Papers on Social Representations - Some changes

2020-10-26

Dear all, 

The editorial team of PSR hopes to find you all well. 

The International Conferences on Social Representations, that take place every two years, are normally the moment we use at Papers on Social Representations to see you all and discuss any PSR-related changes and issues with you.  

Given that due to the COVID-19 pandemic CIRS 2020 did not take place this September and was postponed to September 2021, the core editorial team of PSR recently met online and discussed some changes to the functioning and structure of the journal and team, that we would now like to share with you. All these changes still take place within the general trajectory that we have started to design as an editorial team for PSR already for some years, and which mainly aims to:  

1) expand PSR’s reach and impact beyond the Anglo-Saxon world, to include also other socio-geographical and linguistic contexts, such as Latin America and non-English speaking communities generally. This has mainly been pursued by PSR now accepting original submissions in French, Spanish and Portuguese, even if these have always to be accompanied with a version of the final accepted paper in English; 

2) broadening the scope and aims of PSR to engage with other social sciences and other epistemologies, conceptual frameworks and methodologies that can add to, engage with and develop the Theory of Social Representations and related concepts, empirical applications and social issues. The recent special issue (vol 28, 2019) on the relation between social representations theory and positioning theory, edited by Luk van Lagenhove (Vrije Universitei Brussel, Belgium) and Deborah Wise (University of Newcastle, Australia) is a very clear example of that; 

3) Increasing the visibility and quality of the journal with a view to indexing it in relevant academic databases for increasing its dissemination and impact and of the works it publishes. PSR is already indexed in Scopus (Q4; SJR 2019=0.13) and the next goal will be to increase its impact factor.  

The editorial team of PSR will soon send around an editorial further reflecting on the future of the journal, but for now we would just like to announce the following changes (also to be followed up by separate and more detailed announcements): 

  • Given PSR’s current main aim of increasing the dissemination and visibility of the journal, we will now adopt an “Early View” system, through which articles will be made available online as soon as they are ready to be published, even if they will only be formally published/given final citational information when the issue that includes them is published. Issues will continue to be published twice a year (June and December). Moreover, we will from now on also accept book reviews as another type of contribution to PSR - more information to follow soon;
  • Gordon Sammut (University of Malta), who has been co-editor-in-chief of the journal for several years (thank you Gordon!), will from now on be a member of the Advisory Board of PSR and be replaced by Sabine Caillaud (Université de Lyon 2, France), former associate editor of the journal, as the new co-editor-in-chief (welcome Sabine!). Sabine is an associate professor of social psychology at Université de Lyon 2;
  • As such, we would also like to open a call for applications to fill in the position of Associate Editor that Sabine has just left open, so we will welcome expressions of interest soon;
  • Finally, we would also like to welcome Pauline Mercier and Stéphéline Ginguené, both PhD students in Social Psychology at the Université de Lyon 2, to PSR, as they will join Tânia Santos and Luke Buhagiar in the editorial assistants' team.

Please send us your comments and suggestions regarding these changes or any other issues related with PSR. 

We would also like to strongly encourage you to send us proposals for special issues, such as on TSR and new methods; on articulating TSR with proposals from other disciplines; or on bringing together different approaches to understand a particular social issue, such as racism and populism. 

More news to follow soon and looking forward to seeing you all in CIRS 2021 in Athens, 

The Editorial Team.