Acta Oeconomica celebrates its 75th volume
Acta Oeconomica begins its 75th volume this year. On this occasion, Editors-in-Chief István P. Székely and Dóra Győrffy share their insights on the journal’s current position and address key issues in the field of Economics.
How would you locate the journal in the current global publishing landscape?
Acta Oeconomica is a niche journal from a peripheral European country, and, as such, it is a tiny little boat sailing on unruly, if not stormy, waters. It has significant assets, such as its rich history and, potentially, a great future. Still, it faces enormous challenges in surviving in the short run to get to this promising future. Unlike many other segments, the global market for academic journals is now fully liberalized and digitalized, putting enormous pressure on smaller journals. The "publish or perish" approach rapidly expands globally, but many European universities and research centres restrict it to Q1-Q2. Perhaps Q3 for PhD students. Traditionally, Acta hovered at Q3, and when we took it over in May last year, our goal was to get it to Q2 as quickly as possible. Instead, the first shocking news we received just after taking over was that it had slipped into Q4. It is not that Acta got so much worse. The world is moving at lightning speed. Still, we found ourselves in a deep hole.
The number of new submissions from Hungary and the region dropped dramatically following the downgrade to Q4. We continued to receive a relatively large number of submissions, 25-30 per month, mainly from China and Turkey. Still, the desk rejection rate was around 90 percent, as we insisted on relevance and quality.
After a while, the new editorial approach that opened up Acta Oeconomica to a broader set of research areas and multidisciplinary works started to pay off. In the most recent round, Acta was ranked in four different areas and moved up to Q3 in three of them. This change immediately broadened the journal’s submission base. From this basis, we need to work hard towards achieving our goals.
Why is Economics important?
When we entered the heavily contested selection process for the new editorial team for Acta, we started our proposal by answering this fundamental question. Economics should serve people in making their lives better. It can do so by offering theoretical frameworks and models that can capture the functioning of modern economies and societies better and, based on these models, offer empirical results that can help people, companies, and policymakers address the new challenges they face.
For too long, economics worked with models that were very far from our reality, but it produced exciting new results in the past few decades—the list of Nobel prize winners indicates these latest results. Many on this list took up positions in major policymaking centres, apparently to become more relevant. Joe Stiglitz and Paul Roemer were the Chief Economists of the World Bank, and Simon Johnson was the Chief Economist of the IMF. Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson worked with several governments in the developing world, and Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee’s work at J-PAL also focuses on real-life policy design.
What is the value of the journal in this context?
Acta’s value added is its focus on the key development issues that Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe face today. János Kornai's work forms an integral part of Acta's rich academic heritage. He was a pioneer in moving towards new conceptual frameworks that could capture the world that surrounded us in this part of Europe. We want to stick to this heritage by maintaining this focus. Our challenges considerably overlap with those faced by Europe (the European Union), and one can learn a lot from the experiences of other countries that face similar challenges, such as China or Turkey. These overlaps offer a larger pool of potential submissions and a broader audience.
What is your perspective on the journal’s development and prospects?
Acta is now facing a situation similar to that of Hungarian companies in the 1990s. We either shape up or else. We have an elaborate strategy for the future but need to find a pragmatic way to pull through the current situation.
We have requested a broader scope for our rating. Hopefully, this will take us back into Q3 or perhaps Q2 in several categories that fall into our focus and invite more and better interdisciplinary submissions. We also actively promote submissions from major European and global policymaking centres with significant research potential, such as the Joint Research Centre and DG ECFIN of the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, OECD, the IMF, and the World Bank. Many of our newly recruited Associate Editors from Hungary and our region work in these institutions.
Our strategy of maintaining focus, insisting on relevant papers, and accepting only quality submissions will eventually work and help us put Acta on a new viable path. Acta had significant financial support from many institutions in the past, but these sources have all dried up. We urgently need a new business model that fits the new realities.
How do emerging technologies, such as AI, impact the journal?
New technologies, most importantly AI, offer enormous opportunities. Language editing, detecting plagiarism, and selecting referees, to mention a few. They can help increase our productivity significantly and thus reduce costs, also in terms of time. Social media helps to reach out to new audiences. We increasingly rely on these technologies. However, there is also a dark side to them. We now frequently have submissions that seem to be produced by generative AI, basically technology-assisted plagiarism. We need to raise our guard in the face of such developments. We are not against using AI to enhance researchers’ productivity. It is, anyhow, an unstoppable trend. However, we insist that submissions are based on the authors’ ideas and not on ideas generated by well-trained AI models. But let us see what the future brings. As we said before, the world is moving at lightning speed, and we need to adjust to these changes, or else.
