Regional meeting of journal editors: Struggling of small publishers to survive

Abstract

At the end of May 2024, a traditional regional meeting of editors of small scientific journals in engineering disciplines was held at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade. This year the meeting gathered about 20 editors who discussed novelties, good practices as well as problems in academic publishing. The primary aim of these journals was to support the local scientific community and industry by providing a platform for presenting scientific advances, connecting research and practice, and assisting young scientists in publishing their research results. However, with the widespread adoption of measuring scientific perfor­mance by publication and citation statistics, the scientists lost interest in these journals as underrated in researcher evaluation systems. Thus, low quality of received as well as revised manuscripts, low response rates of reviewers, and, consequently, long processing times and high rejection rates are some of the main problems mentioned at the meeting. All these issues are usually managed by editorial offices, which often have neither technical nor human resources for such endeavors. Still, the conclusion of the meeting was that the benefits of small independent scientific journals are significant and worth efforts particularly for providing an alternative to the profit-oriented publishing and promoting societally relevant research and value-based scientific assessments.