Lost (in) space for dialogue: On the (abandoned) need for working papers in human geography

A requiem for the working paper

The world of academic publishing is changing rapidly with some traditions being stickier than others. Technology, a big enabler, is challenging some well-established structures of scientific publishing (Ash et al., 2018). Indeed, its enabling potential is creating openness towards new forms of scientific communication with and consumption by increasingly diverse audiences. Blog posts, short commentaries and interventions are on the rise, and the time for a scientific article from submission to (online) publication has shortened significantly. Referring to this changing landscape of academic publishing, Carpentier et al. (2015) aptly summarised that

The free availability of scholarly resources has led to the multiplication of sources, increasing dispersal and a notable heterogeneity of article quality. From self-publishing sites, to university blogs and predatory journals that charge authors for publishing their work (see Beall, 2015; Berger and Cirasella, 2015), to respectable peer reviewed academic journals, the reader can be disoriented by this abundance of sources and face difficulties in parsing them all. Additionally, the recent ascendance of academic social network sites such as academia.edu, ResearchGate and Faculty Row contributes to the duplication and dispersal of sources through their self-archiving and publication function. [. . .] [The authors continued to predict that] [l]ow cost online publication appears to be the future of academic knowledge dissemination.

The working paper (WP) plays a curious role in this transformation process, which not only affects the publication as a tangible result but also the purpose of the working paper series (WPS) themselves. We observe that the WP in geography has traditionally been an important communication outlet but recently lost its appeal as a key space for intra-, inter- and trans-disciplinary dialogue. Thus, as a means of communication that usually comes with a light-touch review process and timely dissemination of research findings, the WP has now lost its attraction as a favourable, timely and respected outlet as compared to double-blind peer-reviewed scientific journals. At times, publishers actively challenge the very raison d’être of the WP, which we will expand upon below.

Two broader dynamics inform and contextualise our argument. On one hand, there is an ongoing neoliberalisation of academia with the defining power of large, oligopolistic publishing houses (Asai, 2020) and, on the other hand, there are anxieties about the ‘diluting’ of human geography as a discipline (e.g. Atienza et al., 2019; Cockayne et al., 2018; Gray and Pollard, 2018; James et al., 2018). Both conversations overlap and reinforce each other; both have been affecting the self-image, characterisation and communication cultures of geographers and influenced the choice of outlets, thereby influencing the recognisable contribution to a specific disciplinary field.

First, and drawing on a critical debate recently assembled in a Special Issue in Environment and Planning F (Castree et al., 2022), the ongoing search for geographers’ disciplinary identity and self-image has suggested widespread cultural ‘internal divisions’ (Sheppard, 2022: 14), which were especially influenced by the particular trajectory of Anglophone Geography and the ‘resorting to English as the lingua franca for global scholarship’ (Sheppard, 2022: 20; cf. Aalbers, 2004; Garcia-Ramon, 2003). Second, the (impacts of) universities’ neoliberalization (Castree and Sparke, 2000) and ‘the values of individualism, competition and entrepreneurialism’ (Castree, 2022: 10) are occurring alongside a growing power of oligopolistic publishers. The ‘“money game” (of commercial publishing) has increasingly been affecting geographical research and the community of geographers’ (Liu et al., 2022: 115; cf. Coomes et al., 2017) with impact factors deepening the ‘“capitalisation” of the academia [. . .] taking over academic authority from the academic community (and) marginalising human geographical research’ (Liu et al., 2022: 115). This is driven by a certain short-term-ism that centres on more en vogue research themes especially when faced with institutional pressures of career progression and promotion. Liu et al. (2022) point out that this is especially prominent ‘for the young generation of scholars as they confront more pressures in their professional career, manifested by the anxiety of academic publishing in terms of both the number of papers and that of citation impact’ (Liu et al., 2022: 121). In this context, the value of WPS is easily side-lined, even though some countries are resisting the neoliberal wave of publication cultures and measurements more than others. Indeed, we cannot assume that the culture of publishing in the so-called ‘international’ English-language journals is representative of publishing practices around the world. There is ‘a world beyond the Web of Science’ (Schuermans et al., 2010), but even in significant parts of that world, the value of WPS appears to have diminished. Be that as it may, we do see a future for the WPS in human geography as a pluralistic and integrative communication outlet that would give voice to scholars in our discipline and beyond, including scholars who are otherwise much less visible in specific epistemic communities.

