JEMS editorial welcome note 2025

Over the last 12 months, we rightly celebrated the first half-century of the journal but at the same time held conversations about how we might move forward facing a landscape increasingly challenged by Open Access, AI and the increasing politicisation of our subject matter in the academic and political world.A key component is our JEMS globalisation strategy, i.e. our efforts and initiatives to support the opening and global broadening of academic discussion.How can a journal of migration be anything other than a global journal?At JEMS we have initiated purposeful efforts to provide access to a forum where thinking on international migration and its consequences extends beyond the hegemonic North American and European scholarships.This approach has been embraced and supported by the publisher.It is sometimes challenging and there are clear limits to what a journal can achieve given the structural inequalities in opportunities for knowledge production and scholarship across the globe.Still, unless we make the effort change, however incremental, is not going to happen.We continue trying and there are significant increases in JEMS engagement by scholars in China, Turkey and India, while progress is evident in Latin America, SE Asia and Africa too.According to submission and publication statistics JEMS is importantly globalising relative to other comparable journals.Over the last year we welcomed a whole new set of members to our Editorial Board (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cjms20/about-this-journal#editorial-board)mindful of this aim of representing diverse regions, disciplines and scholarships.Within our core Editorial team of Inhouse Associate Editors, Bingyu Wang, Nankai University, has mobilised campaigns through events and social media platforms to present JEMS as an accessible forum for migration scholars in China.In July 2024, I was delighted and honoured to be present at the JEMS Young Scholars' Forum, held at the new School of Sociology, Nankai University, where the new generation of migration scholars from across China presented their cutting-edge work on a wide ranging of topics, including queer sexualities, digital nomads, and mobility pathways between China and Africa.There is clearly a new impetus for humanities and sociology perspectives in migration research in China and we see JEMS as a natural home to bring these discussions to wider scholarly debates.JEMS is a broad church and a big one -the scale is massive.In 2023, we published 264 articles (5321 pages) of peer-reviewed scholarship across 20 issues.This is roughly equivalent to 40% more than the contractual requirement, because we want authors to have their work in the public domain.Just over a third of articles were Open Access (35%; up from 19% in 2019).JEMS articles were downloaded more than a million times (up from 600K in 2019 and 200K in 2016).JEMS scores consistently high as a top social science journal in the citation rankings.Importantly, JEMS does a lot of the heavy lifting for published scholarship in our field, as well as being the forum that also links across to mainstream disciplinary debates.I have been Editor of JEMS for more than a decade.Over this time the world and the publishing landscape have transformed beyond what would have been imaginable.To give a small