Vol. 11 No. 1, October, 2005
| Vol. 11 No. 1, October, 2005 | ||||
Getting out the first issue of the new volume - which really signals that ten years have now gone by since Information Research first hit cyberspace - has been rather fraught. My Internet connection has been playing up for the past month or so, with first, intermittent disconnection developing into intermittent connection and finally no connection at all. Eventually, after a couple of weeks talking to my ISP help desk, then tests by BT of the ADSL line, only the router was left as the likely source of the problem. So, now it is en route back to Netgear and I'm using the modem that came with the ISP subscription.
The interruptions to service and the time taken in diagnosing the problem have meant that some papers that should have been published in this issue will have to wait until January - my apologies to the authors. Also, at this point, not all of the papers on the site have been properly proof-read; I simply wasn't able to get them to Rae-Ann so that she could do the proofing. Of course, one of the advantages of electronic publication is that we can correct the papers at any time and we shall do so as time goes by. No doubt, however, there are other errors lurking in the system somewhere: if you come across any, do let me know.
We have the usual multi-national contributions to this issue, with papers from Greece, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. From Sweden, we have a second paper from AnnBritt Enochsson on the use of the Internet by children; from Hungary a study of environmental scanning by companies in Western Europe and, coincidentally, another paper on environmental scanning by Greek companies from a Greek research, Liana Kourteli; and, if that was not enough on the subject, yet another, from the USA on environmental scanning by clinicians in substance abuse treatment clinics. Perhaps this ought to have been a special issue on environmental scanning. Finally, we have a couple of papers in Spanish: one on the extent to which academics at the University of Murcia publish in the international journals, and the other on a scientometric study of academic collaboration by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.
It is interesting to note that the papers in Spanish that have been published in Information Research are 'hit' to just about the same extent as the papers in English. This makes me wonder why more scholarly journals are not multilingual. I can understand the problems of accomplishing it, of course, especially for print-on-paper journals, but for open access journals (i.e., true open access, not author-charged) the costs are minimal when collaboration with colleagues abroad is so easily accomplished. The multilingual (or, more correctly, bilingual) character of Information Research surely encourages more native English speakers who understand Spanish to read these papers, while Spanish speakers get the opportunity at least to read the abstracts of the English papers in Spanish, even if they are not sufficiently bilingual to read the entire paper.
Readers of the reviews (and I understand that there are some of you out there who are more likely to read these than any of the papers!) will notice a not too subtle change with this issue. Information Research has become an Amazon Associate. Each review now carries a link to an Amazon site, enabling you to buy the book reviewed immediately - whether for yourself or for your organization. If you do click on the links to Amazon, the journal gets a small payment for each book bought, thereby helping us to keep the journal going.
I'm also experimenting with Google: initially, you'll find a search box at the end of the reference list on each paper with the search terms already entered. Just click on search and you'll be presented (on a new page) with output of a search on Scholar Google. Let me know if you think it is a good idea.
Professor Tom Wilson, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief |
 |
How to cite this editorial:
Wilson, T.D. (2005) "Editorial." Information Research, 11(1), editorial E111 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/11-1/editor111.html]
© the author, 2005. Updated 15 October, 2005
Contents |
|
Home |