On behalf of the Editorial Board of Geotechnical Research (GeoRes), we welcome our readers to the second issue of volume 8 (2021). GeoRes, being the first gold Open Access (OA) journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers, maximises the impact of research articles and knowledge-based case studies in a wide range of geotechnical challenges. Like most other open-access journals, the author/s has/have to pay a publication charge for publishing in GeoRes. However, it offers a range of discounts for disadvantaged groups of researchers, particularly researchers from International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) countries. Such a discount policy aims to partially eliminate an economic barrier for disseminating research outputs from developing countries. With this, we have seen a steady increase in contributions from around the world, particularly the fast-growing regions of Asia Pacific, Arabian Peninsula, Europe and North America. These publications in the last few issues covered several key areas such as innovative ground soil improvement work (Ciardi et al., 2020; Feng et al., 2020; Guo et al., 2020; Weng et al., 2020; Xie et al., 2020), complex soil–structure interaction (Ge et al., 2020; Inazumi et al., 2021; Shiau and Hassan, 2020; Xu et al., 2020; Zhang, 2020) and reliable laboratory testing/model development (Feng and Liu, 2021; Li et al., 2020; O’Kelly and Nogal, 2020; Osman et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2021) alongside other interesting topics.