Slawomir Poleszak won his case against the IPN leadership in court. It could not have been otherwise, by the way. Congratulations. One should rejoice at the restoration of standards and the return to normalcy, although this institution is operating at full steam, drawing huge funds from the budget.

Poleszak's article appeared in our journal  “Holocaust Studies and Materials” published by the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. This was the only possible place for the publication of such a comprehensive scientific study in such a short period of time. For the last twenty years we have been publishing volumes of several hundred pages bringing important texts in our field. We are recognized, we offer a quality product. Despite this, the Ministry still awards us the lowest number of 20 points in the list of scientific journals. It comes out a point per year, and if you add four volumes in English, correspondingly less. Independence comes at a price - during the PiS government, this was obvious. PiS was removed from power some time ago, the problem remained.

I am very happy that we were able to publish Poleszak's text. However, how many articles did we not get, because Polish scholars and researchers, especially of the younger generation, guided by rational calculation, decided to publish them elsewhere. Unlike Poleszak, we have no way to enforce even symbolic reparations. From whom? By what procedure? Discussing the issue of next year's volume at the editorial board meeting today and discussing the content of the call for texts, we could not promise that by that time the evaluation of journals would be changed according to reasonable, and above all equal for all, criteria. We are sitting in the waiting room, and judging by the subsequent enunciations of the “authoritative factors,” we will remain there for a long time. Small consolation that we are not stuck there alone.

Dariusz Libionka
editor in-chief

Automated translation by DeepL.com/Translator