In this article, we do not seek to rehearse and repeat the current challenges to disciplinary thinking and the changing landscape of academic publishing. Rather, we want to critically inquire, analyse and identify potential pathways for the WPS in the future. We define a WP as work-in-progress or pre-published versions of academic articles or book chapters. Our motivation for this study stems largely from our experience with the WPS initiated by the Global Network on Financial Geography (FinGeo) in 2017. As stated on its website, ‘FinGeo’s general aims echo in the WPS: open and interdisciplinary in nature, covering research on the spatiality of money and finance and its implications for the economy, society, and nature. In principle we are open to any high-quality contribution’ (http://www.fingeo.net/call-for-papers/). The FinGeo WPS communicates to a range of audiences and has since become an important and recognised channel of academic work of the growing and diversifying sub-discipline of financial geography. Over time, however, we encountered a decline in the number of submissions and even withdrawals after papers were accepted for publication in a journal. The latter cases were influenced by the publication policies of the journals and publishers’ increasing restrictions towards previously ‘published’ article versions, although what constitutes ‘published versions’ remains fraught with ambiguity, as we will explain below.

These observations of the changing arena of academic publishing and experience of running the FinGeo WPS led to intensive and yet inconclusive debates within the FinGeo Committee regarding the future of the WPS. We therefore decided to seek insights from the editors of thirty academic journals in human geography through a survey. Building on the survey results, we hoped to develop a better understanding of whether the FinGeo WPS – and by extension other WPS in human geography – would have a future, and, if so, what that might look like. As we conducted the survey, an interesting but controversial discussion started to unfold, and several respondents strongly encouraged us to share the results with the broader discipline. Ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly given the sample population of the survey, a journal article was deemed the most fitting outlet for this debate, rather than a WP. It goes without saying that in choosing the outlet for this paper we ourselves faced the dilemma of weighing the importance and reach of the dialogical space of a journal with that of a WPS. Therefore, we would like to situate our findings as an invitation for opening the debate on the future of the WP as an academic outlet.

Despite its tradition, the WP finds itself increasingly squeezed between competing publication logics (and lucrative business models) of the large publishers and new technologies that may render the WP dispensable altogether. The reason and motivation to write this intervention concerns our discipline more broadly and stems from the overarching question: what is the future value of a WPS in human geography, and for whom? We hope that our study will provide orientation and guidance on the academic publication landscape, for example, to early career researchers and scholars less familiar with or situated outside the particular ‘publication culture’ of the US and UK environment that has largely shaped our discipline’s rules of the publication game. We are aware of the limitations of the results invoked in this article, with a sole focus on English language publications and selected human geography journals (a sample skewed towards economic geography). These limitations matter, but also invite further, possibly contradicting, discussion in the future.

Although our analysis cannot provide definitive answers, it highlights the need to discuss and create new research cultures that re-value forms of communication other than those currently favoured by metrics cultures. Even though it is generally deemed more profitable for academics at all career stages to publish in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals, we argue that creating a supportive environment for WPs and alternative forms of publishing can be significant in decolonising the discipline, diversifying its intellectual traditions and communication cultures, and widening our research audience beyond the academy. In the rest of this article, we outline the landscape of WPS in human geography in the section ‘Mapping the landscape of working paper series in geography’, before introducing ‘The survey method’ in the next section. In the section ‘Survey results’, we present and discuss the survey results in the context of the FinGeo WPS as well as other, longer standing, and more visible WPS in human geography. In the section ‘Is there space for working papers in human geography?’, we summarise the results and reflect on their implications for publication cultures and knowledge creation in human geography.

Mapping the landscape of working paper series in geography

Let us start by outlining the current landscape of WPS and its recent evolution using selected examples. An overview of the recent history of WPS suggests the lack of a strong tradition of WPS in human geography, with a somewhat fragmented landscape that has produced some ‘lighthouse projects’, including the following:

Interestingly, several WPS are closely related to economics and business studies. Other examples include time-limited WPS related to specific fixed-term projects, such as the following:

Many other large, typically externally funded, research projects have also boosted WPS, but after an ambitious start they often stopped publishing new WPs well before the project end. Other WPS travelled with their editors-in-chief to their new institutional home, as they had strongly shaped the profiles of the WPS, for example:

Admittedly, the above only provide a limited snapshot. Yet, this exercise shows the rich diversity in focus, anchorage, motivation and success of running a WPS. Obviously, the explanations for establishing and managing a successful WPS vary, and the analysis of success factors goes beyond the means and resources for this article. However, we believe that broader lines of reasoning can shed light on certain publication paths and their dependencies, including publication cultures, which have shaped academic careers from different contexts and geographies today.

