“A good editorial team does more than act as a gatekeeper – it also helps make an article better,” says Marek Tamm, a long-standing figure in academic publishing, Vice President of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of Cultural History at Tallinn University.

Next year marks 75 years since the Estonian Academy of Sciences published its first scholarly journal – a publishing tradition that, in a small country, has grown over the decades into a network of internationally recognised titles. We spoke to Tamm, who also chairs its Publishing Council, about the lessons learned from that tradition and where it goes from here. 

You have chaired the Estonian Academy of Sciences Publishing Council since May this year. At the same time, you have known the publishing house from the inside for many years, not least as editor-in-chief of Acta Historica Tallinnensia. What do you see as the publishing house’s next major directions for development? 

I don’t think the publishing house necessarily needs major changes. Rather, its existing work needs to be pursued even more systematically and professionally. We have a whole series of long-established, internationally recognised journals, and that provides a strong foundation on which to build. For the coming years, the key priorities for me are the automation of technical workflows, greater international visibility for the journals, and further standardisation of editorial practices. We also need to consider how to make a manuscript’s journey from submission to publication as straightforward and efficient as possible, without compromising quality. Part of this could involve adopting new platforms, such as OJS (Open Journal Systems – ed.) and SciFlow, which could help streamline the publishing process. 

Over the years, you have been involved with a wide range of publishers and journals – Varrak, Tallinn University Press, Vikerkaar, the Journal of the Philosophy of History, and Acta Historica Tallinnensia. How has academic publishing changed over that period, and where is it heading now? 

The biggest change, of course, is that academic publishing has become inherently digital and global. Just twenty-odd years ago, a journal was understood primarily as a printed periodical; today, the print issue is increasingly a by-product of a continuous digital publishing process, and it may not survive much longer as a distinct format. The second major change is open access – the expectation that research funded with public money should also be publicly accessible is, in my view, entirely justified. At the same time, the number of research articles published worldwide has grown enormously, making effective quality control ever more important. The pool of authors is certainly more international than before, and English has become even more dominant as the language of scholarship. This means that one of the tasks facing small research communities is to consider what we want to preserve of our own scholarly culture and scholarly language. In my view, internationalisation and the preservation of local scholarly culture are not mutually exclusive – a good academic publisher must be able to do both. 

Estonia is a small country with a relatively small research community, yet the Estonian Academy of Sciences Publishers is responsible for a whole series of international scholarly journals. Is that a lot or a little for a country of Estonia’s size? 

I’m not sure that the number of journals in itself tells us very much. The better question is whether each journal has a clear scholarly profile, a sufficiently strong community of authors and readers, and a competent editorial team. If these conditions are met, then eight scholarly journals under a single academic publisher is not a large number at all. For a small research community, having its own journals can be particularly important, since they make it possible to shape particular fields of research, bring together international research networks, and, in some cases, contribute to making sense of one’s own culture. At the same time, there is no point in keeping a journal going merely out of tradition – every journal must continually justify its existence and demonstrate its quality. The value of a scholarly journal is not determined by where it is published geographically, but by whether good researchers want to publish in it and whether other researchers want to read what it publishes. 

The publishing house’s journals are internationally indexed and recognised, yet the wider public in Estonia may know relatively little about them. Should they be more widely known? 

To begin with, it must be acknowledged that the primary task of a scholarly journal is not to be known to the wider public. Its main audience remains the international research community. But that does not mean that people in Estonia should be unaware that we have such a strong tradition of academic publishing – all the more so because several of the journals deal specifically with topics related to Estonia. In my view, we could do much better at communicating not so much the journals themselves as the interesting research findings published in them. Every journal publishes articles with broader social or cultural significance, yet this knowledge rarely reaches beyond the research community. This is an area in which the publishing house, the Academy, the universities, and science journalists could work together much more effectively than they currently do. 

What role do Estonian universities play in the Academy’s publishing activities? Are they partners or, rather, competitors? 

Partners, certainly. I see little reason to frame the relationship in terms of competition. The Academy’s journals are already produced in close cooperation with universities and other research institutions, and, for example, Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences is published in cooperation with several Estonian universities. For a small country, it would be rather pointless to build parallel systems alongside one another purely so that each institution could say it has its own journal or publishing house. Instead, we need to consider where resources, expertise, and international networks can be combined. One of the Estonian Academy of Sciences’ natural roles is precisely to serve as a meeting point across institutions. This principle could also be developed more deliberately in academic publishing. 

