An invitation to submit

We are honoured to serve as the Editors of European Societies, the flagship journal of the European Sociological Association (ESA), for 2021–2026. We thank the previous Editor Michalis Lianos for his outstanding work and his help in the smooth transition between editorships. During his tenure, Michalis made European Societies more inclusive and visible. He has also steered the journal through the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, ending his term as Editor with the massive special issue ‘European Societies in the Time of the Coronavirus Crisis’, which reflects the substantive, methodological, and geographic diversity of European sociology and its ability to adapt and respond rapidly to a once-in-a-lifetime shock.

Our vision for European Societies for the years to come is twofold. First, European Societies is and will remain a general sociology journal with a focus on Europe and European sociology. We will be open to submissions from all substantive areas of sociology and from authors all over the world. Second, we will modernize the journal with a focus on open access and open science, and remove barriers for submissions to European Societies.

We see our work as editors as servants to the sociological community. Our main task is to organize the peer review of manuscripts. This process takes place behind closed doors yet is of vital importance to not just the journal, but also to the wider community. Only a fraction of the manuscripts undergoing peer review at a competitive journal like European Societies ends up in the pages of the journal. Further, peer review is a collective good that relies on the contributions of many, and we aim to organize it as fairly, comprehensively, and quickly as possible. We enjoy supporting authors in their efforts to write the best possible manuscript, whether it ends up being published in European Societies or elsewhere.

Challenges for European sociology

The key challenges facing Europe – addressing climate change, creating and maintaining equal, inclusive, and reflective societies, adjusting to migration and population ageing, sustaining population health and wellbeing, protecting freedom and security, dealing with public suspicion of science – are genuine sociological problems to the solution of which we as a discipline have a lot to contribute. We will therefore particularly welcome submissions addressing these societal challenges, but our main criterion for publication will remain the scholarly excellence of manuscripts. There are also specific challenges which European Sociology is facing such as disconnected and fragmented national sociological traditions.

Multi-paradigmatic sociology

We will maintain the multi-paradigmatic nature of European Societies, and aim to further integrate European sociology. To support us in achieving this aim we are delighted to have recruited a diverse group of social scientists – leaders in their respective fields – as Associate Editors. They are: Katya Ivanova from Tilburg University is a family sociologist. Jan Mewes from Lund University is working on welfare states and public opinion. Conrad Ziller from the University of Duisburg-Essen is a political sociologist. Turkay Nefes from the Spanish National Research Council works on intergroup hostility and conspiracy theories. Anna Kurowska from the University of Warsaw is interested in work and family, care regimes and gender inequalities. Magne Flemmen from the University of Oslo works on class analysis, with particular attention to the cultural and political dimensions of class divisions. Mathieu Ichou from the French Institute for Demographic Studies INED is working on migration and ethnicity and the sociology of education. Agnieszka Kubal from University College London is a socio-legal scholar of migration law and human rights. Finally, Marga Torre from University Carlos III of Madrid works on occupational mobility, gender segregation, and labour market inequalities.

Our new editorial board is comprised of distinguished European sociologists: Francesco Billari (Bocconi University), Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore), Sonja Drobnič (University of Bremen), Michalis Lianos (University of Rouen), Steffen Mau (Humboldt University of Berlin), Sigrún Ólafsdóttir (University of Iceland), Ellu Saar (Tallin University), Jörg Stolz (University of Lausanne), and Gökçe Yurdakul (Humboldt University of Berlin).

Open access for everyone

ESA has recruited us because we share an important vision with ESA: to turn European Societies into an Open Access journal. Open access is a cause we are strongly committed to and we will work together with the ESA Executive Committee so that the association can open its journals to all readers. Today, the general public as well as many sociologists do not have access to articles published in European Societies. One way around this constraint is for authors to pay the publisher of European Societies for making their articles freely accessible to readers. However, current open access charges are prohibitively high for many sociologists in Europe and beyond, making it impossible for most authors to share their research through this route diminishing the societal and academic impact of their work. Authors who are able to afford the charges often come from institutions and countries with appropriate research funding or that have negotiated open access deals with publishers, effectively creating a two-tier system of those who can make themselves heard beyond the journal and those who cannot afford making their research available beyond the journal. It is our aim to avoid such Matthew effects, and therefore we will aim to find the best possible solution that works for everyone.

