I’d like to begin with a word on editorials: one editorial per year can carry important information – what you’re reading here. However, with all papers now available in open access (of which more in a moment), descriptions of individual papers seem redundant, which means that we will no longer have separate editorials for other issues as they were composed almost exclusively of this; special issues remain a separate case where an editorial can usefully situate thematic content. Speaking of which, the Editorial Board accepted a proposal for a special issue in 2025 on “Migrants’ and refugees’ digital literacies in life and language learning” from Linda Bradley, Nicolas Guichon and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme. The call for papers is now out.

As of 1st January 2024, ReCALL is entering a new five-year contract for publication with CUP. We’re delighted with a number of changes, and the promise of more to come. First and most obviously, ReCALL has now become a wholly open access journal, which means all papers in this issue and in the future are published as Gold Open Access under a Creative Commons licence, and are free to read by all. Please note though that any past papers in ReCALL that were not open access will remain behind a paywall: if you already have access, for example, as a EUROCALL member, you will still be able to read them. However, there are of course costs involved in publication – the (in)famous APCs or “article processing charges”. Unlike some journals, ReCALL is insistent that all articles should be selected according to scientific criteria alone. All papers that have been deemed appropriate for publication in ReCALL based on scientific grounds will be published in the journal, regardless of whether the authors have access to APC funding. This is made possible thanks to CUP and EUROCALL, which, in addition to institutional agreements and project funding, have set up a waiver fund to cover most remaining cases.

It is heartening to announce that ReCALL’s impact factor has increased again, from 4.235 in 2021 to 4.5 in 2023. This moves us up to 7th position in Linguistics (out of 194), and 35th in Education (out of 269). As always, I recommend these figures be treated with caution, as we’re dealing with fairly low numbers in these fields, which are therefore more susceptible to fluctuation (and indeed new methods of calculation). We’re a long way from microbiology, for example, where my daughter has just published a paper as lead author in a journal with an impact factor of 28! Moving away from journal impact factor and on towards the impact of individual papers, research by Shepperd, Marsden and Alferink (Reference Shepperd, Marsden and Alferink2023) has shown that ReCALL articles with an OASIS summary are downloaded significantly more frequently than those without a summary; they are also cited more often. OASIS, as its name suggests, provides a platform for one-page “open accessible summaries in language studies”; these can be written by the authors or, indeed, anyone else, so it’s important to get your version in first. ReCALL has systematically suggested this to the authors of all accepted papers in recent years, and it is gratifying to see that it does make a difference. We feel honoured that OASIS should have chosen our journal for this case study.

Our level of submissions remains stable at about 50% higher than pre-COVID-19 levels; we’re very happy that CUP has introduced more flexible page budgets, meaning that we are no longer limited in the number of papers we can accept (though this does not mean that we will be extending word limits for individual papers!). It should also reduce delays in publication: as soon as a paper is accepted and typeset, it appears online in FirstView; we should now be able to assign it to the very next issue. The question of whether the concept of “issue” still has any real relevance may lead to further changes in coming years.

We’re delighted to welcome three new members of the Editorial Board: Marni Manegre (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), Elaine Riordan (University of Limerick) and Nina Vyatkina (University of Kansas). Though there is no fixed number of members, their appointment reflects four recent departures: Linda Bradley and Trude Heift, who stood down in December 2022, and Catherine Caws and Marie-Josée Hamel, at the end of 2023. Our heartfelt thanks to them all for their years of involvement at ReCALL. The full list of Editorial Board members and others can be found on the ReCALL website. In other news: the winner of the CUP–ReCALL annual prize for “best paper” was announced at the EUROCALL 2023 conference in Iceland, chosen by the Editorial Board drawing on a shortlist compiled by the Editors from the previous three issues (September 2022 to May 2023). This year’s prize goes to Hyejin Yang, Heyoung Kim, Jang Ho Lee and Dongkwang Shin for their paper titled “Implementation of an AI Chatbot as an English Conversation Partner in EFL Speaking Classes”, which appeared in Issue 34.3. Congratulations to them.

