The former Revista Europea de Dirección y Economía de la Empresa is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2016. Congratulations to all of you who have contributed to this outstanding achievement! My special thanks to the two previous editors-in-chief, Professor Varela and Professor Barroso. I wish to extend my congratulations to all of the contributors in any kind. Editorial board members, reviewers and authors must go back their heads and see their milestones achieved over the last 25 years.
Many changes have emerged in the last 25 years. Let me focus on two important issues affecting knowledge diffusion. First, digitalization is part of our common daily tasks for researching and delivering relevant academic contributions. As discussed in Bigné (2015), digitalization opens new windows for researching worldwide not only facilitating access to new sources, but also by adding new topics of study, such as websites, online comments, aggregators, data and information. Beyond the topic itself, issues such as key words and meta-tags are playing a key role in finding out the literature and papers of interest. Digitalization is a notable tool in preparing new manuscripts and also for reviewing and interaction among the agents of the stakeholders. Second, internationalization is gaining presence in many journals, and the frontiers for publishing are becoming increasingly fuzzy. In this change, economic integration, increasing international exchanges among researchers, and, again, digitalization have contributed over the last 25 years.
Being older is synonymous of experience. Indeed, former REDEE has achieved a salient position in publishing papers on management and business economics. Nevertheless, experience per se does not always predict success. An adaptive perspective must recognize the changes and challenges in any field, pursuing a better performance. This is what the new EJM&BE attempts to achieve.
We celebrate our 25 anniversary with two main changes that attempt to adapt the vast experience of REDEE to the new challenges of digitization and internationalization.
First, the name of the journal has been changed into English, aiming to reflect the new internationalization approach of the journal. From now on is published in English, although some papers were published in English in the recent years. Regardless of the Spanish relevance as a language in many parts of the world, most of the queries, high impact papers and advanced conferences are using English as a working language. EJM&BE will target a broad segment, and both, authors and researchers will benefit from it. Authors will obtain higher impact than in the past. By its hand, researchers will find out easily papers published in this journal.
Second, EJM&BE aims to be highly internationalized. Such goal claims for three interrelated milestones: international editorial board, papers from different countries and authors from different countries. The Editorial Board is now composed by academics from Spain (7), other European countries (9), United States (4) and Brazil (1). This current issue publishes a paper based on Senegal as a good example of the path to the internationalization.
Let's congratulate us for the achievements of the past, with a new effort towards internationalization and digitalization knocking our doors. I hope you will enjoy this new issue of the European Journal of Management & Business Economics.