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Editorial February 2013

The Institute for European Integration Research (EIF) has been incorporated into the University of Vienna as an interdepartmental research and teaching platform in April 2012.

EIF is responsible for the editorial management of the European Integration online Papers (EIoP) and its sister journal, the Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG).
LREG is an innovative and multidisciplinary E-journal, developed in co-operation with the Max Planck Society. It publishes solicited state-of-the-art reviews on core themes of European integration research. Please visit LREG 's website to see the list of renowned authors and the review articles.

Editorial November 2009

Dear colleagues!

I am happy to present the first Special Issue of the European Integration online Papers (EIoP):

Sandra Kröger (ed.) "What we have learnt: Advances, pitfalls and remaining questions in OMC research".

Our policy is that a special issue in EIoP consists of of three or more interrelated articles under a common heading, with (a) guest editor(s) and an introduction to the theme in form of either a very brief note or a refereed article. As always, the articles are subject to a strict peer review process.

On this occasion, let me mention that our next Special Issue is already being finalised. It will cover "Post-accession compliance in the EU's new member states".

As you know, EIoP is the first SSCI indexed online-only and open access journal in the field of European Integration research. Our turn-around time for manuscripts is significantly smaller than is the case with many print journals since only the strict refereeing process consumes a significant amount of time but publication as such takes very little.

We welcome further submissions of single manuscripts or proposals for further Special Issues!

Kind regards from Vienna,

Gerda Falkner
Editor-in-Chief

Editorial January 2009

Dear colleagues!

We would like to inform you about a few changes regarding this journal:

- From Volume 13 (2009) onwards, the founding editor of this journal, Michael Nentwich, hands over the role of the editor-in-chief to Gerda Falkner, the long term subject editor for political science of this journal. Gerda is Director of the Institute for European Integration Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and Professor at the University of Vienna.

- At the same time, our long-term subject editor for economics, Fritz Breuss, retires and hands over to Gabriele Tondl. Gabriele is Professor at the Research Institute for European Affairs of the University of Economics and Business Administration Vienna.

- Furthermore, we would like to repeat an announcement made already a few months ago, but of which we understand that technical difficulties seem to have produced incomplete delivery to the subscriber list: The EIoP is now indexed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).

We send our greetings to all our subscribers and hope that you will have a prosperous and successful year 2009!

The new editorial team is looking forward to your excellent submissions for Vol. 13!


Gerda Falkner
Editor-in-Chief

Michael Nentwich
Founding Editor

Editorial September 2008

Dear colleagues!

This summer a long-awaited communication from Thompson Scientific arrived in our mailbox: As of Vol. 11 (2007)
the European Integration online Papers (EIoP) will be indexed in the most prestigious database in our field,
the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).

The editorial team welcomes this move by Thompson Scientific as the EIoP have for many years already complied
with all requirements: We are proud that Thompson Scientific now confirms the professional character of the journal
and the high standard of the refereeing system as well as the published papers.

As the founding Editor-in-Chief of EIoP I am very satisfied to see this publication series after eleven years finally
being recognised not only by the research community, its authors and readers, but also by this important academic institution.
EIoP is among the very first online-only and open access journals in the social sciences accepted by the makers of the SSCI and certainly the first of its kind in the field of European integration studies. My special thanks go, in particular, to our authors who chose to publish with us despite the novel and evolving character of online publishing, and to our section editors and referees who made sure that the standard of the quality control procedures matches those of the competing established journals.

I am looking forward to continuous submission of your manuscripts. Never forget the outstandingly short turn-around time: With the help of responsible referees, a well organised online medium can manage to go from submission to publication in a few weeks only; this advantage is now coupled with the certainty to get additional credit points because of the journal being listed in the SSCI!


Yours sincerly,

Michael Nentwich
Editor-in-Chief

Editorial June 2006

Dear readers of the European Integration online Papers!

We are proud to present a complete re-launch of the EIoP website!

When we at ECSA-Austria planned what later became the EIoP, the Internet was quite a different place from today. Among other things, HTML pages used to be static and editorial software was still in its infancy. Hence, publishing the EIoP was and still is so far a lot more work than it needs do be. However, in the meantime, various initiatives came up with editorial software that makes the demanding task of running such a journal much more convenient. We tested quite a few of them and settled with an open source product developed by the Public Knowledge Project with the name of "Open Journal System" (OJS). From now on, EIoP will run on OJS.

While both all previously published articles (volumes 1-9) and the new ones (from volume 10 onwards) will be available via the known Internet addresses, EIoP users will enjoy a number of new features. EIoP readers can use the reading tools, which offer a comprehensive guidance through each article. For example, you will be able to export the metadata of an EIoP article in the import format of bibliographic software, such as EndNote or ReferenceManager.
For our EIoP authors and referees, this will mean that the whole editorial process will be managed online via the new software. Authors will submit their manuscripts online; referees will give their opinions via the system. The advantage is: authors can track their submissions online; and referees have everything they need (manuscript, guidelines, forms, etc.) available in their personalised section of the EIoP webpage.

OJS supports the editorial team throughout all phases of the editorial process and enables task sharing and access to all necessary documentation asynchronously and independent from the present location of the members of the team. This will ease our task enormously and make the editorial process even faster and more efficient than before!

Speaking of the team: I am pleased to welcome and to introduce the newly appointed managing editor Patrick Scherhaufer, a political scientist working at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna. He has already acquired experience with editorial processes in similar projects in the field of European integration research, including the EUROGOV papers. Please address all correspondence from now on to him at eiop@eiop.or.at.

Although we have tested the software extensively over the last months, we expect minor problems as soon as we administer the first submissions and publications. We hope that you will be patient with us and give us constructive feedback where needed.

