Statement on the closing of JCER

Following several years of discussion, the UACES Trustees and Executive Director have come to the difficult decision closing the Journal of Contemporary European Research (JCER) for new submissions. The final issue will be published in early 2023. The last date to make submissions to the journal will be 31 March 2022. UACES and the Editors will ensure that any papers already submitted to JCER will go through the peer review process and will be published in the journal if accepted. 

UACES is committed to maintaining the JCER website (www.jcer.net) in its current form and ensuring that all issues of the journal remain freely accessible to the public on a long-term, ongoing basis. We have also taken steps to ensure that all articles published in the journal will be archived with Portico under a LOCKSS system.  

Despite its successes, JCER has become unsustainable for UACES to run. The journal has been entirely self-published by the Association and has taken up increasing resources. With limited funds, the journal has relied on the goodwill and voluntary labour of its Editors to perform tasks normally undertaken by publishers and it has been decided that this mode of working is no longer tenable. We have approached several publishers about the journal but have not managed to find one with whom we could publish and maintain JCER’s core mission. It is for these reasons that we have taken this extremely difficult decision. 

The journal was first published in 2005 and was originally intended to provide a welcoming and supportive publishing outlet for PhD and Early-career researchers. Over the last 17 years, the journal has published work from leading scholars alongside those who are earlier in their careers. JCER has joined the Emerging Sources Citation Index and risen to become a Q2 journal. None of this would have been possible without the hard work and commitment of all the Editors past and present and the UACES trustees. We would particularly like to thank Maxine David, Rachael Dickson, Nele Ewers-Peters, Simona Guerra, Karen Heard-Lauréote, Chris Huggins, Ken McDonagh and Kathryn Simpson for their service to the journal. We also wish to express our thanks to Helen Drake and the late Luke Foster for spearheading its redevelopment in the 2010s.  

Finally, to all those who have published an article or articles in JCER: we wish to thank you for your support of the journal over the last 17 years. We have been honoured to work with you and we will continue to support you in your research through the work of UACES.