„U.S. journals can afford to remain regional, but we can not.” Author distribution-based internationality of Eastern European Communication Journals

Abstract

The interest of various players in the academic field is directed towards high prestige items.As publishers, we want to develop or acquire high prestige journals to earn more subscribers and to attract more high profile authors (or authors willing to pay a publication fee).As authors, we want to publish our results at the best possible outlets, where our invested work has the best potential to produce additional prestige and networking opportunities necessary for our academic carrier.Serving as an editor often requires financially uncompensated expenditures from our part.We are only compensated by the increase in our visibility and prestige, which are connected with the journal itself.Journal owners, with a very few exceptions, are not paying us for our time and expertise, nor for using our social capital for the benefit of their product.This leaves us with no incentive to invest work in a journal that is invisible and cannot attract good quality research.Journals published in Eastern European countries in the field of Communication Studies are struggling with attaining high visibility and prestige-here, "high" is a euphemism if we look at them from North America, Western Europe, and other economically advanced regions of the Global North.In the eyes of hiring and grant selection committees in the abovementioned regions, even the mere recognition of these journals is contested.On our own regional level, however, we have a different sense of prestige in at least one respect: After the post-socialist transition, a compulsory mimesis of the West-discussed by the Alatases (S.H. Alatas, 2000; S.F.Alatas, 2000) in postcolonial settings, and even earlier as problems of Eurocentrism in the social sciences (Joseph et al., 1990;Wallerstein, 1997)-have emerged inside Eastern European academia as well.This desire of peripheral scientific communities to emulate the functioning of central scientific communities led to various internationalization strategies in science.Their impetus was partially explicable with mimesis as a psychological (on the individual level) and institutional (on the structural level) reaction to something that is perceived as foreign yet superior.But their aims were, and are, manifold: to be recognized as peers, to be able to enlarge existing networks, to open paths for international exchange and cooperation, to compete for grants provided by central countries; and with Bourdieu, to build up West-compatible social and academic capital.One of these capital-building strategies, of which I would like to talk about in this editorial, is the attempt to create internationally recognized journals.A minimum criteria for international recognition is arguably to be indexed in Elsevier's SCOPUS and/or Clarivate Analytics's (CA) Web of Science, though regions and institutions may differ in their value perceptions of indexation; i.e., US-based institutions and authors are

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