The primary goal of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools is to foster and develop scholarship in landscape architecture by, amongst other things, strengthening the European landscape architecture academic community. The LE:NOTRE Thematic Network Project, which developed out of ECLAS, has already made a key contribution towards achieving these aims. The third and, it is to be hoped, forth years of the project, with their stress on sustainability and dissemination, offer further opportunities to build on these achievements. A key element in the sustainability and dissemination strategy of the project is the planned establishment of a new academic landscape journal as a formal medium for the publication and dissemination of scholarly authorship and research findings. The establishment of the new academic journal will represent both a major challenge and an important opportunity for ECLAS, 15 years after its foundation, to demonstrate its maturity and commitment in the academic world. Without the initial support of the LE:NOTRE Project, it is unlikely that this initiative would be viable.

The ECLAS journal aims to focus on the mutual relationship between the academic discipline and the professional activity of landscape architecture. Therefore, not only traditional research papers, but also scholarly based papers on e.g. visual communication, project critique, and teaching experiments in collaboration with the profession, will be welcome.

The plan for the establishment period during the third year of LE:NOTRE, is to develop the editorial policy through discussions within the organization, along with the feasibility study and business plan for the 'new' ECLAS. At the ECLAS 2005 conference in Ankara in September, a draft issue of the journal will be presented, and the final decisions made whether to proceed with the project. In spring 2006, following the start of the LE:NOTRE Dissemination Project, the first issue will be published and is planned to reach the departments and libraries at all member schools in Europe and it will also be made available to readers in Africa, Asia, America and Australasia.