[InetBib] New issue of Information Research

[Tom Wilson <wilsontd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Members of the list may find the new issue of Information Research of
interest.

Here's the editorial:

Introduction

With this issue, we are back to a normal scale of operations, although
'normal' now means quite a load of work in managing the whole process. We
now mount papers on the site as soon as they are ready, but wait until the
due date of an issue before publicising. This is also the first issue of our
fourteenth year of publication, but I think we'll hold off any celebration
until the fifteenth - perhaps a special issue on scholarly communication
might be appropriate for Volume 14 No. 1 in March, 2010. In fact, take that
as an announcement: papers are invited for a special issue on scholarly
communication to be published in March 2010. That means we shall need
submissions in, let's say, July, August and September to get through the
refereeing and copy-editing process. All aspects of scholarly communication
will be welcomed, from the use of electronic communication in scientific
collaboratories to institutional archives, open access publishing, and
aspects of traditional print publication. Start writing now!

Regular readers will spot some design changes with this issue: the contents
page, this editorial and some of the book reviews have all been redesigned,
using div tags and style sheets instead of tables. The style sheets are
based on those presented by Charles Wyke-Smith in his book reviewed in this
issue <http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs330.html> and the new design
should result in these pages loading a little faster than previously.
In this issue

All of the papers in this issue have been on the Website since editing was
completed, so some of them already have a significant number of hits. I
think this benefits authors, since they have the benefit of early
'publication', while the journal retains the regularity of a publication
programme with quarterly 'issues'. I'll be interested to hear from authors
as to the benefits, or otherwise, of this approach.

The papers cover a wide variety of topics and we have authors from Portugal
and Chile, Iceland, France, Finland, South Africa, Taiwan, and Canada and
the USA. The topics are truly diverse. Three deal with information
behaviour: Palsdottir reports on a study of health-related information
behaviour, while Savolainen is concerned with the nature of information use,
and Meyer reports on information sharing in a cross-cultural context. One,
by Bo-Christer Björk and his colleagues, covers journal publising and the
share taken by open access publishing, concluding that 4.6% of the 2006
output was immediately available, with an additional 3.5% after one year,
and 11.3% in repositories or on home pages. The remaining four papers deal
with evaluating shared virtual work space, the use of intelligent agents in
environmental scanning, the relationship between innovation and IT
capability in the financial service sector, and the evolution of comparison
metrics for indexing languages. In other words we seem to have something
here for pretty well everyone.

Those whose interests aren't catered for by the papers might well find
something of value in the book reviews. We have ten on this occasion, three
of which deal with various aspects of Google and its service. We also review
books on public library management in times of change, a guide to reference
sources, a festschrift for Professor Peter Brophy, information architecture,
and designing Web pages with Cascading Style Sheets - the latter has led to
a new design for the book reviews and may influence other parts of the
journal.
Finally

I noted in the last editorial that this journal is a collaborative effort
and could not be published without considerable efforts by a large number of
people, so I would once again like to thank the Associate Editors, the
referees and the copy-editors for their efforts, as well as our colleagues
at Lund who keep the server running!


-- 
Professor Tom Wilson, PhD, Hon.Ph.D.,
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
Information Research: an international electronic journal
Website: http://InformationR.net/
E-mail: wilsontd@xxxxxxxxx
______________________________________