Two of our Regional Editors have found that the pressures of other work have necessitated that they need to retire from their positions: they are Professor Nils Pharo, who, since we started the Regional Editor role, has been Regional Editor for the Far East; and Dr. Björn Hammarfelt, Joint Regional Editor for Western Europe. Björn has kindly taken the time to write this issue's Editorial. Nils has been replaced in the role by his colleague in Oslo, Dr. Gerd Berget, and Björn by Tuomas Harviainen, Associate Professor at Tampere University, Finland. I'd like to take this opportunity to follow Björn's lead, and wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a happier New Year than the one we've just experienced.

This issue

The last issue of 2021 contains seven papers and five reviews. Thematically these papers can be categorized into two groups, and one 'outsider'. First, we find three articles on topics related to information behaviour and information seeking. The first study, titled Information behaviour of HIV patients during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Georgia analyses how people living with HIV searched for information during the Covid 19 pandemic. The authors Besiki Stvilia, Ketevan Stvilia and Izoleta Bodokia found that AIDS centres, personal networks, physicians, television and websites were common information sources, and three types of information users, lurkers, traditionalists and netizens, were identified. A second paper, on a similar problem, is Employment information needs and information behavior of North Korean refugees authored by Jieun Yeon, and Jee Yeon Lee. They found that the ability of refugees to find information was hindered by social, intellectual and psychological factors. Moreover, North Korean refugees were most likely to find information through personal contacts, the Web or through public institutions. Finally, on a related theme, the importance of critical thinking when searching for information on the web is emphasized in Martha Vidal-Sepúlveda, Cristian Olivares-Rodríguez, and Luis Cárcamo-Ulloa’s article What kind of sources do I need? Critical search for information on the Web. They studied how students use and evaluate search engines, and found that type of sources and publishers were rarely considered when evaluating the results.

The second group of papers in this issue are concerned with scholarly publishing in various ways. Mapping science: tools for bibliometric and altmetric studies, authored by Veslava Osinska, and Radoslaw Klimas, mapped tools used for bibliometric analyses and how these are mentioned on the Web. Interestingly they found that mentions on social media did not necessarily mean that the tools were highly cited in Web of Science. Another paper on scholarly communication is Suênia Oliveira Mendes, and Rosângela Rodrigues Schwarz article, Open access scientific journals: an analysis of the DOAJ catalogue, which analyses 9005 journals indexed in the DOAJ catalogue in terms of publishers, indexing, article processing charges and country origin. Overall, they find that open access journals are predominately published by large commercial companies, which could be said to belong to an oligopoly of academic publishers. Finally, Michael Downes;s paper, Membership of the editorial boards of journals published by the predatory publisher OMICS: willing and unwilling participation, on the large, and questionable academic publisher OMNIC concludes the issue. This study shows that 26% of all editorial members of OMNIC journals were either unaware of being listed as editorial members, or they did not want to be associated with the publisher. The information given by these journals were unreliable, and Downes concludes that association with OMNIC might have a negative impact on the reputation of an individual scholar.

In relation to Downes's paper it should be mentioned that the issue of predatory, or what I rather call questionable, journals has been a debated issue for some time. The famous Beall’s list in which questionable journals was listed has been important for putting focus on the problem, although it has later been criticized for being compiled using unclear criteria. Moreover, Jeffery Beall himself has been accused for taking a critical stance towards open access publishing more generally. Still, unethical publishing using dubious methods is a large and growing problem in academic publishing. Suspicions of publishers trying to silence critique of dubious practices are especially worrisome, and a recent retraction of a study using Beall’s list attracted a lot of attention earlier this year (for a summary see the RetractionWatch page). As a pioneering, open access journal, I believe that Information Research is an especially good venue for interactions on this topic, as it not part of any old oligopoly of academic publishers, and it is operating on a non-commercial basis without any publication fees for authors.

The 'outsider' paper, not fitting into either of the two groups is A holistic framework to examine the impact of user, organizational and data factors on the use of big data analytics systems, by Shin-Yuan Hung, Charlie C. Chen, Hoon Seok Choi, and Peter Ractham. The authors used a kind of convenience sampling method to collect data from people in the top companies in Taiwan and obtained 236 valid responses. The results, which, given the sampling process, would need further verification, indicated that all of the hypotheses, derived from the conceptual model, were supported, except for one. Thus, hypotheses such as 'Openness to novelty impacts actual use positively', 'Organizational readiness impacts actual use positively', and 'Data connectivity impacts actual use positively', were all supported, but 'Data compatibility impacts actual use positively', was not supported. The authors conclude that, "Our findings strongly suggested that such an integrative approach [i.e., one that includes key user, organizational, and data factors] can help an organization understand the challenges of promoting big data analytics to use and improve employees' job performance."

The reviews

The five reviews in this issue deal, as usual, with a variety of topics, from electronic legal deposit, to understanding the economics of the Internet - something for everybody.

This editorial marks the end of my position as a joint regional editor for Information Research. It has been a pleasure to work with all those involved in the journal. From the generous and ever so dedicated Editor-in-chief, Professor Tom Wilson, and the hard-working deputy editor Professor Elena Maceviciute, to fellow editors and committed reviewers from across the world. I am also thankful to those doing the often-invisible labour of the journal like Alen Doracic and Ty Nilsson who successfully managed the recent shift of publishing platforms, and the volunteer copy-editors who do important work in preparing papers for publication.

Thank you and Merry Christmas.


Dr Björn Hammarfelt
Joint Regional Editor, Western Europe
December, 2021.