In the English-speaking environment, mainly the United Kingdom and the United States, a certain tradition to build an academic profile as an early career researcher with WP publications had developed and was promoted from a very early stage of a scholar’s career. Today, this is no longer the case, but many senior scholars are still thriving on these early-developed publication profiles – bolstered by today’s output-driven evaluation culture. In economic geography, for example, Gordon Clark and Dariusz Wójcik both trace their careers back to regularly publishing in the Employment, Work and Finance WPS based at the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and in SSRN. ³ The WPS at Oxford, which thrived in the late 1990s and early 2000s and was later discontinued, published dozens of WPs by doctoral students and faculty members from the School. For the former, they represented tangible outputs before facing the challenges of publishing in journals. In the last phase of its existence the WPS was associated with one of the School’s research clusters. ⁴

This broader process of capitalising on WPs had important implications for WPS. In the early 2000s, some of the geography departments in the United Kingdom and beyond had started to embrace the SSRN in a development that proved to be mostly alien to other academic, non-Anglophone, environments. But this process also had massive implications for academic careers, when the academic (publishing) market started to globalise and harmonise towards Anglophone, metric-driven standards (Müller, 2021; Rodríguez-Pose, 2006).

The situation outside Anglophone academia is rather different, often shaped by different national publishing traditions, which intersect in complex and diverging ways with those in the Anglosphere (Aalbers and Rossi, 2007; Kitchin, 2007; Minca, 2000). Ironically, Anglophone academics speak of ‘international publications’, but most of them publish almost exclusively in a select group on English language journals, whereas many scholars based outside the Anglophone world have a truly international outlook with regular publications in two or more languages. Yet we cannot easily generalise about publication cultures outside Anglophone academia. In some places such as the Netherlands or Flanders (Belgium), publishing in English language journals is as important as in Anglophone countries, although most academics continue to publish in their mother tongue as well. At the same time, there are countries such as France and Italy where publishing ‘too much’ in English may be frowned upon, although many academics – younger ones especially – continue to do so, in part to reach a wider audience and in part to keep their international job options open (Aalbers and Rossi, 2007).

Yet, even when scholars from non-Anglophone countries are publishing – or expected to publish – in Anglophone journals, the ‘international’ reach and scope remains highly problematic. Despite two decades of debate on the Anglo-American and Anglophone hegemony in human geography, Anglophone journals are still predominantly edited by Anglophone editors (Imhof and Müller, 2020). The problem here is not language per se, but that ‘the power-knowledge system works by keeping the debates internal to the Anglo-American geographical community – or at least between actors who are able/willing to articulate themselves within its dominant discourses’ (Simonsen, 2002: 392). In other words, despite much talk about ‘provincialising’ and ‘decolonising’ (academic) knowledge, this is by and large something that is discussed by Anglophone geographers in the absence of non-Anglophone colleagues, and when the latter are included, it is typically on the – often implicit – terms of the former. At the same time, key theoretical works and conceptual debates in Anglophone journals are often translated and discussed in Chinese and Spanish journals (with large readership in East Asian and South American communities, and beyond), which arguably makes for more diverse debates occurring in those domains, although much of these are unknown to most authors and editors of Anglophone publishing outlets. We should also not forget that many journals published in languages such as French and Spanish continue to reach international readership across countries and continents, and therefore cannot be reduced to ‘national’ publishing cultures. Research profiles of chairs had shaped departmental profiles, and WPS were traditionally linked with a department’s thematic identity. In Germany, for example, one result was a fragmented landscape of WPS that came with a strong tradition of advertising departmental research activities and profiles. For better or worse, WPS are often primarily serving their own national academic markets and have (had) important signalling character for geography departments. These histories echo until today and in some national environments, such that articles published in national languages other than English still dominate – or at least co-exist alongside English publications, but even in many of those places WPS appear to be in decline. In response to the increasingly globalising academic market and scholars’ individual publishing careers, some (often previously insular) WPS have vanished or transitioned their (main) language of publication into English. These established spaces of dialogue thus began to evaporate from the ‘champions’ league’ of publication channels. In smaller, more hybrid academic markets, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, the coupling between language and WPS had dissolved much earlier.

Reflecting on the treatment of WPs by various citation metrics and platforms, we find that on Google Scholar, for example, WPs are treated on par with peer-reviewed papers. This differs on Scopus and ResearchGate but also links this discussion to the afore-mentioned neoliberalisation in and of academia. In sum and building on the globalisation and harmonisation of academic publication standards, three factors have accelerated a transition towards metrics-oriented publication strategies pursued mainly in English: first, online journal articles and digital publishing have become pervasive and replaced the need for hard copies, which was the initial advantage of WPS; second, the requirement for ‘objectively’ measuring individual academic output (e.g. as part of the Research Excellence Framework, REF ⁵ ), that is, to quantify individual output, increased the need for (self-)citations, for which WPS were one, although declining, means; and third, more internationalised academic careers imply that also academics from outside English-speaking countries want or need to be read in the most widespread lingua franca – English – especially since such metrics are no longer limited to Anglophone academic world but increasingly implemented elsewhere. Given these contexts, we started to question whether WPS still serve a valuable purpose in knowledge exchange and in the publication strategies of human geographers, and whether these are shaped by the editorial policies of journals in terms of their attitudes towards WPS.

