Editorial: Mission and sustainability of EATSJ
Authors: Teoh Simon 
Published: January 2025

On behalf of the Euro-Asia Tourism Studies Journal (EATSJ), as Chief Editor, I am delighted to announce the publication of Volume 5 Issue 1 (2024). This current issue is an outcome of our 10th Euro Asia Tourism Studies Association (EATSA) Conference, held in Karlsruhe, Germany (8th-12th July 2024). It is also to review the journal’s mission and sustainability, in fostering scientific collaborations of our members. At the Conference, challenges facing our journal were discussed. Like most journals, we faced a lack of peer reviewers. This has hindered our progress and raised questions to its sustainability. As has been discussed at the Tourism Research Information Network (Trinet), there has been a diminishing pool of peer reviewers. This could be attributed to increased academic teaching workloads, the need to prioritise securing research funding, and perhaps most significantly, the pressure to publish in top tiered Scopus listed journals, due to institutional requirements. However, it is common knowledge that only about 10% of submitted articles eventually get published. This is where EATSJ’s mission can help realise the rejected 90%, as it is currently Italian indexed, with Indian and Hungarian indexation being processed. Our mission is to be Scopus indexed. This editorial has three purposes. Firstly, it seeks to remind our members of our journal’s mission, namely, to foster, inspire and elevate the next generation of researchers on European and Asian tourism issues. Second, our journal primarily seeks to critically advance broader tourism related World issues. The key aim is to provide a platform for EATSA members to foster collaborations and publish their work, especially for our junior European and Asian researchers (Early Career Researchers (ECR), PhD and Masters candidates) to realise their academic potentials. We strive to achieve this by providing constructive comments and feedback. This can be valuable for the next generation of potential academics, with the hope that they then in turn become peer reviewers, which can help sustain EATSJ. More importantly, our purpose is to achieve high Eurasian scientific standards at EATSJ. Even though we did not receive many papers for this issue, it is the quality of papers that we focused on. Of the six papers in this volume, one is a revised version of a keynote speech, one conference proceedings, two PhD candidates’ papers, and mot impressively, two undergraduates’ papers. Lastly, this journal seeks to provide scientific insights into significant emerging post-pandemic tourism themes (from ‘no-tourism’ to ‘overtourism’ again, because of ‘revenge tourism’), as tourism continues to impact politics and vice versa. Further themes include the increasing issues with AI in hospitality and tourism, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) geopolitical impacts on tourism, the implications of the ongoing war in the Middle East and Ukraine, and most recently, the forthcoming impacts and implications of the Trump Presidency 2.0 on World tourism. I welcome these and other broader tourism related Eurasian/World scientific themes. It is with the support and collaboration of our EATSA members, that I hope to advance the mission and sustainability of EATSJ.