Next year, the Academy’s tradition of academic publishing will reach an important milestone: it will be 75 years since the first issue of the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR was published, in 1952. At the same time, digitisation and artificial intelligence are changing publishing very rapidly. What does the future hold for scholarly journals? 

In fact, this transformation has already taken place – a scholarly article is no longer simply a text placed in a journal issue and printed on paper. It is simultaneously a digital object, complete with a DOI, metadata, links, datasets, and various machine-readable layers. Proceedings, the successor to the former Academy’s Toimetised, is itself already published online on a continuous-publication basis: articles are made available as soon as they are ready. Artificial intelligence will accelerate this development even further: relevant applications can already be used for language editing, reference checking, metadata creation, and probably soon for many other technical stages of the publishing process as well. But I would be very cautious about claiming that artificial intelligence could replace the substantive work of an editor or reviewer. The central values of academic publishing are trust and responsibility, and responsibility cannot be delegated to an algorithm. Rather, technology can free people from more routine tasks so that they can devote more time to matters where human judgement is genuinely needed. 

Is there an academic publisher or journal anywhere in the world from which the Estonian Academy of Sciences Publishers could learn in particular? And what do you read regularly yourself? 

I wouldn’t name a single ideal model, since research fields and their publishing cultures vary a great deal. From the Academy’s point of view, it is of course instructive to look at the publishing traditions of long-established learned societies and academies, such as the Royal Society, and to consider how they combine centuries-long continuity with a constant capacity for renewal. Incidentally, the first issue of Philosophical Transactions appeared as early as 1665, and the journal is still published today, so the association between academies, learned societies, and scholarly journals has a very long history. The Estonian Academy of Sciences Publishers belongs to the network of European university presses, which provides an opportunity to learn from the experience of smaller, non-profit academic publishers. As for myself, I rarely read journals from cover to cover; instead, I follow particular authors and topics. Given my research interests, journals such as History and Theory, Rethinking History, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, the American Historical Review, the Journal of Medieval History, and Speculum regularly feature in my reading, as do journals on memory and cultural history. Nowadays it is probably more accurate to say that we no longer read journals so much as articles. Almost every day, I receive a table-of-contents alert from one journal or another; this is how I manage to keep up with the contents of dozens of scholarly journals on an ongoing basis. 

What would you advise a young researcher who is considering submitting their first article to a journal published by the Estonian Academy of Sciences Publishers? 

First of all, I would advise them not to base their decision on whether the journal is published in Estonia or abroad. The question to ask is whether it is the right journal for this particular article – whether it publishes similar research and whether it is read by the people with whom the author wants to enter into scholarly dialogue. If the answer is yes, then I see no reason to avoid Estonian journals. The Academy’s journals are internationally peer-reviewed, open access, and indexed in international databases. A young researcher’s first article is, in any case, an important learning experience – it is often their first sustained encounter with peer review, revision, and communication with an editorial team. A good editorial team does more than act as a gatekeeper; it also helps make an article better. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend choosing a journal solely on the basis of a single numerical indicator, such as the impact factor. 

Looking even further ahead, what might the Academy’s journals look like when its first scholarly journal reaches its 100th anniversary in 2052?

First of all, I hope they still exist – but I don’t think they need to look exactly as they do today. It is likely that the journal issue as such will become less and less important, and that centre stage will be taken by a continuously expanding digital knowledge space in which articles are linked to data, sources, comments, and related research. The scholarly text itself will probably also change: interactive data, visualisations, and formats that we cannot yet properly imagine will be added. By then, artificial intelligence will certainly be a standard part of research and publishing, much as a search engine or word processor is today. But I believe one thing will remain the same: we will still need institutions that can establish which knowledge has passed critical scrutiny and for which someone is prepared to take responsibility. That is the most important function of a scholarly journal, and I see no reason to think it will necessarily disappear by 2052. 

A study by researchers from Tallinn University of Technology and Riga Technical University, published in Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, found that nearly 55 percent of firefighters in Estonia and Latvia are overweight or obese.

