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Open Access is a simple idea that has resulted in a confusing landscape of business models, competing policy prescriptions, and vested interests. Academic debates about the pros and cons of Open Access publishing often lack insights into the operational needs for setting up an Open Access publication. This is true particularly for the social sciences, where experiences with Open Access from the production side still seem sparse. Covering the period between 2010 and 2015, this article recapitulates one of the few cases where an existing academic journal in political science has been converted to an Open Access publication. The Austrian Journal of Political Science (OZP) is an Open Access journal since 2015; and it was the academic community that conducted the conversion process. Remaking the OZP may thus entail some broader lessons for the social sciences communities about what is important in Open Access publishing.

This Working Paper builds on the scientific discourse on valuation of SSH research as well as SSH-integration in EU framework programmes and aims at summarizing the key findings from the November 2018 Austrian EU Presidency Conference "Impact of Social Sciences and Humanities for a European Research Agenda - Valuation of SSH in mission-oriented research". It deals with the topic in three instalments. First, it will discuss recent trends in research funding. Second, it provides a brief historical overview of the efforts of integrating SSH into the EU Research Framework Programme. It then adds some observations about continued challenges in SSH. Finally, it will conclude with some suggestions for SSH scholars, based on the discussions from the conference. In that regard the Working Paper is also a document for further reading for those who have read earlier, shorter texts that were published in preparation of that conference.

Despite many warning voices pointing to the organisational weaknesses of this instrument, the European Research Council (ERC) is considered a success story of European research policy. How did that come about? This research note takes a look inside the ERC's administrative body, the ERC Executive Agency. Based on personal experience, the text provides information how tensions between scientific and administrative expectations towards the performance of this agency could be alleviated, and how a unique social fabric consisting of double compliance, complementary efficiency, and two-tier loyalty emerged. The note ends with some cautious remarks concerning the ERC's future.

There is much confusion about role and meaning of peer review today. This deficit is surprising, given the fact that peer review has become something like a mantra within the various scientific communities. Its most controversial deployment today is in research funding, where it is revered by some and loathed by others. The starting point for this paper is a puzzle: How is it that peer review, as a decision-making principle that absolutely relies on scientific judgement, still flourishes in a time when politicians generally expect proof for their investment in research? In answering this question, and based on an extensive review of existing literature on peer review in research funding, this paper suggests a comprehensive conceptual framework that allows us to a) understand peer review in research funding as distinctively different to other deployments of the same principle; b) distinguish analytically between the principle, the implementation, and the orchestration of peer review; and c) to conceptualize peer review in research funding as one of the neuralgic borderlines between the world of policy-making and the world of science.

Three sets of problems are outlined involving the demand for acknowledgment of Islamic symbolism & practices in Europe: the relationship of religion & state, Islam & liberal democracy; & religious & cultural pluralism. It seems that it is one of the great political challenges to reconcile the basic principles of democracy, such as individual freedom of religion & gender equality, without hierarchical organization. The contributions to this journal define the broad field of political & social preoccupation with the public-political role of Islam -- the question of representation of Islam in western European print media, the problem of regulating Islamic headscarves, the construction of religious identities within the context of integration policies, as well as the formation of Islamic religious education at public schools. References. E. Sanchez

This article presents a novel methodological program for frame analysis of textual data and discusses its application in cross-national research. The proposed approach systematizes recent theoretical developments in frame analyses, and offers a step-by-step program for frame identification and measurement, which synthesizes the implications of aforementioned developments into a coherent methodological framework. Frames are identified with analysis techniques borrowed from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and dictionary-free quantitative content analysis. The results of the identification process are subsequently validated via latent class analyses of data matrices, which are obtained with the help of coding techniques that utilize computer-assisted qualitative software packages. Since more interpretative, qualitative elements of frame analysis are combined with quantitative content analysis, findings are of high conceptual validity and generalizability. Comparative broadening of the approach considerably improves the quality of the detected frames.