Eastern European Countryside (EEC) is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year (2013). The first issue “0” appeared in 1993. In the current issue of our periodical – as in the earlier 19 – it is our intention to analyse the process of change in the legislative, organisational, economic, social and cultural sphere of rural areas in Central and Eastern Europe. Researchers from various academic centres in Europe and beyond its borders write about these problems [...] An important achievement of the past decade has been the systematic growth in readership of our periodical (the number of readers doubled in 2011). [...] However, the greatest achievement of the last decade was obtaining a significant position on the international academic publishers’ market. Since 2007 articles published in EEC have been indexed by: The Social Sciences Citation Index; Social Scisearch and the Journal of Citation Reports/Social Science Edition, which in fact means the periodical’s accreditation on the Philadelphia List. Since 2010 EEC also holds the so-called impact factor. [...] The periodical’s current position is primarily due to the contribution of the international editorial team and academic council, their determination for the recognition of EEC, their conscientiousness as regards the high quality of content and linguistic standard of the published texts, their tenacity in securing financial resources. (excerpts from Introduction by Andrzej Kaleta)