The study examined the health data, physical activity and psychosocial working conditions of more than 1,000 firefighters in Estonia and Latvia, ERR News writes.

The study was conducted by Marina Järvis, Karin Reinhold and Jelena Hartšenko from Tallinn University of Technology, together with Tatjana Tambovceva, Jeļena Pundure and Evija Liepa-Hazaleja from Riga Technical University. It examined the health data, physical activity and psychosocial working conditions of more than 1,000 professional firefighters in both countries.

While most respondents sleep six to nine hours before a shift, barely one in ten consistently felt well-rested. More than half of the firefighters also suffered from back pain.

The two countries showed some differences: Latvian rescue workers were more likely to experience anger and panic attacks, while their Estonian colleagues reported more difficulty concentrating and digestive problems. In both countries, a large share of firefighters (more than 55 percent in Latvia, 40 percent in Estonia) need a second job to make ends meet, leaving little time for exercise and recovery.

According to the researchers, the solution lies in how organizations structure work: physical training and dedicated rest periods need to be built into work shifts, rather than left to individual firefighters to manage on their own.

Read the ERR News coverage HERE.

Read the research article Firefighter well-being in the Baltics: a comparative study of physical activity, psychosocial risks, and management strategies in Estonian and Latvian fire services in the journal Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.

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Estonian Academy Publishers is introducing the SciFlow platform to  simplifiy  preparation and typesetting of research articles and facilitate collaboration between authors and copyeditors. The Estonian Journal of Archaeology is the first journal to adopt the platform. 

“The workflow between author and editor becomes simpler, as instead of exchanging working files by email, they can now work in a shared document where all changes are visible and tracked,” explained Piret Lukkanen, Director of Estonian Academy Publishers. “Layout is generated automatically based on the journal template, and the finished document can be exported directly into different formats required for publication with just a few clicks. While we previously produced articles primarily as PDF files, SciFlow also enables us to generate HTML and JATS XML, with ePub planned for the future. This makes article production more efficient and provides better opportunities for publishing research content and delivering it to international databases.” 

SciFlow is a web-based writing and layout platform built specifically for academic publishing. Journal templates are free for authors to use. SciFlow is used, among others, by the Max Planck Society and KIT Scientific Publishing, and offers over 6,000 journal templates, making the tool already familiar to many international authors. “To make the writing process easier for authors and expand our technical publishing capabilities, we plan to roll out SciFlow step by step across all Estonian Academy Publishers journals,” Lukkanen added.

SciFlow is now listed as a recommended tool in the Estonian Journal of Archaeology’s author guidelines. Authors can create a free account at sciflow.net, select the Estonian Journal of Archaeology template, and write their article directly in the correct structure and citation style. Articles can still be submitted in standard Word format as well.

The Estonian Academy Publishers is pleased to announce that Rainis Haller has been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences (PEAS), effective from 5 May 2026.

Rainis Haller has been Professor of Mathematical Analysis at the University of Tartu since 2021 and a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences since 2025. His research is rooted in mathematics, and he has a strong record of scientific leadership, having served as President of the Estonian Mathematical Society from 2018 to 2022. He has been a member of the PEAS Editorial Board since 2024, bringing continuity and a clear understanding of the journal’s scope and values to his new role.

We sat down with Rainis Haller to ask him three questions about his vision for the journal.

You have been part of the PEAS Editorial Board since 2024 – what motivated you to take on the role of Editor-in-Chief, and what do you bring to this position?

Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences has a long history and a special place among journals connected with Estonia and our wider region. I accepted the role because I believe PEAS has a strong foundation and good opportunities to strengthen its position as a selective Academy journal with a clear profile.

As a mathematician, I have learned to value precise questions, solid arguments, and clear writing. These are also important in editorial work. I want to support a fair and careful review process, and to help keep the journal focused on papers that genuinely belong in PEAS.

What is your vision for PEAS over the coming years, and how would you like to see the journal develop, both in terms of scientific scope and its visibility within the international research community?

I would like PEAS to be recognised as a selective journal of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. The journal should have a broad but well-defined scope and publish strong research in fields represented at the Academy, with particular attention to work connected with Estonia, the Baltic region, and Northern Europe.

This does not mean that PEAS should become a local journal. The aim is to publish research that is relevant internationally, while also reflecting perspectives and topics where our region has something distinctive to contribute.