Last but by no means least, one essential function of a yearly editorial is to thank reviewers, without whom scientific publication would be unrecognisable. Authors remain anonymous during the double-blind process, a practice that has been shown to reduce bias in large trials (e.g. Fox, Meyer and Aimé, Reference Fox, Meyer and Aimé2023), but their identity becomes known if and when their paper appears. Reviewers, on the other hand, remain anonymous throughout, so it is essential to acknowledge them here en bloc. Their input has been crucial in making ReCALL the journal it is today, and we know how difficult it can be to find the time for this – many others that we contact never reply, or decline, or agree but fail to submit their promised review, all of which slows down the process more than we would like. More on review procedures specific to ReCALL can be found in Tschichold, Boulton and Pérez-Paredes (Reference Tschichold, Boulton, Pérez-Paredes and Chongin press). Our heartfelt thanks, then, to all the following, who completed reviews between October 2022 and September 2023, a total of 128 researchers from 29 different countries:

Muhammad Abdel Latif, Parisa Abdolrezapour, Alberto Andujar, Vahid Aryadoust, Selami Aydin, Ufuk Balaman, Oliver Ballance, Zsuzsanna Bárkányi, Neil Barrett, Jessie Barrot, Serge Bibauw, Frank Boers, Jill Boggs, Kate Borthwick, Hossein Bozorgian, Marc Brysbaert, Silvia Canto, Marco Cappellini, Catherine G. Caws, Ahmet Cekic, Anna C.-S. Chang, Maggie Charles, Anisa Cheung, Chin-Wen Chien, Yazdan Choubsaz, Milo Coffey, Jozef Colpaert, Barbara Conde Gafaro, Frederik Cornillie, Alejandro Curado Fuentes, Robert Dilenschneider, Mohsen Ebrahimzadeh, Amanda Edmonds, Gülcan Erçetin, Fiona Farr, Lionel Fontan, Luciana Forti, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia, Luke Fryer, Tesni Galvin, Chuan Gao, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Joe Geluso, John Gillespie, Alice Gruber, Nicolas Guichon, Agata Guskaroska, Zoe Handley, Peggy Hartwick, Hsiao-Ling Hsu, Zeping Huang, Phil Hubbard, Sake Jager, Teppo Jakonen, Juhyun Jang, Kristi Jauregi Ondarra, Jenny Lin Jiang, Benjamin Jones, Andrea Kárpáti, Jean Kim, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Gosia Kurek, Meryl Kusyk, Leena Kuure, Hansol Lee, Junkyu Lee, Minjin Lee, Sangmin Lee, Robert Lew, Fan Li, Rui Li, Huifen Lin, Stephanie Link, Tanjun Liu, Yeu-Ting Liu, Kacper Łodzikowski, Mary Jo Lubrano, Qing Ma, Jeffrey Maloney, S. Susan Marandi, Antonio Martínez Sáez, Paul Meara, Bing Mei, Hai Min Dai, Atsushi Mizumoto, Valentina Morgana, Charles Mueller, Liam Murray, Naseh Nasrollahi Shahri, Robert O’Dowd, Carlos Ordoñana Guillamón, Marina Orsini-Jones, Agnieszka Palalas, Mirosław Pawlak, Nikolaos Pellas, Luke Plonsky, Zhi Quan, Jim Ranalli, Geraint Rees, Wei Ren, John Rogers, Vivienne Rogers, Ali Roohani, Fernando Rosell-Aguilar, Aysel Saricaoglu, Cédric Sarré, Müge Satar, Takeshi Sato, Mathias Schulze, Raquel Serrano, Rustam Shadiev, Natalia Shalaeva, Tuğba Şimşek Rackelmann, Jonathan Smart, Jayoung Song, Ursula Stickler, Glenn Stockwell, Maria del Mar Suárez, Ross Sundberg, Pia Sundqvist, Shu-Chiao Tsai, Julie Van de Vyver, Miguel Varela, Joseph Vitta, Mark Warschauer, Stuart Webb, Javad Zare, Danyang Zhang.

As I said earlier, the editorial no longer features comments on individual papers. I would just like to point out that several in this issue involve syntheses or other research issues rather than the more usual primary empirical studies – this does not represent a change in policy but is purely coincidental. We hope you enjoy the papers here, and wish you all the best for 2024 in all your CALL endeavours and beyond.