Javnost – The Public

About Javnost – The Public

About Javnost – The Public

Javnost – The Public is a quarterly, peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to the study of publicness: how publics form, how public communication works, and how media, politics and everyday life shape democratic life. Founded in 1994 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, it publishes in English, with occasional material in Slovenian, and it addresses readers far beyond its home country. The Slovenian word javnost itself points to the public sphere, publicity and public life taken together, and that breadth is deliberate. The journal does not treat the public as a single audience that simply receives messages. It treats publics as historically changing, contested and mediated formations that have to be investigated empirically and theorised carefully.

For authors, the practical meaning of that identity is clear. A manuscript belongs here when its central question is about public communication, public opinion, public discourse, journalism in its public role, or the changing conditions under which citizens can speak, be heard and hold power to account. A purely technical study of a platform feature, a marketing study with no public dimension, or a descriptive newsroom case with no theoretical or comparative payoff will usually sit uneasily here. The strongest work connects a concrete case — an election, a media system, a protest movement, a policy debate, a digital platform controversy — to a larger argument about democracy and public life that readers in other countries can learn from.

Quick Facts

The ISSN pair above is the pair carried on this Journals World record and it matches the journal's established bibliographic identity. Publishing arrangements have changed over the journal's long life: it was published for many years by the European Institute for Communication and Culture in association with the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, and its current distribution sits with Taylor & Francis. That distinction matters for authors, because submission, production and subscription questions go to the current publisher, while the journal's intellectual home and founding story remain in Ljubljana.

History and Identity

The journal was launched in 1994, in the first years after Slovenian independence, when questions about media freedom, democratisation and the rebuilding of public institutions were not abstract seminar topics in Central and Eastern Europe but live political problems. A 25th-anniversary volume later gathered scholars from around twenty countries to revisit the journal's founding concerns: the changing nature of publicness, the crisis of public communication in the internet age, and the task of media research as a social practice. That anniversary framing is a useful guide to the journal's self-understanding. It was founded in a moment of democratic transition, and it has kept returning to the question of what happens to democracy when the infrastructures of public communication change underneath it.

Three decades on, the agenda has widened without losing that core. Early optimism about the internet and democratisation has given way to sustained attention to disinformation, populism, platform power, the weakening of professional journalism, and the pressure on public service media. Work in the journal has examined, among other themes, counterpublics and structural change in media and politics over long historical periods, politicians delegitimising the media on social platforms, the epistemic crisis of democracy, and digital news audiences read through a political lens. Reading across those examples shows the editorial taste: historically aware, theoretically explicit, and interested in structural change rather than in novelty for its own sake.

Scope in Depth

The scope is best understood as a set of overlapping conversations about the public, rather than as a narrow list of approved topics. The following areas recur across the journal's history and its stated concerns.

Public sphere theory and the idea of publicness

Manuscripts that develop, test or criticise theories of the public sphere are central to the journal. That includes work on deliberation, publicity, publicness as a quality that can expand or erode, and the relationship between visibility and political power. A strong contribution in this strand does not merely cite classic theory as decoration; it puts the theory to work on evidence, or uses evidence to show where the theory needs revision. Comparative and historical designs are especially welcome in spirit, because publicness changes form across regimes, media systems and periods, and a single contemporary snapshot rarely settles a theoretical question.

Public opinion, polling and political communication

Public opinion has been a defining concern since the journal's founding generation, including critical work on polling, the spiral of silence, and the normative claims made for measured opinion. Submissions may study election communication, campaign discourse, populist rhetoric, party and leader communication, or the way measured opinion feeds back into politics. The journal is a good home for work that is reflexive about method: what a survey, a content analysis or a platform trace can and cannot show about what a public actually thinks, as opposed to what instruments record.

