The approaching end of the calendar year offers a good occasion to look back and summarise our achievements. Although the passing year, still dominated by COVID-19, was not easy for anyone, we are proud to report about a few affirming successes.
New journals
closed great volumes with at least too issues and impressive articles.
New services
In addition to plagiarism screening of submissions in English via iThenticate, we started to apply Turnitin for articles in other languages to also detect dishonest translations.
In the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Akadémiai Kiadó published nearly 180, closely or loosely related articles. Naturally, most of them belong to Medical and Health Sciences or Biology and Life Sciences. Moreover, there are dozens of articles in Social Sciences and Law, Behavioral Sciences or Business and Economics. The topic appears even in apparently more distant areas of research, such as Materials and Applied Sciences, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and Arts and Humanities. We grouped together all these papers into a thematic collection on our AKJournals website.
In 2021, September 20-24 was chosen to celebrate a most essential ingredient of academic publishing: Peer Review.
The idea of pre-publication screening of scientific papers is pretty old. Historians report about the first peer review process in 1665 at Philosophical Transactions of London Royal Society; and about the first fully refereed academic journal Media Essays and Observations in 1731 by the Royal Society in Edinburgh. Still, it has not become widely accepted until after WWII. In 1936 Albert Einstein was deeply offended, and in fact withdrew his submission from Physical Reviews, because it had been sent to a referee. Refereeing, as a routine, was introduced at The Lancet in 1976. The word ‘referee’ was first used in scientific publication in 1817 and the term `peer review’ is only ca. 50 years old.
Studia Scientiarum Mathematicarum Hungarica is a most prestigious piece in Akadémiai Kiadó’s mathematical portfolio. Some of the greatest Hungarian mathematicians have chosen it to publish their findings. It was founded in 1966 by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and, by tradition, it is handled by the scientists of the Rényi Alfréd Instutute of Mathematics.
Starting with volume 58 in 2021, the editors decided to change the journal’s focus. From a general mathematical journal, it is turned to a forum of Combinatorics, Geometry and Topology (CoGeTo) – and the connections between these areas – as expressed by the new subtitle. The re-formed Editorial Board consists of internationally recognized experts representing these branches of mathematics. Their names are listed on the site of Studia Scientiarum Mathematicarum Hungarica. The Editors in Chief are the following professors from the Rényi Institute of Mathematics.
Akadémiai Kiadó proudly announces that – after a few months of careful preparation – on the 16th of November 2020 they signed the DORA Declaration aiming at a realistic, fair and unbiased assessment of scientific publications.
The DORA Declaration – also known as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment – was accepted on the 16th of December in 2012, on the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco, by the founding group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals.