Towards open access

Abstract

In accordance with the rotation principle of the Journal, our four-year term for editing the Scandinavian Economic History Review is coming to an end. It is time to pass the Journal on to the capable hands of the Norwegian team. We would like to thank all our readers, authors, peer reviewers, fellow editors, board members and associate editors, the Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social History, the staff of Taylor and Francis, and the whole global community of economic historians for these exciting years editing the Journal. We are pleased that the Scandinavian Economic History is in good shape. The numbers of submissions have increased considerably; we publish more content than previously; the Journal has been accepted for the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation index; our digital archives are open for use from 1953 to 1996; and we have been able to streamline the processes, which is witnessed in our webpages, where we are publishing more content as previews. Most importantly, the downloads of our articles have increased substantially in recent years, showing that the community is interested in the research published in the Scandinavian Economic History Review. The new editors-in-chief are Espen Ekberg (Norwegian Business School BI, Oslo) and Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim). The new editorial secretaries are Ingeborg Guldal (NTNU), Frida Jensen (NTNU), Tine Petersen Malonæs (BI) and Eivid Thomassen (University of Oslo). Moreover, Laura Ekholm from the University of Helsinki is the new Finnish country editor. Paul Sharp is continuing as the Danish and Lars Magnusson as the Swedish editor, and Elina Kuorelahti as the book review editor of the Scandinavian Economic History Review. The new editorial team will certainly have an exciting four-year term during which to edit the Journal. The economic and business history community is constantly growing. This is witnessed, for example, in new conferences, also in the Nordic countries. As a new initiative, the Scandinavian Society for Economic and Business History (in collaboration with the Swedish Economic History Association) is organising the First Nordic Economic History Conference in Uppsala, 10–12 October 2019. Another new conference is the Baltic Connections – Conference in Social Science History to be organised at the University of Helsinki 21–23 March 2019. The new editorial team will be facing changes in publishing during the coming four years term as the European open access initiative Plan S released in November 2018 could profoundly change the science publishing environment (Else, 2018). The core idea of Plan S is to make radical and rapid changes towards open access publishing and phase out the costs that academic institutions pay to access scientific literature. The major funding bodies in the European Union and in a number of European countries have already signed this plan – including Academy of Finland, The Research Council of Norway, the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte). These funding bodies are aiming at ‘full and immediate Open Access to publications from publicly funded research’ from 2020 onwards. The idea of open access is indeed welcome, but the short transition period will be a challenging one, especially for hybrid journals like the Scandinavian Economic History Review, that also publishes open access content. Namely, we make papers immediately free to read if the author is willing to pay a fee. According to the initial terms of Plan S, however, researchers will not be allowed to