The present editorial marks an important change for the Revista de Administração Pública (RAP). This is the journal's last printed edition that, starting in 2017, will be presented in its online version only.
The year of 2017 holds an important landmark for RAP, which will be completing 50 years since its launching, in 1967. Fifty years of continuous publication dedicated to Public Administration is, by itself, an indicator of its continuous and solid contribution to the field. However, the scenario has changed: the number of academic publications has not only increased, but communication with its community, authors, reviewers and readers has also changed significantly. The publication of RAP articles and indexes such as SciELO, Redalyc, EBSCO and Spell enables the open access to all community segments, making the print version dispensable.
Symbolically, the 50th anniversary of the Journal will be marked by this change in an important material dimension: printed editions, commonly found in the bookshelves of many national and international libraries, will no longer be available, becoming a document that, hopefully, will contribute to historical research in the field of public administration in Brazil. The transformation of RAP into an online journal should represent more than a reflex of the current academic editorial market. It also represents a new path towards the consolidation strategy of academic journals in the next years: a Brazilian public administration journal that aims at expanding its academic contribution beyond national frontiers.
With that in mind, the last printed edition of RAP also sets the internationalization strategy standard that will be implemented in the following years. All articles, starting in this edition, will be published in both English and Portuguese, seeking to improve, in the long term, the quality of its contents and to publish articles that indeed contribute to transversal subjects in the field of public administration, both nationally and internationally.
We hope the articles of this last issue of 2016 meet our twofold purposes. It is not by coincidence that in this last printed edition of 2016 we have gathered a set of articles that directly or indirectly share historical strands in its various dimensions: a) identifying and analyzing the historical-comparative method, such as in the article The new comparative-historical method and its contributions to political science and public administration, by Octavio Amorim Neto and Júlio César Cossio Rodriguez; b) analyzing the field of public policies and its evolution in the Brazilian context from a historical perspective, in the articles An analysis of public policies in Brazil: from an unnamed practice to the institutionalization of the "public field", by Marta Ferreira Santos Farah, and Evaluation of public policies in Brazil and the United States: a research analysis in the last 10 years, by Charles David Crumpton, Janann Joslin Medeiros, Vicente da Rocha Soares Ferreira, Marcos de Moraes Sousa and Estela Najberg; c) discussing, from a historical perspective and based on longitudinal analyses, themes such as the reform of the Brazilian Judiciary, by Daniella Munhoz da Costa Lima, Valderez Ferreira Fraga and Fátima Bayma de Oliveira in the article The paradox of the reform of the Judiciary: clashes between the new public administration and the organizational culture of the "jeitinho", or online Participatory Budgeting, as Rafael Cardoso Sampaio proposes in the article e-Participatory Budgeting as an initiative of e-requests: prospecting for leading cases and reflections on e-Participation; or d) making the historical object a privileged unit of analysis, as Sergio Wanderley discusses in his article Iseb, a school of government: developmentalism and the qualification of technicians and managers.
I wish you a good reading!
Alketa Peci
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Nov-Dec 2016
