: Editorial June 1998

Dear readers of the European Integration online Papers!

The EIoP is about to take another step towards an advanced use of the innovative opportunities provided by the internet. In our view, the WWW is particularly well placed to ease and increase interactive communication between scholars. Hence the EIoP has installed a facility to give readers the opportunity to react directly to papers and to have their comments published.

From now on, there is an online comment form for each EIoP paper. The comments received via this form will be sent automatically to the paper’s author(s).
If the commentator does not object, the comment will furthermore be published on a special EIoP page related to the paper. The editors will act as (self-restrained) gate-keepers with the sole task to avoid nonsense comments or personal attacks to be published.
Each comment page will have a constant internet address – such as the paper itself. Thus the comments will be apt for quotation. Those investing time and intellectual capacity for commenting (which is a crucial element of academic life) can thus mention this effort in their activity reports or publication lists.
Clearly, the authors of papers as well as any other person are entitled to react to previous comments, so that a multilateral and continued debate may result.

For a start, the most recent papers (those from 1998) were attributed a comment form. Previously published papers may be included on request of their authors.

We hope that numerous comments will be written and that a vivid debate develops on the EIoP pages!

Yours sincerely,
Michael Nentwich
editor-in-chief

[My special thanks to...]