It is with great pleasure that Jeremy and I as Editors-in-Chief welcome you to Spatial Demography. We have collaborated with the PressForward project, at George Mason University, to build a home for this new journal outlet for demographers and others who use spatial data, methods, and theory. We anticipate your submissions to the journal at: submissions@spatialdemography.org. This journal has no submission or page-charge fees as is customary with nearly all journals today.

But this website is more than the typical academic journal published on a quarterly basis. We hope that you will register for the Forum area and post your thoughts about the work being done by others as well as yourself. Because so many forum areas are replete with spam postings, we are requiring nominal registration so as to keep spammers quiet there. Our privacy assurance is absolute: we will never share your information with anyone! Period. The four area Editors each have their own topical areas in the Forum in addition to others. We hope that you will dialog with your peers here so that a community of scholars can be created through this website. This was one of the issues identified in December 2011 by the NIH-sponsored meeting of Specialists at UC-Santa Barbara.

The journal will publish a quarterly issue with four per volume. But the Online First section will contain each article as soon as it is ready for public display. This will reduce the time-to-publication significantly. Commentary on published articles will take place in the Forum area, allowing authors to amplify their work, gaining insight as to building it forward toward better science. We will moderate those discussions to ensure civility in academic discourse.

In the planning stages, we will publish podcasts of interviews with interesting scholars doing work contributing to spatial demography. These interviews will be in the Connections (forthcoming) area of the website. Because they are licensed under the Creative Commons licensing model, they can be used as class material, for rebroadcast elsewhere, and so forth.

So come on in. The water’s fine!