ZFW looks to the future

During the meeting on 31 August in Bonn, the ZfW editors discussed how to develop the journal's profile over the next few years. Since its publication by Springer Nature under the Open Access Gold model in 2015, the journal has significantly increased its visibility within both the national and the international academic communities. The number of submissions and published articles, as well as downloads and citations, is steadily rising. In spring 2026, the journal submitted a promising application for inclusion in the Scopus citation index. The editors and publisher are confident that inclusion in the index, expected by the end of 2026, will further increase the journal's visibility and impact.

However, it is not only quantitative aspects that are intended to enhance the journal’s relevance to the community. The editors have also set themselves new content-related goals. Over the next few years, the plan is to establish stronger links with international research discussions on adult learning. This will intensify the exchange between national and international communities, raise awareness of each other's research findings and encourage joint publications and research projects. At the same time, the editors wish to ‘cautiously’ open up the journal to research findings from related disciplines, such as school pedagogy, psychology, the sociology of education, and digitalisation research, making them relevant to adult and continuing education research. While not seeking to compete with other well-established international journals with high Journal Impact Factors, the journal aims to become a leading publication platform for research into adult education and learning. To achieve this, it will open up to new areas of discourse and subject areas, as well as new target audiences. It aims to attract both existing and new authors, and readers, and to foster mutual connections and opportunities for exchange across disciplinary boundaries as well as across languages and regions.

The editors have discussed a wide range of perspectives and topics and set priorities for themes for the coming years. These will be incorporated into issue concepts covering research methods in adult education, political education, research on research, staff in continuing education, academic continuing education, teacher training, and the changing publishing landscape within the discipline. The new calls for papers will be published in the coming months.

In order to increase the journal’s visibility whilst simultaneously being able to process the rising number of manuscripts in a quality-assured manner, it is essential to strengthen the collaboration with a reliable media partner and optimise workflows. Accordingly, the partnership with the publishing house Springer Nature – represented at the meeting by Alexander Hutzel – has been reaffirmed for the next two years.

To speed up the recruitment of reviewers, the editors and the editorial team have developed a concept for a Reviewer Board, which is due to commence work in 2027. This is also intended to shorten the time manuscripts spend in the review process, so that research findings can be fed back into the research cycle more quickly.

During the meeting, two long-standing members of the Editorial Board were bid farewell. The role of Editor-in-Chief of the journal, which is linked to the position of Scientific Director of the DIE, had already passed from Josef Schrader (co-editor of the ZfW since 2013) to Hannes Schröter on 1 April 2026. Josef Schrader has now resigned from the Editorial Board, but will continue to play an active role in academia in a variety of other capacities. Philipp Gonon from Zurich (co-editor since 2011) has also stepped down from the Editorial Board. In their roles as co-editors of the ZfW, both colleagues not only had a decisive influence on many aspects of publishing an academic journal – from strategic direction to responsibility for individual issues – but were also consistently involved in shaping its content, whether regarding current developments and debates in research or in the wider field of academic publishing within a market dominated by publishers. The editors and the DIE would like to thank Josef Schrader and Philipp Gonon for their commitment to the Editorial Board and for the expertise with which they have made the ZfW what it is – and what it can become in the years ahead.

For the community, these developments open up new opportunities for submissions and – with a view to the expected inclusion in Scopus – even greater visibility and reputation. Through stronger international networking and a move towards transcending disciplinary boundaries, researchers will also be able to initiate new collaborations for research and publication activities. The editors, the editorial team and the publisher will do everything in their power to ensure the journal's continued success and its status as a relevant forum for researchers to exchange ideas.