Active Travel Studies

About

Focus and Scope

We live in times of climate crisis, with illegal levels of air pollution in many cities worldwide, and what has been called an epidemic of physical inactivity. Technological change alone will not solve such problems: we also need major growth in active travel (primarily walking and cycling, but also other active and semi-active types of travel, such as scooters) to replace many shorter car trips. Active modes could even (e.g. through electric assist trikes) help make urban freight much more sustainable.

Journals within many fields cover active travel, but literature remains highly segmented and (despite high levels of policy interest) difficult for practitioners to find. Established, mainstream journals are not open access, another barrier to policy transfer and knowledge exchange. Thus, while many towns, cities, and countries seek to increase active travel, the knowledge base suffers from a lack of high-quality academic evidence that is easy to find and obtain. This reinforces practitioner reliance on often lower-quality grey literature, and a culture of relying on ad hoc case studies in policy and practice.

This journal provides a bridge between academia and practice, based on high academic standards and accessibility to practitioners. Its remit is to share knowledge from any academic discipline/s (from bioscience to anthropology) that can help build knowledge to support active travel and help remove barriers to it, such as car dependency. Within this normative orientation, it is rigorously academic and critical, for instance not shying away from analysing examples where interventions do not lead to more active travel. It goes beyond immediate policy imperatives to share knowledge that while not immediately change-oriented can contribute to a deeper understanding of, for instance, why people drive rather than walk. 

As well as publishing relevant new research, the journal commissions both commentary pieces on such research, and critical reviews of the existing literature. Reflecting the diversity of its audience, its content is varied, including written work of different lengths as well as audio-visual material

Publication Frequency

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are published as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in making content publicly available.

Special collections of accepted submissions are welcomed welcomed and a webpage will be dedicated to each collection. The individual submissions will also be published alongside the journal’s other content.

Open Access Policy

This journal operates under Diamond Open Access, meaning there are no charges for either publication in the journal or readership of its content. The journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports the global exchange of knowledge.

Authors of published material remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons licence agreement.

Archiving Policy

The journal’s publisher focuses on making content discoverable and accessible through indexing services. Content is also archived around the world to ensure long-term availability.

In addition, the journal is available for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises CLOCKSS, and LOCKSS archiving systems.

If the journal is not indexed by your preferred service, please contact us or, if you prefer, make an indexing request directly with the service.

Sponsors

Active Travel Studies is published with the support of the University of Westminster and the Quintin Hogg Trust. 

• Quintin Hogg Trust
• University of Westminster

Editorial Team

Editor

Tom Cohen
Active Travel Academy, University of Westminster, UK
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Deputy Editor

Rachel Aldred

Editorial Assistant

Luz Navarro Eslava

Editorial Board

Sonja Haustein
Technical University of Denmark
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Esther Anaya Boig
Imperial College London, UK
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Giulio Mattioli

Andy Cope

Tim Jones
Oxford Brookes University, UK
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Ersilia Verlinghieri
University of Westminster, UK

Jamie Furlong
University of Westminster, UK

Author Guidelines

Submissions should be made electronically through this website. Once submitted, the author can track the submission and communicate with the editors via the online journal management system.

Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript. Failure to do so may delay processing your submission.

