Speeding up to allow time: launching the topical special issue concept in Space and Polity

Special issues are an important publication format, especially in social sciences where research is as much about presenting empirical results as it is about discussing the approaches, methodologies, theories, philosophies, ethics, epistemologies, and ontologies of the research. Offering an interdisciplinary platform for such collections, Space and Polity has always published special issues along with regular issues, totalling over 20 thematic guest edited issues since the establishment of the journal in 1997.

Such special issues can provide a productive platform for bringing into dialogue a range of perspectives on a specific place—as in our recent special issue on Mostar, where a diverse set of work on the city is brought together to raise critical questions about how ‘ethnically divided cities’ are studied (Carabelli et al., 2019). They can also be a site where a new theoretical approach or longstanding conceptual debates are given space to develop across a broad range of empirical contexts—as in a past special issue on neo-liberalism and crisis (Featherstone et al., 2015). They can, as well, chart a relational and comparative course across important phenomena that raise pressing theoretical and political questions, as in recent special issues on youth politics in Asia (Lam-Knott & Cheng, 2020) or the pedagogies of peace and citizenship (Staeheli, 2017). Through special issues a journal can also encourage the development of new scholarly fields, such as political geographies of childhood and youth (Kallio & Häkli, 2013; Lam-Knott & Cheng, 2020; Philo & Smith, 2003).

Many special issues are based on a conference session or a thematic seminar—a combination that offers opportunities for early career scholars to learn some of the key elements of academic work, in their roles as event organizers and guest editors, or as presenters and authors. Further, while submitting a paper for peer review is always a learning experience, the crucial role of expert and engaged guest editors in special issues can, when processes work well, allow for especially focused and constructive editorial feedback for authors. There are also reasons to think that special issue papers are more likely to be read and cited, and they can set out productive research agendas for others to build on. Thus, through special issues, journals contribute to international research training and mentoring, while taking forward scholarship in important ways.

Because of these important contributions, we are excited to launch a new option for special issues that, we hope, can carry forward many of the potential benefits of the format, while also responding to some of the challenges it can pose. In doing so, we have sought to learn from what other journals are doing. Recent years have seen innovative use of virtual special issue concepts across fields. While there are variations across publishers and journals, these virtual special issues often curate already published papers addressing an urgent issue and make them readily available through social media promotion and, often, a time-limited period of free access. In our own field, Political Geography has launched a virtual forum format that allows for a dialogical collection of shorter viewpoint articles that are gathered online, including both invited contributions and open responses, with each article also published individually in a regular issue (Nagel, 2021). In both cases, these formats allow for a collection of articles to have a collective identity online beyond the usual flow of published articles in a journal, and they also, differently, respond to the need for timely responses to pressing issues and for opening up dialogue across contributions.

Currently, interest in organizing special issues seems to be increasing. While one out of the three yearly issues of Space and Polity used to be guest edited, in recent years we have oftentimes had only one regular issue per year due to the rising amount of proposed thematic collections—all on interesting and important topics. One driver behind the increasing demand for special issues stems from research funding instruments that request comprehensive publication plans from the projects. In addition to individual articles, a collection bringing together the final results of the study, even across extensive consortia, is often included. The papers in such collections may be produced jointly with advisory board members, practical collaborators, sometimes even research participants, on top of involving the researchers of the project. This makes the whole stronger than the sum of its parts yet, to the editors, it often entails work with a large number and a broad range of authors over a relatively small number of papers. This last aspect means that, first, special issues require plenty of editorial resources, afforded by guest editors and the journal editor(s) responsible for the process, and second, the processes often end up being lengthy, and can sometimes lead to an uneven outcome.

Moreover, the relevance of special issues has grown during the past couple of decades also because some publishers have become less eager to accept edited volumes in their publication schemes. However, there are some notable differences between edited volumes and journal special issues. Even if book publishers use various kinds of quality assessment procedures, including peer reviewing of individual chapters and sections or of the whole volume, in refereed journals the individual peer reviewing of manuscripts forms the core of the process. When inviting reviewers, the editor may mention that the proposed paper is intended as part of a special issue on a specific theme, yet the reviewer has rather limited opportunities to assess the paper as part of the whole that does not yet exist.

