We are in the process of switching the journal management system from OJS version 2, to OJS version 3, and at the same time we are moving the journal files from the server in Lund to a new server in Borås. As a result there may be some delay in dealing with submissions. We hope to have the new system open to submissions in early April, and we will then ask authors to submit their papers to the new system, while continuing to process the existing backlog of papers within version 2. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience the transfer process may cause.

This issue

We have seven papers in this issue, and, as we often have more, it has made the management of the issue rather less fraught. We welcome papers, of course, but sometimes the load of papers available for publication is rather more than we would ideally like to deal with.

The seven papers are quite diverse in their topics: information seeking is a regular topic and in this issue we have two that are directly concerned with that. Muhammad Naveed and his colleagues have explored the everyday life information seeking behaviour of postgraduate students, resident on campus, in Pakistan. A strong need was for health-related information, and needs were often served by interpersonal sources of information. Akanbi and Fourie also deal with the health-related information activities of pregnant women in Pretoria, South Africa, finding that family and health professionals were the most used sources of information. Interestingly, compared with some other studies, social media were not used to a significant extent.

The remaining papers are all on different topics: Zhang and colleagues discuss the information quality of academic social networking sites, as perceived by users. This study, unusually, uses an experimental method to explore the issue.

Two papers deal with very different aspects of digital publishing: Estakhr and colleagues investigate the article processing charge model of journal publication. They seek to determine the cost-effectiveness of the model for different countries. They conclude that the model (as exemplified by Elsevier's hybrid open access journals) is cost effective for institutions as it leads to greater visibility of the research outputs.

Millicent Weber and her co-authors investigated the circulation of digital audio-books in Australian libraries. They find that there has been substantial growth in the circulation of audio-books between 2006 and 2017, and I imagine that the pandemic has led to an even greater increase. The dominant genres were crime, science fiction, and fantasy.

Karim, Nikou and Widén discuss the role of the perceived information literacy of young people in their assessment of youth information and counselling services. Their study confirms that perceived information literacy has a strong relationship with how ease of access, reliability, and the responsiveness of information and counselling services are perceived, and, through these factors, how the quality of service is judged.

Finally, Reijo Savolainen explores how expert power is used by opinion leaders, focusing on their use of such power through information sharing. This is an analysis of the existing research literature on the subject of expert power and provides an interesting and stimulating introduction. Simply by bringing the subject to our 'collective consciousness' the author provides a stimulus to further information-behaviour-related research.

Book reviews

Six books are reviewed in the current issue: the reviewers seem to have found all of them of some value to the information research community. They range in topic from AI and big data to fakes and forgeries in the ancient Middle East, through to modern China. I'm sure that readers will find something of interest here.

Finally

Our thanks, as usual, to the regional editors who see the papers through the review process, our copy-editors who try to ensure the readability of the texts, to the many reviewers and members of the Editorial Board who help to maintain the quality of the papers published. Without their dedication to the open access ideal, the journal would not exist.


Professor T.D. Wilson
Editor-in-chief
June, 2021.