This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. Journal of World- Systems Research, Volume 21, Number 1, Pages i-ii, ISSN 1076-156X Editors’ Introduction This issue marks the last one we will publish independently, since we are happy to report that we are in the process of moving JWSR onto the University of Pittsburgh’s Office of Scholarly Publishing e-journal platform. This move will help us streamline the review process, and more importantly it will raise the profile of our journal in a number of critical ways. First, the librarians who design and manage this platform are trained to help make research accessible. They are committed to defending open access to scholarly research and to helping users find information. Articles will be formatted to enhance searchability, and we will have more support in publicizing our journal to a wide audience, including a large international readership. Second, all of our articles—including those from previously published issues—will be assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which provides a more stable link than a URL, which might change. This will further aid in our effort to get our authors’ work to those who want to read it. Third, the Journal of World-Systems Research will soon be indexed in the most common scholarly databases, and we will also be able to measure the impact of articles with a developing array of alternative metrics that are appropriate for online content. This will encourage more submissions, particularly from junior scholars for whom such metrics are a factor in deciding where to publish. Our anticipated launch date for the new system is, appropriately, May 1, 2015, so watch for our new website, which will continue to be at www.jwsr.org. This move underscores the arrival of what we see as the second generation of online publishing. JWSR’s founding editor, Christopher Chase-Dunn, helped make the journal a leader in scholarly open access publishing, at a time when few others were taking online publishing seriously. Now, with more than 20 volumes, ours is one of the most established peer-reviewed open access journals. And today we now have far better software and support for this form of publishing, thanks in large measure to a growing social movement promoting open access publishing. In response to rising costs of scholarly journals, which is related to the consolidation of the commercial publishing industry, more universities, libraries, government agencies, and scholars are joining together to defend free and open access to information. We are proud to be part of this movement to defend the knowledge commons from commercialization and to support the people and groups that use this knowledge to advance a more just and equitable world (For more details on this movement see Smith 2015). We’re pleased to bring to our readers an exciting special issue, guest edited by Mangala Subramaniam, that explores relationships between the state and social movements. This special issue assembles a fascinating array of contemporary cases in Asia and Latin America to help further theorizing about processes of contestation and social change. In addition, we have two regular articles that help bring into focus the countries of the semiperiphery and periphery of the world-economy. Schwartzman examines the relationship between China’s economic expansion and Mexico’s trade performance. She examines changes in these two countries’ garlic trade to assess the relative impacts of China’s growth on other low-income countries. Her paper provides an important foundation for further research on the processes of change and of reproduction of world-system inequalities. Makki offers us a world-system perspective on the trajectory of the countries of Africa over the past half-century. Despite “growing resource extraction, creeping peasant dispossession, and heightened levels of social polarization and ecological degradation,” Makki argues that the shift in the global center of accumulation to East Asia has helped stimulate http://www.library.pitt.edu/e-journals/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/e-journals/ http://jwsr.org/ http://www.plumanalytics.com/ http://www.jwsr.org/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/jackie-smith/defending-global-knowledge-commons Editor’s Introduction ii economies in Africa. His analysis helps show the processes behind and the consequences of the continent’s asymmetrical integration into the world-economy—something he contends must be understood in order to guide the search for a more equitable world-system. Our book review section features a special symposium on Andre Gunder Frank’s last book, the posthumously published Reorienting the 19th Century: Global Economy in the Continuing Asian Age. The lead review essay by Albert Bergesen, “World-System Theory After Andre Gunder Frank,” enumerates the key insights of Gunder Frank’s book and explains how they extend his long and complex history of critical engagement with world-systems analysis. In so doing, Bergesen not only revisits some of the fundamental questions within the annals of PEWS scholarship, but he also makes a spirited call to reorient the field’s research agenda in ways that more clearly recognize the central role of trade relations as the “foundation of the modern, and for that matter any, world-system.” We have five replies to Bergesen’s provocations, with response essays authored by Sing C. Chew, Hae-Yung Song, Annamarie Oliverio and Pat Lauderdale, Robert A. Denemark and Barry K. Gills, and Christopher Chase- Dunn. In addition to this rich and lively debate about the legacy of Gunder Frank’s scholarship, we have our normal complement of book reviews. Once again, we are pleased to review a set of books that run the gamut of political economy and world-systems analysis, and we are grateful for the thoughtful appraisal offered by a diverse set of insightful critics. Jackie Smith, Editor Jennifer Bair, Book Review Editor Scott Byrd, Technical Editor Journal of World-Systems Research Reference Smith, Jackie. 2015. “Defending the global knowledge commons” Open Movements Series on Opendemocracy.net. At: https://www.opendemocracy.net/jackie-smith/defending-global- knowledge-commons https://www.opendemocracy.net/jackie-smith/defending-global-knowledge-commons https://www.opendemocracy.net/jackie-smith/defending-global-knowledge-commons https://www.opendemocracy.net/jackie-smith/defending-global-knowledge-commons