Article types

• Research articles must describe the outcomes and application of unpublished original research. These should make a substantial contribution to knowledge and understanding in the subject matter and should be supported by relevant figures and tabulated data. Research articles should be no more than 8,000 words in length.
• Commentaries should reflect upon or critique a specific "happening" such as a release of a major study or other notable occurrence related to journal focus. Authors interested in submitting a commentary piece should discuss the content with the editor before submitting a manuscript. Commentary articles should be no longer than 3,000 words in length.
• Reviews can cover topics such as current controversies or the historical development of studies as well as issues of regional or temporal focus. Papers should critically engage with the relevant body of extant literature. Review articles should be no longer than 8,000 words in length.
• Debates should allow a range of views on a subject relevant to the journal’s focus to be aired in a lively manner by at least two authors taking contrasting positions and reacting to each other’s interventions, referring to the literature as appropriate. Debate articles should be no more than 5,000 words in length.
• Interviews will present the opinions of influential figures from the world of active travel and associated fields through the medium of interview conducted by knowledgeable researchers. Participants can write their answers to questions or can be interviewed conventionally, subject to subsequent editing to ensure the final text achieves the journal’s standards of precision and clarity. Interviews must not exceed 5,000 words in length. 
• Viewpoints will offer informed analysis and critical views surrounding key and emerging issues in active travel research with suggestions for future directions as well as comment on emerging trends in the literature. These may be of length 3,500 to 8000 words in length.

All word limits include referencing and citation.

For further details please follow below links:

Article types | Structure | Permissions |Language & text | Data & Symbols | Figures & Tables | References

Research Integrity

Anti-Plagiarism Checking

A combination of pre-screening and open access is the best possible defence against plagiarism. All articles submitted to University of Westminster Press journals are automatically screened for plagiarism by the CrossCheck system from CrossRef. This system compares incoming articles to a large database of academic content, and alerts editors to any possible issues.

Rigorous Peer Review

University of Westminster Press ensures that all research output, in both journals and books, is thoroughly peer reviewed by external reviewers, and offers the option of open peer review if required. Publications of a commentary or opinion nature may not be sent for external peer review but will include extensive editorial review and revisions. All of our journals adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice.

Open Licences

All University of Westminster Press content is released under open licences from Creative Commons. We believe that only CC BY meets the requirements for true open access for journals, and strongly prefer CC0 for open research data.

The journals supports the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which states that open access “…will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”

Active Travel Studies endorses the Panton Principles, which state that "for science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open."

Research Data

All University of Westminster Press journals and books strongly encourage authors to make the research objects associated with their publications openly available. This includes research data, software, bioresources and methodologies. This means that peer reviewers are better able to assess the foundations of claims made, and the research community and wider public are similarly able to validate authors’ work, and are more easily able to extend and build upon it.

All journals and books can be integrated with their own repository on the Dataverse Network as standard, and additional integration with subject-specific repositories such as Dryad is implemented on request.

Indexing

All University of Westminster Press content is indexed with CrossRef and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This means that all of our references are made available so that citations can be tracked by the publishing community, and the content is added to the Cross-Check anti-plagiarism database.

All of our article metadata is openly available for harvesting by indexing services via OAI-PMH and the journals are registered with Open Archives.

For more information on where this journal is indexed, please view the journal's about page.

Archiving

As members of CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) our content is regularly archived with many of the world's leading research libraries. The CLOCKSS archive ensures that University of Westminster Press content will always be made available as open access, in any eventuality.

Where relevant we automatically archive journal and book content with subject specific archives such as PubMed Central or Europe PMC / PMC Bookshelf.

We fully support and encourage author self-archiving of all content (sometimes termed 'green' open access). All University of Westminster Press journals are registered with SHERPA/RoMEO to ensure that the licence terms and self-archiving policies of the journals are 100% clear.

No Lock-in

The University of Westminster Press uses open, non-proprietary standards for all of its content, meaning that it can be easily transferred to archives and other publishers. All of our article XML is compliant with the Journal Archiving Tag Suite (JATS) schema.

We endorse and adhere to the NISO Transfer Code of Practice, which ensures that, when a journal transfers between publishers, librarians, editors, and other publishers are informed and treated fairly.

All copyright to the published content is retained by the authors, University of Westminster Press does not retain rights to the published content and the content can be transferred away from University of Westminster Press if the editors decide to change publisher.

Journal Representatives

Principal Contact - Editor

Dr Tom Cohen

Technical Support

Support Contact

Deputy Editor

Professor Rachel Aldred

For inquiries, kindly get in touch here via the ATS contact form