The survey method

Between January and March 2021, we conducted an email-based survey among the editors of thirty mostly English language journals in human geography and related fields (Table 1). Given our initial motivation to inform ongoing discussions about the future of the FinGeo WPS, our sample focused on journals most relevant to financial geography, although they cover many of the journals read and published by human geographers more generally. We proceeded in two consecutive steps: after an initial first phase of responses, we followed up with emails to the remaining editors to encourage them to join the debate if they had time and capacity to do so.

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Table 1.

Overview of the approached journals (in alphabetical order).

	Journal	Publisher	Responding editors’ country base
1	Annals of the American Association of Geographers	Taylor & Francis	US
2	Antipode	Wiley-Blackwell	Germany
3	Area	Wiley-Blackwell	UK
4	Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society	Oxford University Press	US, UK
5	Competition and Change	Sage	UK
6	Dialogues in Human Geography	Sage	Canada
7	Economic Geography	Taylor & Francis	US
8	Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space	Sage	Canada
9	Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space	Sage	Canada, Netherlands
10	Environment and Planning D: Society and Space	Sage	n/a
11	Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space	Sage	Canada
12	Eurasian Geography and Economics	Taylor & Francis	UK
13	Geoforum	Elsevier BV	UK
14	Geografiska Annaler: Human Geography	Taylor & Francis	Sweden
15	Geography Compass (Economic Geography)	Wiley-Blackwell	Switzerland
16	Global Networks	Wiley-Blackwell	UK
17	Growth and Change	Wiley-Blackwell	n/a
18	International Journal of Urban and Regional Research	Wiley-Blackwell	UK
20	Journal of Economic Geography	Oxford University Press	Singapore, UK
19	Journal of Transport Geography	Elsevier BV	Belgium
21	Political Geography	Elsevier BV	n/a
22	Professional Geographer	Taylor & Francis	n/a
23	Progress in Human Geography	Sage	UK
24	Regional Studies	Taylor & Francis	US, UK
25	Territory, Politics, Governance	Taylor & Francis	n/a
26	Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie	Wiley-Blackwell	Belgium
27	Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers	Wiley-Blackwell	n/a
28	Urban Geography	Taylor & Francis	UK
29	Urban Studies	Sage	UK, US
30	Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie (German Journal of Economic Geography)	Walter de Gruyter	Germany

Source: The authors.

The overall response rate of 80% (editors from 24 out of 30 journals) was surprisingly high. In some cases, we received responses from two or more editors of the same journal (right column, Table 1). We interpret the high response rate as indicative of the widespread interest in the value and future of WPS and wider concerns regarding publishing cultures in geography. Overall, 31 editors (comprising both editors-in-chief and associate editors) contributed to our survey. It reminded us that geography journals are run by passionate, dedicated scholars. Thirteen editors were identified as female and 18 as male. We were surprised and heartened about the strong editorial representation of female scholars, which may also signify changes in the wider discipline.

Responses indicate how important (and controversial) this topic is in the eyes of the editors themselves, especially against the constraining background of publishers’ financial imperatives. Our respondents provided rather varied assessments and much food for thought. We need to emphasise that scholars based in English-speaking countries dominate the editorial teams of selected journals, primarily because most of the selected journals are not only published in English but also founded in the United Kingdom or United States. At the same time, there is some diversity in terms of editors with eight being based outside of Anglophone countries. However, the United Kingdom remains dominant as the academic home of 14 out of 31 editors (Table 1). In the next section, we will use survey quotes to illustrate our results. Here, we do not specify which quote belongs to which editor, but the geographic positionality of some editors becomes clear through the examples they use. We note that several editors reason primarily from a UK position. Interestingly, these are regularly editors of the so-called ‘international journals’, but it appears that even after intense debates in geography – often in the same journals – on postcolonialism, Anglophone hegemony, and decentring and provincialising knowledge, some journals remain somewhat biased towards a UK perspective.

