Adding value in academia: The vision of a newborn Ukrainian journal

Vladyslav Dombrovskyi graduated in Banking and had been teaching Micro- and Macroeconomics for many years, till he made a decision to change his career path and transform his lifelong hobby and passion for computers and computer networks into his profession. In 2010, Vladyslav switched to applied computer science and became an associate professor at the Department of Economic Cybernetics (Ukrainian Academy of Banking). The next three years were life changing for him. He tried a new capacity of a team-mentor in Microsoft Imagine Cup competition and also led several software development projects. At the moment, Vladyslav is a managing editor of the Information Technology and Economics journal, a new international journal established in 2014, which focuses on the intersection of IT, Business and Economics.

Gaudeamus. Why have you decided to set up a new academic journal?

Vladyslav Dombrovskyi. Our decision was based on three I-s: Idea, Inspiration and Interest.

It came as a surprise to discover that there were just a few interdisciplinary journals in the area. That is when and why the idea of a new journal was born. This initial idea grew into a bigger-scale one about the necessity to create a bridge, which could unite not only IT, Business and Economics, but people as well – namely, scholars and experts from all over the world.

We also had an inspired and inspiring team with diversified backgrounds, expertise and qualifications – this component surely added to the decision of launching such kind of a project.

Last but not least, it was the interest in IT as a driving force for modern economic and business development.

G. Which is the focus of the journal?

VD. The focus of the journal pursues two main directions: Application of IT in Business and Economics, and Economics of high-technology industries. At present, information technology changes rapidly and penetrates every sphere of our life, giving great opportunities to create a better future for everyone.

G. What do you think you are offering to the scientific community with your new journal?

VD. We believe our journal can offer several things. First of all, it is a unique interdisciplinary journal. We could find no more than 5 journals with similar thematic focus, aims and scope. Secondly, we provide a platform for discussing new ideas in the extremely up-to-date areas. What we really value is originality and novelty of those ideas. Finally, we offer participation in e-publishing experiments. We are not limited by the traditional model of publishing.  However, we are not going to immediately rush into the experiments – we are well aware of the fact that before you improve something, you need to learn and understand well how this process is organized traditionally.

G. What are the major difficulties you’re encountering in this initial phase?

VD. Right now, our main obstacle is forming the Editorial Board and finding a proper candidate for the Editor-in-chief position. Even though the idea of the journal looks interesting and topic is definitely relevant for the modern world, we still have to be very convincing to persuade people to join us. Nowadays academics do not have a lot of free time, which they can spend on participation in additional projects. Anyway, we have to refuse candidates who would like to join the Editorial Board if they do not meet our criteria.

G. What kind of papers and authors are you looking for the journal? And why should authors publish there?

VD. We are primarily interested in interdisciplinary researches on the intersection of IT, Business and Economics.  Nowadays there are millions of young people who have grown up with IT in their blood, and they go into traditional businesses and reinvent them. We are facing the emergence of a completely new economy, in which some industries can disappear while others are likely to be dramatically transformed. Let’s take, for example, Bitcoin. It clearly shows the possibility of paying for purchases or sending money without banks or any other intermediaries. So far this technology is a great controversy, but it can completely reshape financial markets. How? We have to think.

As for the authors, we would like to see papers from researchers with a deep understanding of Information Technology and its capabilities, who are not afraid of putting forward new bold ideas and discussing them. The pace of IT development is so high that economists often do not imagine the full extent of all the opportunities offered by the use of new technologies. At the same time, even the most advanced and useful technology is sooner or later confronted with the market and the laws of economics. We see our potential authors as part of a team, which wants to create a better future with the help of modern IT.

Why should they choose us? We offer not simply a publication in the journal – we strive to attract people who are eager to participate in the project, in the experiment. Write for our blog, share your ideas, discuss them, come up with a new initiative. Let’s dream together. Let’s put forward ideas and test them. We want to create a community around the journal that would help academics and practitioners with finding partners for joint researches. Moreover, we do not charge fees for publishing papers in our journal, as we strongly believe that selection should be based on professionalism and quality of a research and our project should be accessible for every worthy author.

At the same time, we are not going to go too far with the experiments. The journal is refereed and it will be abstracted and indexed by main academic databases and search engines as soon as the volume of content and other criteria are met.

G. Starting a new business in the academic world from Ukraine, do you think is an advantage or a disadvantage? Do you receive some kind of support from the state?

VD. First of all, what we are doing can be called business only in the sense that our goal is to create value for the academic community. The profit is a bad goal for such projects, but a good benchmark for confirming whether what you are doing is necessary for society or not. We believe that any good project should be financially self-sustaining. This ensures its long life.

Starting any new project in present-day Ukraine is challenging. There is a high level of uncertainty about the future due to the current situation. Ukrainians went through a revolution, where we proved our right to freedom, our right to be heard and our right to have a democratic country that values its citizens. Now our country is facing the transformation period, which is always a difficult time for everyone.

On the whole, we are perceived positively by the researches and they are ready to work with the scientific journal from the Eastern Europe, because they are mainly concerned about the quality. So we are now focused on forming a strong Editorial Board to ensure a smooth and transparent reviewing process.

Speaking about support – unfortunately, there are no governmental programs in this area at the moment, so we rely on friends, our supporters and ourselves. However, with the current transformation processes in Ukraine we hope for possible cooperation from the state – that is not likely to happen due to many other priorities that government should take care of, but we never stop hoping for better.

Join us in our journey (www.prostoscience.org). And you will see, it will be interesting.