This issue will see out the first year of our partnership with Routledge, which has been full of excitement and of the tensions that exist between curating and publishing. Thanks to Routledge’s marketing, our close partnership has manifested itself in the increasing visibility of EASTS in East Asia via university library database subscriptions. Meanwhile, the editorial team in Taiwan has successfully mitigated the damage done to academia by the Covid pandemic. Nonetheless, the pressure to keep publications on schedule is still real. The pandemic has seemed to strain scholarly solidarity, but how to maintain a robust “invisible college” of STS and a due resilience—to borrow Diana Crane’s notion of scientific community (Citation1972)—poses a serious challenge for journals like ours. We cannot help but ask ourselves whether there is a normative structure of STS—as sociologist Robert Merton (Merton, Citation1973 [1942]) would put it—whose performance can be sensed and evaluated via an institutional and systematic approach?