Journalism and its democratic role

Journalism studies fit when the argument is about journalism's place in public life: its independence, its economic foundations, its professional norms under pressure, its relationship to political actors, and its capacity to sustain a shared factual world. Studies of attacks on journalists, of media delegitimation by political elites, of public service media funding and governance, and of journalism in small media markets have a natural readership here. A manuscript that only describes a single outlet's routines, without connecting them to democratic function or structural conditions, will need substantial reframing before it fits.

Digital media, platforms and datafied publics

The journal follows public communication into digital environments: social platforms, messaging spaces, algorithmic visibility, online political discussion, and the reorganisation of news audiences. The editorial interest is in consequences for publics and democracy, not in platform description alone. Work that traces how platform design, moderation, recommendation or monetisation reshapes who can speak and who is heard aligns well. So does work on digital inequalities and on the difference between being connected and being a participant in a public.

Media, culture and everyday public life

Publics are also cultural. The journal accommodates work on media and cultural diversity, minority and community media, popular culture as a site of public argument, and the everyday practices through which people encounter news and one another. Contributions in this strand often work qualitatively and attend to language, identity and place. Their fit depends on making the public dimension explicit: how a cultural practice creates, sustains or fragments a public, rather than treating culture and communication as separate worlds that happen to touch.

Media systems, policy and political economy

Comparative media-system research, media policy, ownership and regulation, and the political economy of communication all fall within the journal's remit when they bear on public communication. That includes European-level policy debates, the governance of public service media, media pluralism monitoring, and the position of small-language and small-market media systems inside larger continental structures. Policy manuscripts should engage evidence and institutional detail, and should be clear about which level — local, national, European, platform-global — their claims operate at.

Readership and Who the Journal Speaks To

The core readership is scholars and advanced students in media and communication studies, political communication, journalism studies, sociology and political science who work on Europe and on democratic transitions, together with an international audience interested in public sphere theory. Because the journal publishes in English and organises much of each issue around a theme, its articles are frequently read comparatively: a study of one country's election campaign is read by scholars working on quite different systems who are looking for mechanisms, not local colour.

Practitioners form a secondary but real audience. Journalists, media policymakers, regulators and civil-society organisations concerned with media freedom and disinformation can use the journal's thematic issues as structured briefings on a problem. Authors who want that wider readership should write accordingly: define national institutions for outsiders, translate institutional names, date all policy references precisely, and avoid assuming that a reader in another continent knows the local party system or media law by heart. Clarity about context is not a stylistic extra in this journal; it is what makes a national case into an international contribution.

Editorial Model and Peer Review

Javnost – The Public is a peer-reviewed journal, and contributions are assessed for originality, theoretical coherence, methodological soundness and relevance to the journal's conversation about publicness. Much of each issue is traditionally devoted to a specific theme, with the remainder given to general contributions, essays, research reports, commentaries and book reviews. That structure has two practical consequences. First, thematic calls can be an excellent route in, because an editor is actively assembling a conversation your paper can join. Second, a general submission must make its own conversation visible, since it will not be carried by a theme.

The journal's intellectual leadership has historically been anchored at the University of Ljubljana's Faculty of Social Sciences, with Slavko Splichal — a scholar of communication and public opinion — as its best-known founding figure, and an international advisory presence reflecting the journal's ambitions. Specific editor names, board composition and submission contacts change over time and are not stated here where they could not be verified for the present day; authors should confirm the current masthead on the publisher's journal page before addressing correspondence or relying on a named editor. What does not change is the standard the masthead represents: theoretically literate, internationally comparative, and sceptical of purely descriptive work.

Publication Model, Access and Fees

The journal operates primarily as a subscription journal on its current publisher platform, with individual articles also encountered through institutional libraries, author manuscripts and thematic collections. It should not be described as a fully open-access journal, and authors with a funder mandate for immediate open access should check the publisher's current open-access options and any article charge that applies to them at the time of submission, because those terms are set by the publisher and can change. No article processing charge figure is stated in this profile, because a current, verified figure could not be confirmed from an official source at the time of writing.