Editors responded in their position as editor, as an experienced individual scholar, or in both roles. Some editors provided their personal views, particularly in cases where an official journal policy on the topic did not exist; others provided us with the official journal policy and perspective. Some respondents answered selected questions only, others answered in a general manner with little detail on each specific question. While these approaches were informative and insightful, the combinations of answers of various types did not allow us to easily quantify our findings. This was not the main purpose of our survey, and the results we present in the following sections should only be considered as indicative of the broad spectrum of answers.

In some cases, some of the editors of a given journal replied collectively, often revealing differing views on the same question. We have anonymised all responses and wish to stress that the ‘identifiers’ such as E8 (abbreviation for ‘editor 8’) do not correspond with the numbers in Table 1. The numbering of respondents is to aid an orderly presentation of results. We have harmonised the editors’ written responses according to British English grammar and spelling without changing the meaning or content. Overall, we sensed a general openness among the editors to respond, which besides interest, enthusiasm and perhaps a sense of duty towards the discipline, could also be interpreted as a sign of curiosity about and importance of the topic.

The survey contained five key questions. These arose primarily from our specific search for a possible place in the future of the FinGeo WPS in relation to other longer-established WPS as listed in the section ‘Mapping the landscape of working paper series in geography’:

With this sequence of questions, we intended to find out about specific practices employed by the journals but also query some of the most experienced and influential scholars in our discipline about their views on the fate of WPs in general.

Survey results

For some scholars – here also in their specific role as editors – WPs are about a requiem for past publishing practice, for others about dilemmas especially for early career researchers. Yet for others, it is about the separation of disciplinary thinking, expressed in terms of ‘us’ (geographers) versus ‘them’ (e.g. economists) regarding different academic and publishing cultures. However, if we sing a requiem for WPs, why is SSRN still so successful, not only among economists but also among some economic geographers? Geographers seem torn on this issue. The subsequent sections present and interpret the results of our survey focusing on each of the five survey questions in turn.

Journal policies regarding WPs

In response to Question 1 (Table 2), we saw a range of opinions, perceptions and policies currently shaping the transformation of the academic publishing landscape and, within it, the positioning of WPS. The responses below provide a flavour of this diversity. Within the ‘yes’ category, while some journals do not consider WPs as published academic outputs, others explicitly welcome WP submissions, provided that the submitted version is considerably different from the WP version:

[W]e’ll consider any paper that has not been previously published, and generally, we do not consider WPS as published. So we do consider WPs (as long as there is no copyright on the piece). If there is some copyright it has to follow the general procedures for reproduction of previously published material. (E6)

In terms of journal policy [. . .] [the journal allows] submissions that are WPs and recent advice has been that those in repositories should be reviewed as normal since this is becoming increasingly common. Previously, anything in a series with an ISSN might have been considered as ‘prior publication’ but since these are often now attached to WPs and repositories, it is not practical to enforce this rule. Manuscripts often change quite a lot through review and only the authors’ original manuscript [. . .] should be in a WPS or repository prior to the article being accepted for publication. This means the journal still has the published version of record and it will often look different from the original submission. (E20)

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Table 2.

Answers to Q1: Does your journal have a policy for submissions that have previously been published as working papers?

yes	no (incl. ‘not sure’; informal policy; ad-hoc decisions)	n/a
12	10	2

Source: The authors.

Other respondents referred straight to the publisher’s submission guidelines that dictate the journal’s policies as illustrated below:

While SAGE generally supports the early dissemination of research through preprints (the pre-peer review version of the paper, also referenced as a ‘working paper’), including through SAGE’s own preprint platform, Advance, and other preprint platforms and SCNs, such as bioRxiV, preprints.org, ResearchGate and Academia.edu, some journals will not consider submissions that have been shared as a preprint prior to submission. (E5)

Within the ‘no’ category, only three editors clearly stated that their journals do not accept submitted manuscripts previously published as WPs, unless they are sufficiently different from their WP versions. Only one journal stated it would not accept a submission with an ISSN/ISBN. As many as 12 journals would still accept such a manuscript previously published in a WPS with an ISSN. The remaining journals do not (yet) have an official policy, in practice probably implying that they would accept them too, as evidence below suggests.

