The October issue is another bumper issue, bursting at the seams with interesting articles. Our Early Career Editor, Megan Ainsworth has written the editorial which draws on her own experiences to discuss the need for change and the problems of change for large and small publishers – so if you read nothing else, ensure that you read this article!

The issue covers many other important and timely topics, such as …

• the global academic response to COVID-19 – how the publication outputs in the past year compare to those from other health crises
• equity in publishing (written by Simone Taylor who spoke excellently at the ALPSP conference, and her colleagues), reporting their study that showed problems in diversity and how these can be addressed within the industry
• how research performance differs in regional provinces of China, what disciplines are more or less prevalent in different regions
• the challenges of publishing in “periphery” countries and what we can all learn from them, with studies from Croatia, Vietnam and Turkey

and much more: Take a look at this issue