• Volumes und Articles 1997 - 2015
     
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Editorials

As the editor-in-chief (Gerda Falkner) and the founding editor-in-chief and technical director (Michael Nentwich), it is our pleasure to announce our latest and final publication of EIoP (article details please find at the bottom of this message).

Our work on this project has lasted for about two decades. The first formal publication was in April 1997 but the preparations for that had been laborious since the six kick-off papers were authored by superstars of European integration studies and followed twice by two more papers by other stellar scholars only a few weeks later. Finally, in 2007, the EIoP has even become an SSCI-listed journal! Overall, we published altogether 257 papers in 19 volumes.

We enjoyed the project and we are still in great support of the basic ideas: making top-level research available to everybody around the globe (open access), free of charge for both authors and readers. However, times have changed fundamentally. A shortage of strictly double-blind refereed journals in the field of European integration studies no longer exists. The same is generally true for online publications with easy access (although unfortunately mostly at high prices). In fact, the present times in our view rather suffer from a “write only” culture where, under ever increasing pressure, researchers produce ever more output. This now extends to PhD students who are typically being asked by their supervisors to start submitting to journals rather too soon. Although some of them certainly are of excellent quality, the sheer number of individual PhD submissions puts a heavy burden on editorial offices. The latter, at the same time, suffer from ever shorter resources. That is a shame but, in a nutshell, we feel that the times are gone when the European Integration online Papers had a truly outstanding legitimacy as a unique project in the field and so it is time for the two of us to say goodbye, and thank you to the many people who over all those years have contributed in making the journal a success! There is a chance that the project might be continued by a group of junior scholars around ECSA-Austria.

In any case, all published papers will continue to be accessible as a free service to the scientific community. Should there ever be a failure to reach the current journal address, please visit EIF’s website (at http://eif.univie.ac.at) where the papers will also be stored as a kind of double net security location, or write to EIF (eif@univie.ac.at) to get continued access to the texts.

P.S. At the same time, the related project European Research Papers Archive (ERPA) cannot be continued any longer. In times of Google Scholar and social networks like ResearchGate, Mendeley or Academia.edu, research papers can be found easily on the Internet. As with the EIoP, we shall provide a static list of all papers ever included in ERPA up to February 2015, but no further papers will be added to the database and the search engine will no longer be available.

Editorial 20 February 2015

Dear readers,

MANY THANKS for the multitude of extremely kind replies to our last message, also on behalf of our editorial assistants Veronika Pollak and Brigitte Pircher at the Institute for European Integration Research in Vienna (as well as the former longterm editorial assistant Patrick Scherhaufer). It is impossible to reply to all of those nice words directly, we have to ask for your understanding.
A follow-up project with young researchers is being considered by the President of ECSA Austria, Stefan Griller. If that comes to life you will be informed. Related queries please send directly to ECSA-Austria (info@ecsa-austria.eu). The association has supported EIoP since its origins and we would like to express our gratitude to all those who contributed, in addition to Stefan Griller particularly also the (former) subject editors for economics (Fritz Breuss, Gabriele Tondl) and law (Thomas Eilmansberger).