Access arrangements also affect strategy. Because themed issues are often read as a set, an article placed in a well-matched theme may be discovered more readily than the same article published alone. Authors should also plan the usual post-publication steps themselves: deposit an accepted manuscript where their institution and the publisher's policy allow, share a lawful link rather than an unlawful PDF copy, and write a plain-language summary for non-specialist readers. The journal's subject matter — the health of public communication — makes that extra dissemination work unusually appropriate; research about publics benefits from actually reaching them.

Indexing, Metrics and How to Interpret Them

This directory record lists an h-index of 53 for the journal. Treat that as a directory-supplied indicator of accumulated citation influence, not as a current official metric: h-index values differ by database and by date, and secondary listings for this title report different values at different times. Separate secondary reporting has placed the journal in the second quartile for Communication in Scopus-based rankings and has reported a Journal Impact Factor around 1.7 in recent cycles. None of those figures should be quoted to an employer or funder without checking the current, primary listing — the publisher page, Scopus, or the Journal Citation Reports — for the exact year in question.

Used properly, the metrics tell a consistent story. This is an established, mid-sized international journal with a long citation tail: its thematic and theoretical articles keep being cited because they address durable questions, which also means citation patterns reward conceptual contributions over fast news-cycle commentary. Authors evaluating fit should read the metrics alongside the archive. If the articles a journal has published in the last three years are the articles you cite, argue with and want to be read beside, that is stronger evidence of fit than any single number. Conversely, a high number in any one database does not compensate for a scope mismatch, which remains the most common reason for rejection at established journals.

What a Strong Submission Looks Like

A strong Javnost submission usually does four things at once. It names a problem in public communication that matters beyond one news cycle; it states its theoretical position plainly enough to be argued with; it brings evidence — archival, comparative, survey, textual, interview or digital — that is proportionate to its claims; and it ends by saying what changes, in theory or in democratic practice, if its argument is right. The following elements deserve particular care.

The opening problem statement

Open with the public problem, not with a literature inventory. Readers should learn within the first pages what is at stake democratically, what is puzzling or contested about it, and what the article will show. Literature belongs in the service of that problem. A useful test is whether a scholar from a different media system could finish the introduction knowing both the case and the general question, and wanting the answer.

Theory used, not displayed

Choose the smallest theoretical apparatus that does the work, and use it consistently. If counterpublics, deliberation, mediatisation or populism is your frame, define it, say what would count as evidence for and against your reading, and return to it in the discussion. Editors and reviewers in this tradition are quick to notice decorative theory — famous names cited in the introduction and abandoned by the analysis — and equally quick to value a modest frame applied rigorously.

Comparative and historical awareness

Single-country studies are welcome when they are written comparatively in spirit: context supplied, scope conditions stated, and implications for other systems discussed honestly. Historical depth is a strength of the journal; showing how a present arrangement emerged, or how a debate repeats an earlier one in new technological dress, often turns an adequate article into a memorable one. Avoid presentism, and avoid treating one country's experience as the universal path of media change.

Method transparency

State sampling, period, coding or interview procedures, and limitations with the same precision you would expect from the articles you cite. For digital data, describe collection access, date of collection and ethical handling of identifiable material. For normative argument, transparency takes a different form: premises stated, counter-arguments faced, and the boundary between evidence and judgement kept visible. Either way, a reader should be able to retrace how you know what you claim to know.

Submission Checklist

Before submitting to Javnost – The Public, work through the following checks, which reflect the journal's identity and general scholarly publishing practice. Always confirm the publisher's current author instructions as the controlling source.