There is one last point I want to mention in this editorial: the new software gives readers the option to register on the site. We encourage you to do so as soon as possible. While the old EIoP subscribers list will be available for quite some time, we plan to shift completely to the new subscription system in the medium term. Please show your continued interest in this journal by registering with the new system and unsubscribing from the old list. Many thanks in advance!


Michael Nentwich
editor-in-chief

Editorial June 2002

Dear readers of the European Integration online Papers!

The last editorial being issued quite a while ago, there are some news and changes with regard to the EIoP to be reported.

First, we are proud that a number of indexing services have accepted the EIoP. From now on, the papers published in the EIoP can be found via the following services (partly also the full text):

SSRN – Social Science Research Network, RePEc – Research Papers in Economics (including IDEAS), RDB – RechtsDatenBank (the Austrian law database), ECLAS – European Commission Libraries Catalogue, SOSIG – Social Science Information Gateway.

This will make the EIoP papers even more widely accessible. In addition, the EIoP website as a whole, and individual articles are linked to from hundreds of other websites (as a Google search reveals).

Second, the EIoP was founded in 1997 as a new type of academic publication, somewhere inbetween a journal and a working-paper series. Meanwhile, thanks to continued submissions by well-known researchers in the community and increasing numbers of citations in other publications, the EIoP is well-established in the community of Europeanists. Today, there is no doubt that it fulfills the function of a genuine academic publication. We therefore chose to call it by the appropriate name, that is an "E-journal". This will, however, not change the corner-stones of our editorial policy. The authors will still retain their copyright and will still have the right to submit a paper first published in the EIoP to another (print) journal or book (but not to another E-only publication).
As the offer to remove the full text of an EIoP paper in case of later publication in a traditional journal has been used only twice in five years, we decided to drop it. This decision regards only new submission (ex nunc), that is not including the papers already published or in the pipeline. Obviously, publishers in our field are either ready to accept later versions or they are not satisfied even by our offer to remove. As an eventual removal entails much additional work, in particular as EIoP papers are now also registered and uploaded to other databases, we hope that our future authors will understand this decision. See the editorial policy pages for details.

Third, I would like to let you know that we will continue to pursue a persistent high-quality editorial policy. That is all submitted papers are sent to at least two experts in the field for double-blind refereeing. So far, the rejection rate was at approximately 40 per cent.

Yours sincerely,
Michael Nentwichy
editor-in-chief

Editorial September 1998

Dear readers of the European Integration online Papers!

The EIoP is proud to be one of the founding members of the new European Research Papers Archive (ERPA) which has been launched on 8 September at this URL:

http://eiop.or.at/erpa

ERPA is a continously updated database for online working papers in the field of European integration research. So far, it provides access to the archives of the following working paper series:

1. the Harvard Jean Monnet Chair papers,
2. the online publications on European research of the European University Institute in Florence (Academy of European Law and Robert Schuman Centre),
3. the working papers and discussion papers of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne,
4. and the European Integration online Papers.

This powerful search-engine allows searches for authors, paper titles, publication dates, keywords, fulltext, or any combination of these. Furthermore, "Quick Search" updates you on the latest entries in the ERPA database.

Yours sincerely,
Michael Nentwich
editor-in-chief

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

Editorial October 1997

Dear reader of the European Integration online Papers!

Some of you reported problems with printing papers. As far as I can see, these problems all relate to the different products and versions of web browsers used throughout the world. We therefore decided to make an effort to help solving these problems.

We are proud to present two new ways of downloading the EIoP papers: in addition to printing from your web browser, you may now download PDF (Acrobat Reader) and PS (Postscript) files. I hope that these new features will further enhance the quality of the EIoP as a tool for European integration scholars.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for making the EIoP such a success. Over 440 academic subscribers from all parts of the world (including some of the most prominent peers of our disciplines); well over 6300 counted visits to the site; and 18 papers published (and many more submitted) in just six months is more than anybody might have expected. These figures underline the potential of the WorldWideWeb for scholarly communication and encourage us to proceed.

So far, most of the EIoP subscribers were readers only. Let me encourage you to submit your latest research results for this very special form of publication and, thus, worldwide discussion within a distinguished group of academics!

Yours sincerely,
Michael Nentwich
editor-in-chief

Editorial April 1997

Dear reader!

E-mail has changed scientific communication and exchange during the last few years, in particular but not only among younger scholars. The WorldWideWeb is just about to change our reading habits. While other disciplines such as the computer sciences or physics are already well established in this new and open space, the social sciences in general and the study of European Integration in particular are latecomers in exploring the potential benefits of the internet. Most of us only just started to use "the net" as a new tool to work with and we still have a lot to learn about how to use it the most efficient way.
The European Integration online Papers are an attempt to profit by these new opportunities. They will be a fast and ecologically sound channel for the distribution of high quality scientific papers:

• A peer review process will secure the highest standards.

• Using email for the internal and external communication among the editors, with the reviewers, and with the authors will speed up the publication and help minimize time lags. Furthermore, the publication of papers in the EIoP is not delayed due to a specific rythm of scheduled issues: as soon as a paper has got its O.K. by the reviewers and the formatting is done, it will be put on the net.

• Readers are not obliged "to buy the pig in the poke": you will be informed when a new paper is put online and you can read it either off the screen or print it as you wish. But there is no need any more to send piles of paper around the globe.

The EIoP is a working paper series, not a proper journal. It does not intend to replace paper publications but represents an additional and innovative channel of scientific communication.

The editorial board encourages written reactions to papers published in the EIoP: whenever you feel inclined to reply, do not hesitate to pin down your argument. There will be WWW cross linking between the original paper and the reply (or even the replies).

Let us make the EIoP a worldwide forum of scientific debate!

Yours sincerely,
Michael Nentwich
editor-in-chief