At the beginning of 2020 we gratefully look back on a challenging year 2019. We want to wholeheartedly thank our authors, reviewers, associate editors and our editorial board for their joint efforts to finetune this journal’s content and improve its reach. Supported by our publishing house de Gruyter (e. g., by Katharina Kaupen, Ulrike Kitzing, Christine Lembrecht and thanks to the continuous advice from Gavin Stewart) we introduced the Scholar One platform. The process of implementing the online platform was supervised by our new editorial manager in Bremen, Viviane Harkort, who succeeded Leif Kramp in March 2019. Leif is staying with us as Editorial Board Member. Many international journals have gone this way before us. Nevertheless, for us it was a major step that had been discussed in the editorial team and postponed more than once out of concern for the autonomy of the journal’s editorial management. We will evaluate our decision as well as the current workflow in an editorial meeting in June 2020 in Leuven together with our Associate Editors. Our experience so far is positive: the platform supports a workflow which is transparent for all Editors and Associate Editors, the blind peer review is fully respected, and our decision processes are faster than before. However, our biggest problem remains: finding enough suitable experts to review. This procedure demands a lot of time and is led by the editors and associate editors. Anyhow, it is a structural problem all scientific journals nowadays are coping with. With this issue, we warmly welcome Christian Pentzold, Professor Communication Studies at the University of Chemnitz, in our Associate Editors’ team. He will fill the expertise gap with regard to digital communication and digital methods. Let us look at some figures. Till the end of November 2019, 85 articles were submitted (only one was submitted to our Research in Brief section) with an acceptance rate of 34 percent. We also noticed more submissions from doctoral candidates whose dissertation consists of published articles rather than a monograph.

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社论2020

在2020年初，我们衷心地回顾2019年是充满挑战的一年。我们要衷心感谢我们的作者，审稿人，副编辑和我们的编辑委员会共同努力，以期优化该期刊的内容并提高其覆盖面。在我们的出版公司de Gruyter（例如，Katharina Kaupen，Ulrike Kitzing，Christine Lembrecht的支持下，并感谢Gavin Stewart的不断建议）的支持下，我们介绍了Scholar One平台。在线平台的实施过程由不来梅新任编辑经理Viviane Harkort监督，他于2019年3月接替LeifKramp。Leif将继续担任我们的编辑委员会成员。许多国际期刊已经摆在我们面前。不过，对我们而言，这是编辑团队已经讨论的重要一步，出于对期刊编辑管理自主权的关注，推迟了不止一次。我们将在2020年6月在鲁汶与我们的副编辑一起举行的编辑会议中评估我们的决定以及当前的工作流程。到目前为止，我们的经验是积极的：该平台支持对所有编辑者和副编辑者都透明的工作流程，完全尊重盲人同行评审，并且我们的决策过程比以前更快。但是，我们最大的问题仍然是：找到足够的合适专家进行审查。此过程需要很多时间，并且由编辑和副编辑负责。无论如何，这是当今所有科学期刊都在应对的结构性问题。在本期杂志中，我们热烈欢迎Christian Pentzold，在我们的副编辑团队中，开姆尼茨大学的传播学教授。他将填补数字通信和数字方法方面的专业知识空白。让我们看看一些数字。到2019年11月底，已提交了85篇文章（只有一篇被提交给我们的``简要研究''部分），接受率为34％。我们还注意到有更多博士论文的投稿，其论文由已发表的文章而非专着组成。