Urban Science (ISSN 2413-8851) is a peer-reviewed open-access, international journal headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. It is a quarterly journal available online only. Urban Science is one of the 193 open-access journals published by MDPI. It is relatively new; according to the website; the first issue was published in March 2017. Content is available free for all readers and and authors can publish for of charge if manuscript is well-prepared. I am not sure how well-preparedness of articles is decided but that is what the website says. It seems to imply that poorly-prepared manuscript will be charged but my thought is that the language used in the website is to mean they only publish well-prepared manuscript.
Submitted articles are peer-reviewed and published continuously until the deadline. For planned papers, authors can submit an abstract that will be announced on the website prior to submission of full manuscript. However, this does not guarantee acceptance of work; manuscripts are peer-reviewed.
Urban Science’s goals are “to encourage contributors to publish theoretical and empirical research”1 and its scope includes urban, rural, and regional development, environment and resource opportunities and constraints, economic and political development, public policy analysis, community formation and reformation, and the globalization of cities and regions. The journal describes its purpose to be “providing platform for the exchange of theories, ideas, methods, analyses, and comparative studies of urban and regional development”2. One thing that struck me was its definition of “science” (part of the journal’s name) as qualitative and quantitative analysis. What comes to my mind when I see a reference to qualitative and quantitative analysis is research and not necessarily science. That caught my attention.
The parent publishing MDPI, which is based in Switzerland but has offices in other countries in Europe and Asia describes itself as “a pioneer in scholarly open access publishing”3 that started in 1996. All content published in its journals (including in Urban Science) are free for all readers. Provision of free content is financed by article processing charges paid by institutes and research funding bodies of authors.
I selected this journal because my adviser Professor Thomas Sanchez (who is a guest editor) and I are working on a manuscript to submit. Our abstract has been announced on the website. Click here to view.
1. http://www.mdpi.com/journal/urbansci – Urban Science – Open Access Journal
2. file:///C:/Users/gmahtot/Downloads/flyer.pdf – Aims and Scope
3. http://www.mdpi.com/about – About
Mahtot [Mah-tote] Gebresselassie, PhD 