• Confirm the manuscript's central question concerns public communication, public opinion, journalism's public role, or the conditions of democratic public life — not media in general.
• Check whether a current thematic call matches your topic, and if so, follow its deadlines and framing exactly.
• Supply full context for national institutions, parties, laws and media outlets so an international reader needs no local knowledge.
• State the theoretical frame early, use it in the analysis, and return to it in the discussion.
• Document methods, data periods and limitations; for digital material, record collection dates and ethical safeguards.
• Follow the publisher's current formatting, referencing, abstract and keyword requirements without assuming they match another journal's.
• Prepare a title and abstract that name the public problem and the argument, in English that a non-native-speaker readership can follow readily.
• Declare funding, conflicts of interest and any prior dissemination of the material, as the publisher's current policy requires.

Timelines, word limits and file requirements are not stated numerically in this profile because they are set by the publisher and the specific call, and a figure that could not be verified from a current official source would mislead more than it helped. The controlling figures are those on the publisher's journal page on the day you submit.

Is This Journal Right for Your Paper?

Choose this journal if your work is fundamentally about publics and democracy, if you can write a national or historical case so that it travels, and if you value being read by theoretically minded communication scholars across Europe and beyond. The journal particularly suits authors whose contribution is conceptual or comparative as much as empirical: a new distinction, a revised periodisation, a mechanism that explains cases in several systems, or a careful demolition of a fashionable claim about digital democracy.

Look elsewhere if your paper is primarily a technical evaluation of a tool, a marketing or audience-analytics study without a public dimension, a purely local descriptive report with no comparative or theoretical yield, or a manuscript that needs a biomedical, engineering or general social-science audience. Also think carefully about timing and format: a fast-moving commentary on this week's platform controversy may be better placed as an essay or in a faster outlet, reserving the journal article for the durable, evidenced version of the argument. Matching the venue to the kind of contribution is itself a scholarly skill, and this journal rewards authors who practise it.

Risks, Limits and Honest Cautions

Three cautions deserve emphasis. First, bibliographic housekeeping: the journal has had more than one publishing arrangement over three decades, so citations, subscription claims and older web pages may name different publishers; rely on the current publisher platform for submission and access questions, and on the ISSN pair for identity. Second, metric housekeeping: directory, aggregator and official figures for this title differ, so never copy a metric from a secondary profile — including this one — into a formal evaluation document without a primary check. Third, scope discipline: the word public in the title is a demanding criterion, not a broad invitation, and manuscripts that cannot show their public dimension in the first pages are unlikely to survive editorial screening, however competent they are on their own terms.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Javnost – The Public?

The print ISSN is 1318-3222 and the online ISSN is 1854-8377, the pair carried on this record.

Who publishes Javnost – The Public?

The journal was founded in Ljubljana and long published by the European Institute for Communication and Culture in association with the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana; its current publisher platform is Taylor & Francis. Check the publisher page for the present submission route.

When was the journal founded and how often does it appear?

It was launched in 1994 and appears quarterly.

What topics fit best?

Public sphere theory, public opinion, political communication, journalism and democracy, digital publics and platforms, media systems and policy, and media and culture where the public dimension is explicit.

Is the journal peer reviewed?

Yes. It is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal; the exact review arrangements for a given submission type or thematic call should be confirmed in the publisher's current instructions.

Is it an open-access journal?

It operates primarily on a subscription basis through its publisher. Any open-access option and any associated charge are set by the publisher and should be verified at submission; no verified current charge figure could be confirmed for this profile.

What h-index does this directory list?

This record lists an h-index of 53. Database values vary by source and date, so verify any metric in the primary database before formal use.

Conclusion

Javnost – The Public has spent three decades asking a single, difficult question in many forms: what does it take for a society to have a public life worth the name, and what happens to democracy when the media conditions for that life change? Its founding context in post-transition Slovenia, its base in Ljubljana scholarship, its thematic issues and its international authorship have made it one of Central and Eastern Europe's most visible contributions to communication research. For an author with a well-evidenced, theoretically clear argument about publics, opinion, journalism or platforms, it offers a serious readership that will engage the argument on its merits — provided the manuscript shows, from its first page, why its case matters for public life far beyond the place it was studied.