In practice, I would like to build on what PEAS already does well by inviting more review articles and perspective papers, and by developing thematic contributions when they can bring together strong papers on a well-defined topic.

PEAS publishes original research across a wide range of disciplines. How do you approach the challenge of managing such broad disciplinary breadth, and what does a strong multidisciplinary journal mean to you?

A broad scope only works if the journal remains coherent. PEAS should not be simply a collection of papers from different disciplines. For every submission, the key question is simple: why should this paper appear in PEAS?

Rigorous peer review by specialists is essential, but it is not the whole story. The journal also needs careful editorial judgement at an early stage: whether a manuscript fits the profile, whether it has sufficient quality and relevance, and whether PEAS is the right place for it.

That is why I describe PEAS as a selective Academy journal with a broad but well-defined scope. The ‘Academy’ part should mean two things: high disciplinary standards and a wider perspective. The journal should publish papers that are not only technically sound but also meaningful beyond a very narrow specialist circle.

On 5 May 2026, the Presidium of the Estonian Academy of Sciences confirmed the new composition of the Publishing Council of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.

The Council is chaired by Marek Tamm, Academician and Vice-President of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.

The membership includes:

• Mart Saarma, Academician and President of the Estonian Academy of Sciences
• Anne Kahru, Academician and Secretary General of the Estonian Academy of Sciences
• Piret Lukkanen, Director of Estonian Academy Publishers
• Jüri Allik, Academician, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Jarek Kurnitski, Academician, Department of Informatics and Technical Sciences
• Karl Pajusalu, Academician, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Maarja Öpik, Academician, Department of Natural Sciences and Medicine

The newly appointed Publishing Council brings together leading representatives of the Estonian academic community across disciplines, reflecting the publishers’ commitment to maintaining high scientific standards and supporting the dissemination of quality research.

On 30 April 2025, Professor Jaak Järv’s tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences ended. His editorship, which began on 1 October 2007, spanned nearly eighteen years ‒ a period during which the journal underwent substantial development and modernisation.

One of Professor Järv’s first major undertakings was consolidating four separate series ‒ Physics. Mathematics, Chemistry, Engineering, and Biology. Ecology ‒ into a single unified journal. This structural reform streamlined the publication and laid the groundwork for subsequent advances. Over the years, Professor Järv introduced a number of important innovations, including the adoption of Creative Commons licensing for all published articles, the journal’s inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and an initiative to digitise the back catalogue of previously published Academy of Sciences journals and assign DOIs to their articles ‒ making decades of Estonian scientific research permanently citable and discoverable online.

Alongside his editorial duties, Professor Järv simultaneously served as Chairman of the Publishing Council of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, contributing to the broader strategic direction of academic publishing in Estonia. Both roles concluded on the same date.

Professor Järv’s long-standing commitment has been highly valued in maintaining the journal’s continuity and quality through different stages of development. The editorial board and the Estonian Academy Publishers extend their sincere gratitude for his dedication and the impact of his work. We wish him every success in the endeavours ahead.

As of 5 May 2025, Academician and Professor of Mathematics Rainis Haller has assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief. The responsibilities of Chair of the Publishing Council have passed to Academician Marek Tamm, Vice-President of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. We warmly welcome both to their new roles and look forward to the journal’s continued development under their leadership.

The Board of the Estonian Academy of Sciences confirmed on January 23 the appointment of academician Kalle Kirsimäe as the new editor-in-chief of the Estonian Journal of Earth Sciences.

Kirsimäe has been associated with the journal since 2007, initially as an associate editor, and now takes over the editorial leadership from Olle Hints, who served as the editor-in-chief since 2019.

Kalle Kirsimäe is a professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Tartu and has been a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences since 2018. His primary research focus revolves around the early development of the Earth’s atmosphere-hydrosphere and the reconstruction of related material cycles. In addition, he is involved in applied research projects under the RESTA initiatives, which investigate the potential of Estonian phosphorite, rare metals used in batteries metals, and rare earth element resources.

Kirsimäe has been a member of Academia Europaea since 2022, a member of the Council of the Estonian Geological Survey since 2022, and a member of the editorial board of the journal Oil Shale since 2013.