay. We have an acceptance rate of around 15%, and this signals both the rigorousness of our peer review processes and the intense competition for inclusion in the pages of the journal.
As a journal with a historical commitment to providing a forum for the highest quality research on race and ethnic relations globally we are proud of our record of publishing the work of scholars from various parts of the globe. Like many journals we are aware that we do not publish a high number of papers from scholars based in the Global South, and we encourage submissions to us from a diverse range of national environments. In addition, we are also committed to providing space for interdisciplinary perspectives in this rapidly changing field of scholarship. It is perhaps not an accident that our base in the United Kingdom allows us to take on a more global and diverse range of scholarship than many of the journals that are firmly placed in the intellectual environment of American sociology and the social sciences more generally.
We remain open to ideas for future special issues, symposia on books and articles. We consider proposals for special issues annually in March and October. If you have ideas for special issues within the broad scope of the journal, particular on issues that we have not covered as much in the past or on new geopolitical environments we are keen to hear from you. We are also open to ideas for symposia focused on books or on articles that will be of interest to the various communities that the journal serves.
We are, as ever, grateful for the support of our International Editorial Board for their continued support of the journal and its objectives. We are in the process of revamping the composition of the IEB during 2023 and 2024, and we are grateful for the support of all those whose membership of the board has now finished. We also look forward to welcoming some new members as a result. But we are also grateful to the many scholars who are able to support our work through their willingness to review papers for us. Given the wider pressures that exist in academic cultures at the present time this support underpins the peer review processes that journals such as our own rely on. Our publishers at Taylor & Francis have continued to support us through this period of change and transition for academic journals. We are grateful in particular for the support of Madeleine Heming Markey, Elizabeth Walker, Matthew Derbyshire and Gail Hartley. We look forward to working with them in the future.
We hope that you find the papers in this issue of interest. You can get a feel for the papers that will form part of the volume as a whole by looking at the extensive list of latest articles, including those in special issues, and book reviews.