How as an editor to manage global shifts in knowledge production and journal geopolitics

In journal publishing, the Web, like the world, seems our oyster: endless space where anything is possible. Journal websites are spaces of governance and regulation describing aims and scope, editorial boards, and submission guidelines and positioning efforts to be international, if not global. Before the Web, of course, journals’ reach was highly circumscribed; they arrived in hard copy via postal services to paid members of professional associations, repository libraries, and subscribing organisations. But the geographies of journal publishing changed in the Web-world of increasing open access. On that understanding, this work reflects on the shifting geographies of submission, review and editorial oversight in relation to one scholarly journal. Those shifts are situated in a growing literature on the geopolitics of academic writing, its imperial legacies and agendas for knowledge decolonisation and consideration is given to consequences of those shifts to ideas about how to deal with them in practical terms.