Special Issue on COVID-19

The rapid and devastating spread of the novel strain of a coronavirus, COVID-19, is transforming the lives of people around the globe. While earlier widespread infections have impacted  populations, altering local and regional histories, the potential for this virus to do harm is much greater – we now live in a world populated by densely settled cities and countries, in which people and animals travel internationally on an unprecedented scale. These conditions challenge humanity to work together. 

Global Transitions publishes actionable knowledge and forward-thinking perspectives on transitions in many fields that are relevant to rigorous discourse on social sciences, as well as public health.  For this reason, Global Transitions is the ideal platform for the exchange of knowledge and information spanning these discipline borders. For example, the recommendations of medical and public health experts relating to COVID-19 haven’t been fully adopted by all countries, raising urgent sociological and psychological questions.

Global Transitions is fully open access and will not be charging any Article Processing Charges (APCs) throughout 2020. Published articles will be immediately and permanently available globally for everyone to read, download and share.

Our COVID-19 virtual special issue will publish articles that touch on the following areas:

• The role psychosocial responses play in adopting best practices to control viruses like COVID-19.
• The problem of cultural and food preferences: most of the recent epidemics have emerged in the context of consuming wild meat sources.
• Technology: opportunities to leverage the monitoring of emergent viruses to help us better prepare for likely future epidemics in a world with varying environments, demographics, and sociopolitical structures.
• Sociology:  the barriers to transparency and collection of critical data.
• Pathways to the future: the probable scenarios for national and global recovery after a pandemic.
• How we can use the experience of this pandemic to design and carry out preparation plans on an international scale.

We are calling for research articles, research notes, best practices, perspectives, case studies and literature reviews. All types of articles are welcome, long and short.

We explicitly invite expert views from people who have managed the crisis in China or South Korea; for example, protocol lessons for crisis management, experiences, hospital management, etc.

Rapid yet rigorous peer review is guaranteed for all papers. Our aim is to bring together various communities and disciplines on all scales to aid research into this disease. Submit your manuscript and help us achieve that goal.

Guest Editors

• Alistair Woodward, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
• Rangan Banerjee, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.
• Alexander Brem, University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Submit your paper