Keeping Economics Local in the Academic Mainstream: Competitive Journal Management Practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The pressure to publish academic research in English and the impact this has had on the lives of nonnative English speaker academics have been widely documented in recent years. This trend has also influenced academic journal policies, with a narrower range of languages used in academic publishing today than was the case several decades ago. For languages of lesser diffusion, such as Bosnian, the shift to publishing in a language of international diffusion has advantages. Not only do local scholars reach a wider audience, but the journals themselves stand a strong chance of being included in international, prestigious databases. This in turn, has downstream advantages to the scholars who publish in such journals, and it also creates opportunities for these journals to access more sophisticated publishing tools (such as text-matching software, or content-usage trackers), which can contribute to increasing the quality of the journal and its visibility and reception in the global academic community. This study investigates the experience of two Economics journals affiliated to universities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which have achieved (to differing degrees) international prominence through a combination of sound journal management policies and their inclusion in international databases or through affiliation to international publishing companies. Data for this study come from interviews with journal editors in 2013/14 in Bosnia. The study sheds light on strategies used by successful journals in a resource-poor context to adapt to the exigencies of competitive academic publishing in the 21st century.