The category ‘no’, however, hosts a range of ambiguous responses, and compiling them in this category is a simplification. This includes responses that referred to the application of an informal policy, to ad hoc decisions, or to degrees of flexibility as editors in handling such policies because of lacking formal policy:

We do not have a formal policy per se but do not have a problem with papers being first published as WPs so long as they, once published, clearly state that the correct/ultimate citation should be to the published paper [in the journal]. (E1)

[W]e don’t have a policy on this [. . .], but there is some accumulated experience. The editors will likely be having a conversation about this. (E3)

As a journal, we don’t have a particular policy on WPs but there is some concern on our board about the growing number that are online and whether these in effect constitute ‘published’ material. (E18)

[N]o specific policy, BUT [publisher’s] software iThenticate would (if this paper is accessible somewhere in a repository as WP) drive the similarity index to high numbers. If this similarity is +10% we tend to go for a desk reject, and sometimes we see like +60% what then usually means that the paper is available somewhere as a WP. (E23)

In terms of the degree of formality, it became clear that some editors (aligned with the formal journal policy) consider a WP with an ISSN as prior publication. To them, a WP published in a series with an ISSN already represents a stand-alone published academic product. In practical terms, this means that submitted WPs with an ISSN or doi will not be accepted due to the assumption of wide distribution and/or peer-review prior to submission.

Potential advantages of a more widespread use of working paper series

While Question 2 dealt with the obstacles facing WPS, Question 3 sought to illuminate opportunities and strengths that a WPS could bring to the publication landscape. The list of suggested advantages of a WPS is diverse. For example, our respondents stressed that WPs enable different, innovative styles and formats of writing beyond a standard academic journal article. WPs can include short position papers (e.g. from applied research) to engage with stakeholders and a much broader public audience, including grassroots communities, NGOs and activists, making them more accessible especially if they are OA, in comparison with standard journal outlets. Depending on one’s epistemic and geographic community, reaching such audiences may be important or irrelevant. Again, differences between the United Kingdom and other countries may be stark here.

Respondents further argued that WPs can be an outlet for initial research findings, exploratory work, presenting detailed descriptive statistics to contextualise findings, more formal modelling, and for the publication of material that does not end up as a journal article. Therefore, WPS could be useful for providing greater clarity to work that is published later, by providing a form of scholarly record of how ideas developed:

From a more personal view, being a quantitative economic geographer, what WPs do offer is a possibility to both include thorough descriptive statistics to contextualise the findings as well as the more formal modelling. Adhering to an 8k limit (including everything) works poorly with traditional geographical research and is more suited for either natural sciences or non-empirical research. The strict word-limit of most journals is of course a completely different question but something that really could challenge how we (re-)produce geography. (E13)

WPs can often help clarify later published work. [. . .] I was able to make sense of arguments in a recent book (in a new field to me) by reading through a few WPs that were the basis for the book. The presentation of arguments in the book was obviously modified substantially, but I found the WPs provided a helpful guide for how the authors had developed their arguments. I’m not sure how applicable this would be to all WPs, but the trace of a ‘scholarly record’ they leave was, in this case, greatly appreciated. (E21)

Some respondents demonstrated ambivalence towards WPS, as they recognised no explicit disadvantages, but equally could not identify clear advantages:

I don’t see many, if any. I also don’t think that journal papers are quite as straightjacketed as this question suggests. Yes, usually they wouldn’t go higher than 11k (but that’s quite a lot of words) and there are many formats for essays that go way lower than 8k in journals. (E10)

I’m not sure there are many really – there is already too much to read across the growing population of journals. They could provide a home for more innovative and non-standard format pieces, but that intersects for me with issues of quality control and the requirements [. . .] for leading journal publications in many/most promotion systems. The growing use of online appendices [. . .] again erodes the distinctive of longer, more in-depth WPs. (E24)

Yes, but it is also not accepted to cite WPs for many journals, so I am not sure how to increase use. (E8)

The last – about citing WPs – strikes us as rather odd. After all, many journal papers cite conference presentations, which are even more fleeting if they are not archived as conference proceedings, as well as websites and popular media sources. The scholarly practice of acknowledging the source of particular ideas or findings should remain important, whatever the source.

Question 4, closely related to Question 3, delved into the specific benefits of WPs for early career researchers, with answers summarised in Table 3.

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Table 3.

Answers to Q4: Would working papers be beneficial to early career scholars?

yes	no	n/a (incl. ‘possibly’; ‘yes and no’)
14	5	5

Source: The authors.

