Editorial: What we promised, and what we delivered

As we write our final editorial for European Societies, we return to the spirit of our first editorial (Präg, Ersanilli and Gugushvili, 2022) and to the question that guided our tenure: did we deliver on what we promised? At the outset, we set out a twofold vision. We wanted to keep European Societies a genuinely general sociology journal with a focus on Europe and European sociology, open to all substantive areas and to authors worldwide. At the same time, we wanted to modernize the journal by lowering barriers to participation, moving toward open access and open science, and by running peer review as fairly, comprehensively, and efficiently as possible. Looking back, we believe the direction of travel has been consistent with that agenda, even if some constraints have become more pronounced as submissions have grown.The most tangible step toward barrier reduction has been the shift in the journal's publishing model. The move to MIT Press and the adoption of a noncommercial, diamond open-access model have made the journal free to read and free to publish in. This has mattered not only as an institutional achievement by ESA, but also as a signal of what a flagship journal of the European Sociological Association can be: a truly public scholarly resource rather than a gated space shaped by the ability to pay. In parallel, we worked to reduce friction in submission and production by making procedures more predictable and less resource-intensive for authors, and by strengthening the journal's commitment to transparency, including the routine expectation of replication materials for quantitative work published in the journal (Präg, Ersanilli and Gugushvili, 2025). We have thought of these changes as working on “access” and “voice” simultaneously. By “access,” we mean making it easier for people to read the journal and to submit their work. By “voice,” we mean that a broader range of scholars, institutions, and regions appears on our pages and shapes the debates. Both have to move together: if access improves but the same narrow groups are published, existing hierarchies remain; if new voices are celebrated but practical barriers stay in place, inclusion risks becoming largely symbolic.A general sociology journal should reflect the major currents shaping European societies, not by chasing headlines, but by publishing sociological work that helps explain how Europe is changing. Over the past years, the journal has continued to engage research on inequalities and social stratification, climate change and ecological transition, migration and shifting borders, transformations in work and welfare, population aging and health inequalities, and the reconfiguration of social trust and political contestation. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further underlined how quickly the horizon of “normal” European development can rupture, and how urgent it becomes to understand societies that have too often been treated as peripheral in general sociological publishing. The Special Issue on understanding Ukrainian society before and after the invasion (Martsenyuk et al., 2024) was therefore an attempt to contribute to that understanding while also practicing what we had argued for from the start: that underrepresented parts of Europe should not appear only through external observation, but should be visible through scholarship that is locally grounded, rigorously theoretical, and fully integrated into European sociology.Throughout our tenure, we also sought to ensure that the journal provided space for the plurality of sociological traditions across Europe. European sociology remains multi-paradigmatic and unevenly structured by regional and institutional inequalities. We therefore aimed to combine a high threshold for publication with broad openness to different intellectual styles, methods, and substantive agendas, and to keep ourselves accountable by paying attention to patterns in submissions and editorial outcomes across regions and approaches. This is unfinished work, but it is work that cannot be postponed if we want a journal that represents European sociology as it exists, rather than as it is imagined from a few well-resourced centers.If there is one difficulty we want to name carefully, it is the constraint created by success. Submissions increased in both volume and quality. This is good news for the journal and for the field, but it also means a tighter bottleneck than many authors may expect. The most painful decisions we made were not rejections of weak work, but rejections of high-quality manuscripts that could not be accommodated because the available space is limited and the competition is intense. We did our best to communicate these decisions clearly and with respect. Still, the structural reality remains that a general journal with finite capacity cannot publish all of the strong sociology it receives, even when that sociology deserves a wide readership.This pressure is intertwined with another growing challenge: the difficulty of securing peer reviewers. Reviewing is the central infrastructure of scholarly publishing, but it rests on time and goodwill that are increasingly stretched. Across our term, it has become harder to find the right expertise quickly, particularly for more specialized topics or for underrepresented contexts where the pool of suitable reviewers is smaller. We therefore want to thank reviewers once more, not as a ritual, but as recognition that the journal's quality and fairness depend directly on their labor. We also hope that our community continues to treat reviewing as part of academic reciprocity, because without a sustainable reviewing culture, no editorial team can reliably balance speed, rigor, and equity.We owe special thanks to Patrick Präg, who left his editorial role slightly earlier but contributed enormously to the journal's direction and to the everyday work that makes a journal function. His intellectual judgment, practical ambition, and commitment to fairness and transparency shaped many of the changes implemented during our tenure, and the journal is stronger because of his contributions. We also thank our associate editors, without whom our work would have been impossible: Plamen Akaliyski (Lingnan University), Çetin Çelik (Koç University), Roxanne Connelly (University of Edinburgh), Ivana Dobrotić (University of Zagreb), Marta Dominguez Folgueras (Sciences Po), Magne P. Flemmen (University of Oslo), Pablo Gracia (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Mobarak Hossain (London School of Economics and Political Science), Mathieu Ichou (INED), Katya Ivanova (Tilburg University), Cyril Jayet (Sorbonne University), Agnieszka Kubal (University of Oxford), Anna Kurowska (University of Warsaw), Tamara Martsenyuk (National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy), Dina Maskileyson (University of Luxembourg), Jan Mewes (Lund University), Emily Murphy (University of Limerick), Türkay Nefes (Spanish National Research Council), Marii Paskov (University of Bristol), Martí Rovira (Pompeu Fabra University), George Soroka (Harvard University), Marga Torre (University Carlos III of Madrid), Yannis Tsirbas (University of Athens), Simone Varriale (Loughborough University), and Conrad Ziller (University of Duisburg Essen). We also thank the European Sociological Association for their trust in us, and we are grateful to the publishing teams who made the transition to a new publisher and model possible.Finally, we are delighted to welcome the new editors-in-chief, Sarah Neal and Karim Murji, and we wish them every success in leading European Societies in the years ahead. They inherit a journal with strong momentum and also with clear tasks: sustaining diamond open access over the long term, continuing to broaden participation across regions and traditions, strengthening the reviewer pool, and navigating new tools, including AI, in ways that preserve transparency, reproducibility, and trust. We step down with gratitude to everyone who submitted, reviewed, edited, read, and supported the journal during these years, and with confidence that European Societies will continue to serve as a shared space for rigorous, plural, and genuinely European sociology.