Dear CGF and ACME-Alerts list members:

Whenever we publish a new issue of ACME, we keep track of downloads to give us a sense of what articles people are enjoying and to get a sense of how an issue is being received by the readership.  We published the latest issue of ACME approximately four days ago (93 hours and 50 minutes ago at the time I calculated the following data).  In that time, the seven articles that comprise Volume 9, issue 2 of the journal have been downloaded 4,384 times.  Over the last few years, we have seen steady growth in the popularity of new ACME issues (based on downloads per article) and this issue continues that growth trend.

Since May 30, 2006 — the date upon which we switched ACME servers here at UBC (and thus the earliest date for which we have download data) — the 179 articles published in ACME have been downloaded 594,494 times.  Over that same time, the ACME website was visited an average of more than 130,000 times each year.  In more recent years, the average monthly visits have increased significantly, with 18,968 visits last month alone.  The site was visited by people  from at least 180 different nations (according to their GeoIP), although the vast majority of visitors are from North America and Europe (approximately 70% of all visits to ACME).

Many of you will have noticed that we have begun to publish issues of ACME ‘early’.  The first issue of 2010 (Volume 9, Issue 1), for example, was published six months early in November of 2009 and the second issue was recently published approximately 8 months sooner than usual.  Colleagues have been so supportive with submission of their research to ACME that at one time we had a more than two-year publication lag.  We have begun this policy of early publication of issues in order to improve our publication timelines.  It has been successful in that we are now able to publish many articles not long after they finish the copy-editing and production process.  We have reduced our backlog significantly, and we hope to keep publishing issues ‘early’ and bringing our readers some of the best research and writing in critical geography via open-access publishing.

On behalf of the Editorial Collective I would like to thank everyone for their overwhelming support for ACME specifically and for open-access publishing more generally.  This support is especially heartening in light of the significant pressures on academics to publish their work in ISI-ranked journals produced (almost exclusively) by commercial publishers.

Sincerely,
Lawrence Berg
Co-editor, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies
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Lawrence D. Berg, D.Phil.
Co-Director, The Centre for Social, Spatial & Economic Justice
Graduate Coordinator, Human Geography

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