A clear majority of editors sees much benefit for early career researchers, including the possibility of providing mentorship in the publication process. However, many ‘yes’ answers came with a strong ‘but’, which sums up the advice that early career researchers should not build a career (in view of jobs, promotion, UK REF, etc.) focused on WP publications. Respondents opined that early career scholars should only pick a WPS that is well curated and a stand-alone series, including a good promotion/marketing strategy that leads to wide recognition. Moreover, even if early career researchers publish in WPS for all the good reasons mentioned so far, they should be aware that the benefit of peer review is lost. One respondent aptly summarised these dilemmas:

Yes, and no. Yes, in the sense that one can get their work out for public consumption more quickly and thus get it read and cited more readily. No, in the sense that it would be unwise to suggest to a junior colleague that WPs count in significant ways when it comes to matters of promotion and/or getting a job – they are fine as dissemination strategies but not very strategic in the sense of job security or acquisition. (E1)

On a more positive note, WPs can help diversify authorship, promote early career researchers, improve wider accessibility of research outputs (without paywall) and speed up publication:

I think it would diversify authors and readership, but I think it’s important to note that there are lots of initiatives out there to try to operate more diverse publication formats which for me is separate to WPs. [. . .] If WPs diversify authorship then I think that would be super. (E7)

WPs can get ideas ‘out there’ even while people are still aiming to publish, and will be good for circulating ideas. The competition to get into particular geography journals is overly intense now, I think, again because of the 4* prize bestowed by REF ⁶ on some of those journals. (E11)

Many WPS have the advantage of light-touch review, sometimes with no (strict) word limit, while – contrary to the before mentioned claim that WPs are not a good way to claim an idea – authors can still ‘claim’ their intellectual property through a WP, and in some other fields this is considered a key reason for publishing a WP.

Is there space for working papers in human geography?

In this article, we have presented a trove of views, perceptions and experiences that inform publishing strategies and concerns of geographers, with the help of a survey among 31 editors of 24 journals in human geography. Our key focus was on the WP and its potential future as an outlet to communicate scientific research within and beyond geography. Three striking insights emerge from the debate, from which we derive careful optimism for the future of WPS in human geography.

First, there are distinctive differences in publication cultures among scholars within and outside of the Anglo-American sphere of academic influence, which also shape disciplinary cultures and academic practice, with some being more valued or privileged than others. This affects not only scholars from outside Anglophone academic settings in terms of barriers to publication but also limits knowledge and information flows within and beyond the discipline at large. The hegemonic English language as the lingua franca for global scholarship adds to this issue. It brings powerful normative influence, that is, the adaptation of English as the lingua franca is not limited to the use of English but also imports a set of cultural, ideological and publishing ideas and practices into an international academic arena (Kitchin, 2005). Previous debates have repeatedly referred to ‘the geographical bias which characterizes the production of social science knowledge’ (Aalbers and Rossi, 2007: 284; cf. Alatas, 2006; Baber, 2003; Yeung, 2001) and ‘[t]he abuses of citation counts’ (Yeung, 2002: 2098) in the production of knowledge that ‘counts’. Hard and soft disciplinary barriers underpin this situation, as do the costs and benefits on those who are English native speakers and those who are not. These are particularly pressing concerns if we are serious about the wider decolonisation agenda of the discipline (Müller, 2021; Radcliffe, 2017). Some of the interview quotes appear to reflect primarily on what ‘counts’ in the United Kingdom, and underscore the need for further decolonisation, decentering and provincialising. Although ‘provincialising’ perhaps is not the most accurate term here: editorial policies and publishing practices, in a way, need to be ‘de-provincialised’ and to reflect a wider set of international publishing traditions and scholarly concerns rather than resort to a very limited, so-called ‘international’, outlook that is essentially British. It is insufficient to acknowledge that the geographies of knowledge production are globally uneven and unequal if we do not open spaces of exchange and engagement with those facing different political realities and diverse epistemic and institutional histories of geographical research and teaching (McFarlane, 2022).

Second, as noted by other scholars (Asai, 2020; Bergstrom, 2001; Coomes et al., 2017), the power game of the large, oligopolistic publishers (Larivière et al., 2015) has already affected the direction and forms of disciplinary publications and what is perceived as a ‘valuable’ outlet. Unsurprisingly, this greatly affects the publication channels and career planning of early career researchers, which may also contribute to rising inequality among scholars from different countries and institutional traditions depending on accessibility to the disciplinary core journals. The concentration of power among publishers and control of their scientific journals contradicts the plurality of knowledge distribution. We are mindful of the shift towards digital outlets and recognise that digital natives welcome new formats, but we also believe that different formats can co-exist in the academic world.

