Important updates to TSR policies and practices

Dear TSR community,

Time flies, and we have just realized that it is time to celebrate the journal's fifth birthday. What started as something of a hobby project has developed into a serious publishing venue, with a clear mission, a professional editorial team, and hundreds of dedicated authors and readers.

Over the past few months, the editorial team has been working on a new strategic plan for the journal—our roadmap for moving from simply being ‘good’ to becoming ‘great’ (aiming to be The Lancet of traffic safety, remember?).

Here is a glimpse of what you can expect from the TSR in the months and years ahead.

Strengthened Safe System orientation

We want the Traffic Safety Research to become the home of Safe System and Vision Zero research. This does not mean that, starting tomorrow, every submission that does not explicitly mention the Safe System will be rejected. Rather, we want to encourage our authors to frame their research within a proactive, system-oriented approach to traffic safety. We will support this transition through good examples, educational activities, clearer editorial guidance, and opportunities for discussion within the research community.

In the near future, you can expect:

• updated submission guidelines and editorial quality criteria, making it clearer that editors consider the relevance and contribution of submissions through a Safe System lens
• an expanded Advisory Board, bringing in leading Safe System experts who can help us identify emerging research topics, promising early-career researchers, and opportunities for external collaboration
• knowledge status reviews, consensus statements, and other commissioned publications, developed together with leading Safe System researchers and experts
• special issues devoted to topics of particular importance within the Safe System paradigm
• educational activities, including webinars, opportunities for author coaching, and other initiatives aimed at strengthening the quality and relevance of traffic safety research
• a new ‘Policy in practice’ publication type, providing governments, cities, transport authorities, and other organizations with an opportunity to share both successes and failures in implementing Safe System principles in real-world settings.

We hope that these initiatives will strengthen the connection between research, policy, and practice, while keeping the TSR open to new ideas and different methodological traditions.

Higher standards for scientific transparency

Another important part of our strategy is to raise the bar for transparency and reproducibility. We believe that readers should be able to understand not only what researchers found, but also how they arrived at their findings.

We are therefore introducing:

• updated scientific-transparency guidelines, including clearer expectations for reporting the data, methods, software, and analytical tools used in a study
• stronger requirements for data sharing, with authors expected to make the data underlying their publications openly available whenever they can legitimately be shared (‘data available on request’ will no longer be acceptable where public sharing is possible).

We recognize that not all research data can be made public. Ethical restrictions, personal-data protection, confidentiality agreements, commercial interests, and other legitimate constraints sometimes make sharing impossible. Our aim is not to impose openness where it would be inappropriate, but to make transparency and sharing the norm whenever circumstances allow.

And we need your help

A journal is ultimately shaped by the community that publishes in it, reviews for it, reads it, challenges it, and contributes ideas to it. The editorial team can set a direction, but we cannot make the TSR a great journal on our own.

So please continue to send us your best work, give us honest and constructive reviews, suggest topics that deserve more attention, tell us when we get something wrong, and share your ideas about what the TSR should become.

Together, we can make the TSR not only a better journal, but a stronger platform for advancing traffic safety research and ultimately helping to prevent deaths and serious injuries on our roads.

On behalf of the TSR editorial team,

Aliaksei Laureshyn
editor-in-chief | Lund University, Sweden
editor@tsr.international