This issue is “new” in two senses. It opens what we might call the “new normal” after a year since the COVID outbreak. It is also the first issue published by Routledge of Taylor & Francis Group, our new publishing partner. As I have mentioned in previous editor’s notes (14.3 and 14.4), COVID intruded unexpectedly into our lives and its impact was immediate. Compared to this, our move to Routledge has been and will be a rather longer process of consultations and discussions.
The transfer from Duke University Press (DUP) to Routledge may be seen by many as a huge undertaking, as the two publishers look so very different – one scholarly, and the other commercial. Even so, from an editorial perspective I would say that the decision is prudential and responsive. It reflects a long debate among STS scholars about the future of academic publishing, one example of which can be seen in the launch of Engaging Science, Technology and Society, 4S’s official open-access journal, in 2015. For EASTS, with our previous publishing contract about to end, the journal sponsor and editorial team was granted an opportunity to rethink what EASTS had already done and what it might develop into in response to global trends toward a robust publishing environment in which every journal, while maintaining the highest academic quality, has also to be financially sustainable, reader-friendly, and, last but not least, fair to its contributors.
