Spatial Economic Analysis is a pioneering journal dedicated to the development of theory and methods in spatial economic analysis. We are happy to announce that the journal's two-year impact factor increased from 1.231 in 2017 to 1.902 in 2018, its highest since the introduction of Spatial Economic Analysis in 2006. We would like to thank the authors, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, Regional Studies Association, Regional Science Association International British and Irish Section, and Taylor & Francis for their contributions to the growing reputation of the journal. This issue contains six papers contributing to the journal's mission. The first is based on Rey's (2019, in this issue) plenary talk at the Cork Meetings of the Regional Science Association International British and Irish Section in 2018. Rey examines the field of regional science from the perspective of wider developments surrounding open-source software and the rising open-science movement. In his opinion, the regional science community has benefited from two freedoms created by open software: the so-called 'free beer' freedom and the 'free as in free speech' freedom. The first means that there are no monetary costs involved in acquiring software; it is available for anybody who can download it. This holds for PySAL, the topic of Rey's paper, but also for all regional scientists who make available routines written in R, Matlab or Stata on their personal websites, journal websites (including for this journal) or on other platforms; these routines are free to the user beyond the fixed costs of software acquisition and installation. Spatial Economic Analysis has been making special efforts to encourage authors to provide their routines (Elhorst et al., 2016), and a growing number of authors are making use of these opportunities. Examples are