Over the past 25 years, the models of editorial management for scientific journals have substantially changed. The relevant progress of technology – particularly the development of OJS platform of PkP and the social media – offers greater and more extensive communication capabilities while reducing both the costs of publishing and distribution of publications as well as diminishing waiting times to have access to the products. As a consequence, the emergence of new and varied editorial projects is clearly visible. The various rating agencies of editorial quality, meanwhile, have specified and increased their demands by developing guidelines related to the best practices. At the same time, the need to assess the popularity of journals has been generated, for which the rankings are established and taken into consideration for the evaluation and promotion of researchers and university professors. These transformations, among other things, have led to what is called the professionalization of the editorial management for scientific journals that is becoming a more and more complex business. Among their numerous tasks, editorial teams must clearly define their mission, raise awareness of its originality, increase the international scope of the publication, achieve accreditation for good editorial quality, get included in one or more ranking schemes, and adhere to the best practice guidelines.
The History of Education has not been left out of this trend. The editorial boards have to improve significantly the scientific project underlying the journals, to look for strategies aimed at cataloging and indexing them in the most important database. This activity of dissemination and wide spreading also requires advertising techniques and skills; in addition, adapting journals to international standards of best practices needs abilities and cleverness in order to handle a good management.
Thus, specialized journals in this branch of science are facing some challenges of great significance and importance, in some cases touching core and fundamental aspects of the publishing projects that do not differ much from Social Sciences and Humanities.
During this same period the History of Education has remarkably developed as a scientific field with its own identity, meaning and significance. The community of historians of education has been organizing around research groups, scientific societies and international organizations, while specific channels for communication and collaboration, such as conferences, symposia, seminars and specialized scientific journals were especially created and articulated in the area of the History of Education.
The first regular journal of a scientific nature explicitly dedicated to the historical aspects of education came into being in the United States at the beginning of the 1950s. Over the next four decades, some of the publishing projects emerged: they still currently enjoy prestige and recognition among academic historians of education. Since then, especially during the second half of the 1990s, ways and means of scientific communication began to multiply geographically dispersed sources of irradiation, gaining prominence in Latin America and Mediterranean Europe, and editorial management models become more complicated. This landscape is a symptom, among other phenomena – at least in Western culture – both of the epistemological and methodological advances in the History of Education as a discipline, and of the transformation of the scientific culture. Significant also are the emergence and spread of the most innovative information technology, which have contributed to the dissemination of the scientific production.
On the other hand, since some decades, the History of Education as a scientific discipline and academic or teaching field, has been suffering changes of various kinds. The philosophical assumptions have mutated; the methodologies have been expanded and refined; the study topics and perspectives have multiplied, discovering other research fields and applying, in some cases, hazardous logics and courageous formulas to interrogate the past. Styles and ways of making the History of Education have changed their trend, just the same the communication channels established for discipline are doing.
The quantity and quality of publications have significantly increased, while they have been conditioned in the ways of thinking, doing and communicate new findings in the History of Education.
Connecting History of Education Working Group is a project created in 2014 within FahrenHouse publisher. This project brings together researchers from Australia, Brazil, Spain and Italy with the common interest to open spaces for reflection and debate on international management policies related to scientific journals, to analyze and study the historiographical trends in education generated by such publications, to contribute to efforts that are underway to develop the Mapping the Discipline History of Education, to enrich the flow of communication and collaboration between journals and members of the international community of the historians of education, and to develop scientific tools that meet the demands of a globalized world.