Encouragement to publish pre-prints. As a pragmatic first step, we will encourage authors upon submission of their manuscripts to us to make their manuscripts available on SocArXiv or similar preprint repositories. This is to ensure that their research findings are freely available and shared as fast as possible in the spirit of open access and open science.

Removing barriers

‘Free format’ submissions. We do not require manuscripts to be formatted in any particular style (or file format) for initial submissions anymore, as long as manuscripts are in a fashion that is suitable for peer review. Only manuscripts accepted for publication should be formatted in European Societies style guidelines.

Abolition of the word limit. We do not require authors to adhere to any specific number of words and welcome both shorter and longer research manuscripts for consideration. That being said, we do not abolish common sense, overly long manuscripts (more than 8,000 words) will require a justification as to why the increased burden on reviewers is necessary.

Submission of extended abstracts. Sociologists from many parts of the world struggle with writing in English and have to rely on translators for making themselves heard in the English-language scholarly literature, yet sometimes lack the funding for paying for translations. To make things easier for such cases, we now allow the submission of extended abstracts (2–4 pages written in English, outlining research question, contribution, data and methods, and results) to obtain feedback from the editors on whether a potential manuscript will be considered by European Societies. This is to save authors from the disappointment of spending money and effort on the translation of a long manuscript that in the end would not be published in European Societies. If a manuscript is, however, already written in English, we would kindly ask prospective authors not to submit an extended abstract first but rather to submit the entire manuscript.

Open science and transparency

While European Societies is a journal that is explicitly open to all types of sociology, the majority of manuscripts both submitted and published has been quantitative in the past years. The way that quantitative studies in the social sciences are being conducted and published is fundamentally changing. Demands for greater replicability of quantitative research in the social sciences have culminated in a push towards open science, where research materials such as data and programming code are made public. European Societies will contribute to the open science movement in sociology with a set of measures that we will constantly review and update when necessary:

• Replication packages. We will request replication packages from authors of quantitative studies that should be made available upon submission of the manuscript and will be published.

• Pre-registration. We encourage pre-registration of quantitative studies – whether experimental or using other designs – and will consider pre-registration (results-blind) studies for publication.

• Open science in qualitative research. There is an ongoing debate on the desirability and feasibility of introducing open science practices in qualitative research. We will observe how this debate evolves. For the time being, we will encourage authors of qualitative studies to provide supplementary information on their methodology, and, privacy and security allowing, on their data such as archival documents and transcripts.

• Editorial transparency. We provide information on editorial policies and guidelines for peer review on the journal website, we have already started sharing anonymized editorial decision letters of manuscripts among all the reviewers of a manuscript, and published articles will also specify the name of the editor who handled the manuscript from submission to acceptance to increase transparency and acknowledge the unpaid work of our Associate Editors.

A call for contributors

Over the first few months of our tenure, we managed to make a first decision on all newly submitted, externally reviewed manuscripts within fifty days, and these submissions received feedback from usually three anonymous reviewers. We will aim to maintain and further decrease the length of the review process, but for some submissions we encounter problems of finding reviewers. We want to highlight again that review work is a contribution to a collective good central to advancement of European sociology. We believe in the rule of thumb that scholars – including senior scholars – should be reviewing three times as many manuscripts as they submit for publication. This practice ensures fairness in the reviewing process which is collective good to the entire discipline. If identified reviewers are unable to accept our invitations, we will also appreciate hearing reviewer suggestions from them.

We conclude with an invitation to submit to European Societies. We have laid out our vision for the journal, its openness to all of sociology, our commitment to open access and to open science, and we have described concrete steps we have taken to reduce the burden for authors when submitting manuscripts to us. We welcome individual submission and proposals for special issues that address the challenges faced by European Societies. It is now your turn to submit your work to European Societies, which will spur debates and push the boundaries of sociological knowledge.