Vol. 13 No. 2, June 2008
| Vol. 13 No. 2, June 2008 | ||||
As a truly open access journal on the 'Platinum' model (that is, free to access without charging author fees), we have no subscription list to tell us what our penetration of the market might be—indeed, we have no market, since the journal is freely distributed. All we can rely upon, then, are the hits received by the journals papers and the readers who register to receive the quarterly e-mail message that alerts them to its publication.
At this moment, as I write, we have 2,718 registered readers, the latest of whom signed up at 14:31 today (15th June, 2008), from the USA. I haven't checked the geographical distribution for some time now, but other sources tell me that those readers are spread throughout the world in a way that is unmatched by print on paper publishing.
The hit counters tell us a little more, and from time to time I've drawn up lists of the 'top 20' papers on the basis of those hits. Google Analytics has helped, more recently, to give me a view of what is used and what is not—and there is very little of the latter. It tells me, for example, that the top page of the journal has received 35,701 unique page views in the past twelve months from visitors from 156 countries, the top ten being: United States, United Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, Malaysia, Finland and Denmark. The map you can find by scrolling down to the bottom of the top page of the journal gives a nice graphic representation of the geographical distribution:
The top ten papers over the past year, on the basis of hits from these eager information seekers around the world, are (in rank order):
We have a very diverse set of papers in this issue, from the usual wide geographic range. We have papers whose authors come from Brazil, Lithuania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the UK as well as the usual "Watch this" column from Terry Brooks in the USA.
The diversity of subjects represented is obvious from the title page: we have papers on activity theory and information requirements for Web applications; records use in organizations; citation counts and the UK's dreaded Research Assessment Exercise; agricultural information systems in Turkey; information needs and their associated information competencies in the Brazilian banking system; and decision support systems in Lithuania. The journal's scope is advertised as covering information research in all its variety, rather than limiting it to one established discipline or field, and an issue like this demonstrates the validity of that approach.
One of the benefits of diversity is that readers are drawn to work that, otherwise, they would never come across in what they think of as the 'key' journals they read. Indeed, messages from readers tell me that this, together with the international scope of the journal, is one of the things that stimulates them—and keeps them coming back.
Compared with the March issue, which had a substantial backlog of books to present, we have relatively few in this issue. However, some 'regular readers' tell me that the reviews are one of the most useful features of the journal, so no doubt even a small number is better than none!
My thanks to all the usual suspects for copy-editing, link-checking, translations, etc., as well as a continuing thanks to my Associate Editors for their work in managing papers through the review and editing process.
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