Vol. 12 No. 2, January 2007
| Vol. 12 No. 2, January 2007 | ||||
Managing an electronic journal is a non-trivial task and, although I have Associate Editors who help greatly in the process of evaluating submissions, the main work of getting the issues out is down to me. With the loss of my volunteer proof-reader, Rae-Ann Hughes, the checking is an additional load. It is something of a relief, therefore, to know that Lund University Libraries (our host institution for the server) is implementing the journal management package, Open Journal Systems. Together with the Associate Editors, I am in the process of testing the system and hope, shortly, that all submissions will be handled through OJS.
This said, there is still room for more volunteers to help with the production of the journal: ideally, a proof-reader who knows British English and an XHTML code editor would be very useful. So, if you have a little time on your hands (a vain hope in these days of overwork!), or if you are recently retired and interested in helping the open access movement, do contact me.
And, speaking of volunteers, thanks to Elena Maceviciute for her link checking this issue - a bigger task than usual, and to Pedro Dias and Jose Vicente Rodriguez for the Spanish abstracts; again, a much bigger task than previously.
The main work of this issue has been in preparing the final batch of papers from the Information Seeking in Context Conference, which was held in Sydney last year. As usual, the range is very wide, from the information needs of Iranian engineers, to the information behaviour of Taiwanese aborigines—evidence that the information behaviour field is dynamic and growing. Very few of the authors, however, explore the implications of their work for information practice, and I hope that the 2008 conference (to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania) will address this issue.
We also have five other peer-reviewed papers and another open access case study. The five papers cover very different topics: professional education in Brazil, Internet services in the countries of the European Union, students' use of the Internet for their Finnish Masters' theses, the impact of the Terrorist bombings in Madrid on the 11th March, 2004, on newspaper documentation centres (in Spanish) and a workflow model for scholarly communication. This last one is very long for a paper and the author has provided a link to a .pdf file so that you may print it out more easily. The case study deals with Medical Education Online, which was established (like Information Researh) by an individual, enthused by the idea of open access publishing.
Partly because of the ISIC papers, we have a good geographic spread of papers in this issue: USA - 4, Finland - 3, Japan - 2, Spain - 2, Brazil - 1, Canada - 1, Iran - 1, Singapore - 1, Taiwan - 1, UK - 1.
As I noted in the previous issue, I now use Google Analytics to monitor the use of the journal and (at the time of writing) I now have four months of data. The data show that the top page of the journal has had 35,323 'unique views' and 66,145 'page views' in this time - which I assume means that each visitor comes back to the top page ('home' on the navigation bar) at least once after the initial click. Extrapolating that for 2006 as a whole suggests that the top page has had 105,969 unique views and 198,435 page views. I've also been using OneStat.com since last April and it shows 32,517 page views for the top page in eight months - extrapolating gives us 48,775 for the year, which is significantly fewer than suggested by Google Analytics, so I'm not quite sure what's going on there :-). However, in 2005 we had 47,117 hits, so usage continues to increase. One thing is certain: the papers in Information Research are getting a lot of exposure!
I am making changes to the Editorial Board, with a view to stabilizing membership by the beginning of the next volume. Membership is for a period of three years, renewable, and some members are now due to retire, so with this issue, we welcome three new members of the Editorial Board: Jim Jansen, Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi. Jim strengthens our representation of the Web research community, while Bonnie and Victor, apart from helping review papers for the activity theory issue due in April, strengthen the information systems area. Welcome folks!
The journal's publication schedule will also be changing, partly to bring the volume year into line with the calendar year and partly to avoid holiday periods as far as possible. So, this year, the final two issues of Volume 12 will be published in April and October and Volume 13 will have its four issues in March, June, September and December of 2008, with subsequent volumes having the same publication pattern. This way, I might actually have some holiday time at Christmas!
Given how far the month is advanced, it may seem a little late, but... a very Happy New Year!
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