In considering the future ‘value’ of WPS in geography in general, and value for whom specifically, we draw our third insight from the voices of our surveyed editors, including their (still overall encouraging) responses to Question 5, which we cite here in their diversity (Table 4):

Is there scope to develop a more ‘mixed economy’ of publishing? Definitely in my view. WPs could have a role here, ‘alongside’ other forms. But this case becomes blurred if WPs are ‘photo-papers’ intended for ultimate submission to journals. Back when I got started, [. . .] the general pattern was to publish as a WP, try to drum up some comments, and then develop the paper further. Since the WPs were normally only available for purchase, via the mail (!), they were probably deemed almost irrelevant by the journals of the day. The readily and permanently available WP of today is a different animal, however. (E3)

When I ran a WPS many years ago, we published material that would not end up as a journal article. My view would be that as an initial stage to submitting a journal article, probably not; but as a way of disseminating initial research findings or exploratory work, then yes. (E4)

Yes, I definitely think there is space for WPs in human geography and related fields. The more ways that we can share our work widely with different publics in an OA format, the better. (E5)

Yes, I hope we can change the nature of access as I think the model of peer review is ill suited to the 21st century. (E8)

WPs vary in quality depending on the institutional make-up (department, centre, institute) and seem to be more popular in Europe than the US. Institutional make-up matters because centres in the US that generate them are increasingly revenue seeking. Some WPs are very local catering to the local communities that support the centres; others are policy-oriented and target practitioners/donors who form their revenue base. (E20)

I suspect this question will reflect, to an extent, sub-disciplinary norms. Fields such as GIS or economic geography come to mind as fields where I have seen WPs somewhat regularly, and where the format has proven useful. This hasn’t seemed to translate into work in other sub-disciplines yet. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a space for that work, but rather that the institutional norms and sedimented practices of geographic research are changing more slowly relative to the quickly evolving preprint publishing options. (E21)

More generally, I am personally (also as editor) neutral or even positive in considering papers that have been published as WPs for a number of reasons. They provide (and protect) ways to diffuse new research agenda/ideas which will take long time to publish. They help hugely early carrier researchers who are more and more in competition and need to wait some years before building a record; indeed, although evaluation for hiring or promotion are clearly based on journal publications, a good ‘pipeline’ shown in reputable WPS is always interpreted as a very positive sign. The anonymity of the peer review in journals is more and more in doubt, as googling titles can nowadays very often link to authors, with or without WP. (E24)

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Table 4.

Answers Q5: In summary, do you think there is space for working papers in human geography and related fields?

yes	no (incl. ‘not sure’; informal policy; ad-hoc decisions)	n/a
14	5	5

Source: The authors.

Context has clearly shaped the outcomes of our survey, and academic cultures play a major role in defining the ‘business model’ and intention of WPS across the (Anglophone and European) disciplinary landscape of human geographers. WPs were and still are vibrant means of academic communication visible to both the academic community and increasingly non-academic audiences, which could be seen as measurable societal impact to tick yet another metric in today’s academic profiles. The future of WPS may be linked to publication motivations stemming from differences in national disciplinary cultures, including the REF-driven research profiles of UK-based scholars, publications required in languages other than English for national academic markets, and the practicality for early career researchers to build their research profiles early on. Publications in WPS, however, do not only influence individual (early) career research profiles. (New) WPS may also help establish emerging sub-disciplines in human geography, such as that of financial geography, which motivated this survey on WPS initially. There is also potential for WPS to be less heavily policed by the norms of specific national academic cultures, in part because submitted WPs typically receive a light review, implying that they should be more open to include ‘Other’ knowledges and methods. In that sense, WPS can make a meaningful contribution to decentering and deprovincialising academic debates by improving visibility of non-Anglophone research and researchers and emerging topics, and access to richer and more diverse scholarly outputs.

In this article, we have set out to inquire the future value of a WPS in human geography, and if so, for whom. Despite the mixed bag of reactions from our interviewed editors, we note an overall positive and encouraging tone to continue navigating WPS through this complex amalgamate of emerging stakeholder groups, powerful interests and changing environments for career-building requirements and publications. It became clear that the prevailing Anglophone view does not account for how many researchers from developing and non-Anglophone countries face barriers to publishing in the so-called ‘international journals’ that are heavily controlled by the Anglophone academic community. After decades of debate on Anglophone hegemony in academic publishing, postcolonialism and provincialisation of knowledge, we would like to emphasise that WPS can be important publication channels in diverse epistemic and geographic communities, including emerging (sub-)disciplines.

Reflecting on the initial motivation for conducting the survey, we hope that the FinGeo WPS as well as other WPS will carve out space for further publications and the promotion of different audiences and interested readership, which is why we believe it will continue to have a vital raison d’être. Having a well-curated WPS provides (and protects) opportunities for the dissemination of new research agendas and ideas, and creates space for ‘Other’ and unorthodox thinking in a gradually streamlined disciplinary canon, therefore sustaining the disciplinary ethos of a community of practice in human geography. This is a value inherent to WPS, which should not be underestimated in an era of metrics-addiction, publication-dependency and the concentration of major publishers that are shaping the publication (and intellectual) landscape and direction of human geography and other disciplines.