‘The Professional Geographer’: COVID-19 Announcement

To the authors, readers, reviewers, and staff members who contribute their energy and insight to The Professional Geographer,

I am grateful to this community of scholars and practitioners, whose contributions to The Professional Geographer have helped maintain its high quality and excellent reputation. Your dedication to scholarship and reflections on practice have put The Professional Geographer in a strong position to weather the unprecedented challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Right now, all of us are experiencing intense personal and professional demands. As teachers and professionals, we must move our work online, with increasing requests of our students and colleagues. As parents and caregivers of family and friends, and as individuals, we are called upon to cope with change, uncertainty, economic stress, and threats to our own and loved ones’ health.

In recognition of these realities, and to respond to our community’s needs, The Professional Geographer will adjust its customary timetables for submissions and reviews to accommodate everyone who will need extra time this year because of increased professional and personal obligations. Our team will make every effort possible to move the editorial process along smoothly, working within the realistic timeframes needed by each person we work with, as the need arises. For example, we may need to extend the review period for a submitted paper, or give an author extra time to make revisions. Editorial decisions, which rely on voluntary peer-reviews, may be prolonged as a result.

In short, we expect to slow down the production process in the coming months, to help our contributors and staff rise to the unexpected challenges of this global public health crisis. Production of The Professional Geographer will not stop, however. Perhaps now more than ever, our discipline needs the excellent scholarship and professional reflections the journal provides on how and with what tools we learn about the world and work to solve its problems.

As the editor of a journal that has evolved over 70 years to fulfill this mission, I am confident that even this challenge will lead us to become more robust, once we get through this tunnel. I look forward to working with you. Together we will endure this challenging moment. I ask for your patience and resilience, and thank you for your support of our community.

Editor, The Professional Geographer

Heejun Chang