Another difference in the process of editing a book or a special issue is that, in an issue of say five papers, the journal ends up consulting ten to twenty reviewers during the process, sometimes with drastically differing views on the portrayed research, and delivering their review reports with different timelines. This may mean that some of the papers are accepted for publication smoothly and quickly while others go through several lengthy review and revision rounds. From such processes, it is not uncommon that the articles are published during a period of two to three years. When all papers are accepted – and typically published in a forthcoming section of the online journal – the guest editors may finalize their editorial as the last piece of the puzzle, after which the whole can be compiled into an issue by the journal editors and the production team. The special issue is then published in the next available issue of the journal, which may easily take another year or so. To the guest editors this means that their novel ideas on, often, rapidly developing phenomena have been waiting to be published for a lengthy period.

Apparently, then, while there is an increasing demand for journal special issues, the traditional format does not always well serve the needs of scholars, or research funders. Their interest is generally to publish novel perspectives on a timely topic quickly, yet at the same time it is important that the papers included in the issue go through a high-quality publication process; a challenging combination, as every journal editor knows. Neither is the situation ideal from the journal’s point of view. For one thing, working for many years on a special issue that includes individual publication processes proceeding at their own pace can be laborious. As the aim of the journal is the production of high-quality publications, and the peer reviewers’ invaluable contributions are based on voluntary work, it is not easy to hasten the processes without compromising on quality or publication ethics. Moreover, the editors’ temporary posts in the journal may end before the issue is done, meaning that another editor gets involved in the middle of the process, which may lead to further delay. The guest editors similarly often find these publication processes slower and heavier than planned, not least because of their position between the journal editors and the authors who may both be discontent with how things proceed.

To overcome at least some of these challenges and unintended disadvantages, Space and Polity is developing a new special issue concept, namely Topical Special Issues. We will reorganize the publication process in keeping with our ethical principles: first, we will not compromise on the quality of the articles and, second, we will not add pressure on the reviewers. At the same time, we want to get the novel ideas of the guest editors out fast and give the special issue theme long-term visibility. How this is done in practice is now presented in our instructions for authors at the journal webpage:

Special Issues: Space and Polity welcomes proposals for Special Issues, which provide a critical forum for sets of complementary or contrasting articles addressing emergent theoretical and substantive questions. Along with traditional thematic issues, we also accept and encourage proposals for Topical Special Issues. The latter includes the fast publication of an editorial article where guest editors present a substantive perspective on the issue’s topical theme, along with an open invitation to potential authors. The accepted contributions are published one by one in our forthcoming section and finally collected into an issue with the first published editorial, accompanied by a separate introduction to the issue’s contributions by the guest editors.

Simply put, the new concept turns the publication order on its head: Instead of including the editorial as the last piece of the collection, it will be the first paper to be published online. This allows for the guest editors to present their ideas freshly, perhaps after a conference session or a research seminar where they were developed. Timely issues are introduced to the scholarly community while still timely, and emerging perspectives are brought to scholarly debate when emerging. To the authors, the concept has two advantages. First, the editorial includes an open invitation that anyone can respond to by proposing a paper to the named special issue. This broadens the scope of potential authors, especially to scholars whose access to international conferences and small-scale seminars with invited participants is weaker. Second, the authors can work on their individual contributions without the burden that, should the processing of their paper take more time than the others, the whole special issue is delayed. As the papers can be linked with the editorial and other published contributions one by one, the special issue builds gradually. Peer reviewers will benefit from the opportunity to access the editorial of the special issue, and potentially some already published papers, when assessing an individual contribution, which helps to contextualize the manuscript as part of the whole. For the journal editors, this concept gives leeway to editing special issues with a relaxed timeline, and without the fear that if too many papers drop out, the issue is not realized at all.

Our new Topical Special Issue format will be launched in 2022 with the publication of the first guest editors’ editorial, including the invitation to potential contributors. We are eager to experiment with this new concept, and we warmly invite the readers of the journal to engage in these processes as authors, peer reviewers, and guest editors. These first issues will be co-learning processes, and we hope to receive plenty of feedback so that the concept can be further developed to better serve the interests and aspirations of our authors and readers.