Reflections on the last four years of RAUSP’s Management Journal

Abstract

As the reader certainly has noticed, our journal has been through several changes in the past four years. All these changes began with a new policy, from both the University of Sao Paulo and the Department of Business Administration of our school, intended to foster the internationalisation of our initiatives in 2015. The steps we have taken for making this journal more international will be described in this editorial.As one of the first effects of this new international perspective, the traditional RAUSP -Revista de Administração da USP was replaced by RAUSP Management Journal. This decision ratified the previous policy, created in 2016, since when our journal has been publishing articles only in English language. This internationalisation process at RAUSP has already been addressed by a previous editorial (Saes & Hourneaux , 2019).The consolidation of the publishing industry within a few big international players is a wellknown phenomenon (Rønning & Slaatta, 2011). This was the rationale we considered to increase the internationalisation of the journal even more by adopting an international publisher as an outlet for our articles. At first, this publisher was Elsevier B.V., from September 2016 to July 2018. After that, it was replaced by Emerald Publishing Limited, our current partner. We must say that there were several difficulties to change the systems and procedures from one provider to the other (and also from our previous home-made system). Fortunately, all these issues have been solved.Nevertheless, we can cite some lessons learned through this period. First, as we have mentioned, is the adaptation to the publishers' procedures and standards and the difficulties in adapting these to the Brazilian context. These changes required time and flexibility from all our partners to be accomplished.Second is the need for change from Portuguese to English, from that point on, as the official language of the journal. As literature shows, the predominance of the English language in scientific publications can be a barrier for researchers from non-English-speaking countries (Flowerdew, 1999;Ge, 2015). As we have mentioned, as all the articles must be published in the English language, we have constantly recommended the authors to enhance the quality of their writing, sometimes taking more time and adding new rounds for the final approval of the article.Despite these difficulties, some innovative initiatives were implemented. From 2017 on, every issue has had an invited paper, called "ThinkBox". For writing these articles, distinguished scholars from Brazil and abroad are asked to send their contributions to cutting-edge themes on several aspects of management. "ThinkBox" articles are among the most read in our collection, we must add.Another new feature is the videos recorded by the article's authors. Some authors have been invited to disclose their research through these short videos that are