I have come to the end of my second term as Editor in Chief of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (EASTS). Such a tenure might not be that unusual for international journals, but it is quite a long time in East Asia, where scholars appreciate working as groups and where decisions are usually done collectively. With an excellent editorial team, during my time here we have achieved several important milestones, including being indexed and abstracted in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in 2016, winning the Infrastructure Award of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in 2018, and becoming a 4S-endorsed journal in 2020. For me, this seems to be the perfect time to stand back and to watch a new team lead this wonderful journal on to its next stage.
To begin, I would like once more to thank all our authors, reviewers, and editorial teams, who together have established EASTS as a strong East Asian brand in STS scholarship. In what follows, I hope to clarify what I mean by “branding” East Asia in reviewing what we have achieved to date. As we often remind ourselves and our readers EASTS cannot become “just another English-language journal.” This was the vision we started out with back in the early 2000s, during the preparatory work for EASTS, when STS-related associations began being founded in East Asia. Sixteen years have now passed, and I believe it’s time for a reappraisal.
