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Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

I have been active in the transport profession for almost 50 years. I started working for the Greater London Council in 1967 when the subject area was young, and we were all learning from one another. Many of the topics which I worked on then, such as planning transport and land use together and managing the demand for travel are as important now as they were then.

In 1977 I moved to the University of Leeds as Professor of Transport Engineering, a post which I held until 2009, when I retired. In that period I taught over 1000 transport professionals, and developed my research interests in sustainable urban transport policy. I also contributed to policy making in many UK cities and in countries as diverse as New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand.

I remain very active in retirement, advising international bodies, contributing to European guidance on urban transport policy, and helping design enhancements to transport and the public realm in London and York as well, of course, as editing this journal.

European Transport Research Review has recently been indexed by Thomson Reuters and the first Impact Factor is expected for 2017. What are your ambitions for the journal in the future?

We want to ensure that European Transport Research Review continues
to be the principal forum for high quality articles which disseminates new ideas of relevance to transport in Europe. To this end we will continue to encourage a mix of individually generated articles and contributions to topical collections.

We are about to launch three new topical collections on smart cities, urban freight and automated vehicles, and are keen to encourage those working in Horizon 2020 to submit sets of articles summarizing their projects’ key findings.

At the same time we welcome contributions from outside Europe. Europe has much to learn from current developments in China, North and South America. And given the support from Europe for transport enhancements in the developing world, articles from the developing world are also highly relevant.

In your opinion, what are the benefits of open access publishing and how do you see open access helping the development of European Transport Research Review?

Open access is still a new concept, and we find that many authors
still do not understand what it involves. The principal benefit for the author is that an accepted open access article is immediately widely available; download rates and citations can easily be doubled as a result.

The principal benefit for the author is that an accepted open access article is immediately widely available

This also means that the users of research have more immediate access to results, and the funders of research see more immediate benefits from their input.

For European Transport Research Review, open access means that we can potentially broaden the funding base for the journal, and hence its coverage. We charge for each article published, but this need not be a barrier to publication.

Many research funders, including the European Commission, have agreed to meet the costs of publication, and many research institutions provide funding for their own staff, for example as members of SpringerOpen.

We continue to be sponsored by the European Conference of Transport
Research Institutes (ECTRI), so that authors who have no other source of funding can still publish. Springer also provides waivers for authors from developing countries and for research students.

What advice would you give a researcher before submitting to your journal?

As for any journal, authors need to ensure that they meet the requirements for publication. For European Transport Research Review we seek high quality, novel research findings which are well founded on, and build on, existing research. We also expect to see a clear articulation of the policy implications of the research.  As long as these requirements are met, we are happy to receive articles relevant to any mode of transport.

As European Transport Research Review is an open access journal with article-processing charges, authors should check whether they can obtain funding for publication from their employer or their research sponsor, or are eligible for a Springer waiver before submitting their manuscript. If none of these funding sources are available to you, please contact me, as Editor-in-Chief at [email protected], to find out if you are eligible to benefit from the sponsorship which we obtain from ECTRI and others. If you are, you will not need to meet the costs of article-processing charges yourself, and will still benefit from the wider dissemination which open access achieves.

Visit the journal website to learn more about European Transport Research Review.