[Asis-l] New issue of Information Research

[Tom Wilson]

By tomorrow morning (or this evening on the west coast of the USA :-)
you can get access to the latest issue of Information Research -
Volume 13 No. 2 at http://InformationR.net/ir/

Here's the Editorial:

Introduction

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):

    * The nonsense of 'knowledge management'
    * Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning
    * An action research approach to curriculum development
    * Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour
    * Understanding knowledge management and information management:
the need for an empirical perspective
    * The duality of knowledge
    * Scanning the business external environment for information:
evidence from Greece
    * Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded
theory approach
    * Information as a tool for management decision making: a case
study of Singapore
    * Information literacy in Europe: a literature review

In this issue

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.

Book reviews

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!
Thank you!

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.


-- 
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 at gmail.com
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