Aims and Scope

economics is a new type of academic journal in economics. By involving a large research community in an innovative public peer review process, economics aims to provide fast access to top-quality papers. Modern communication technologies are used to find for every research issue the best virtual team out of a network of highly motivated researchers from all over the world. Thus, publishing is seen as a cooperative enterprise between authors, editors, referees, and readers. economics offers open access to all readers and takes the form of an e-journal, i.e. submission, evaluation, and publication are electronic.

economics embodies the following principles:

Open Access: Following the principle that knowledge is a public good, all readers have open access to reading and downloading papers. The simple and free access ensures maximum readership and high citation records for published papers.

Open Assessment: The traditional peer review process is substantially supplemented by a public peer review process in which the community of active researchers from all over the world has a hand in the evaluation process. Due to interactive peer review and public discussion, economics provides fast and efficient quality assurance. Within a two stage publication process, much of the research evaluation takes place after rather than before an article is published. Prizes for the most outstanding papers in special fields are awarded. 

Speed: Submitted papers that have been identified as sufficiently promising for a referee process are made available on the journal’s homepage within three weeks. Thus, the time for new ideas to find their way into the scientific community is substantially reduced.

Add-on Services: To foster scientific exchange, economics embeds forums on special themes, where authors and readers can communicate and possibly conduct joint research. In addition, interested readers can take advantage of alert services announcing new papers in their fields. As far as possible, economics also provides hyperlinks to the referenced literature.

Style and Contents

economics aims to cover all the main areas of economics. Inevitably, articles in different areas of economics are addressed at different audiences. Many of the articles submitted to the journal are standard technical pieces, addressed to a purely academic audience. Others concern economic policy and thus are addressed both to economists and policy makers with some economic background. Yet others are surveys and overviews, often interdisciplinary, addressed to a non-technical audience. To attract this variety of contributions, economics will contain the following areas, in addition to the standard contributions for a purely academic audience: 

Policy Papers

economics Policy Papers are concerned with the economic analysis of current policy issues. The analysis is rigorous, from a theoretical and empirical perspective, but the articles are written in non-technical language appropriate for a broad spectrum of economic decision makers and participants economic policy discussion. The rigorous analysis is contained in the appendix of each article.

Surveys and Overviews

Surveys and Overviews aim to integrate the analysis and lessons from various fields of economics with the aim of providing new insights, that are not accessible from any particular sub-discipline of economics. The contributions may include survey and review articles, provided that the broad perspective is maintained. They are addressed to a general audience interested in economic issues.

New Frontier Papers

New Frontier Papers contain articles that make potentially fundamental contributions to economic thinking. The papers are meant to change the way we conceptualize economic phenomena or transform the way the profession thinks about important economic issues. Contributions will be reviewed by renowned, top-flight economists, including Nobel prize winners.