The new issue of Information Researchwill be available on the Website
tomorrow. There may be some editing glitches as a result of the problems
explained in the Editorial, but one of the advantages of electronic publishing
is the capacity to correct. :-) Here's the Editorial:

        Introduction

        Getting out the first issue of the new volume - which really signals
that ten years have now gone by since Information Research first hit cyberspace
- has been rather fraught. My Internet connection has been playing up for the
past month or so, with first, intermittent disconnection developing into
intermittent connection and finally no connection at all. Eventually, after a
couple of weeks talking to my ISP help desk, then tests by BT of the ADSL line,
only the router was left as the likely source of the problem. So, now it is en
route back to Netgear and I'm using the modem that came with the ISP
subscription.

        The interruptions to service and the time taken in diagnosing the
problem have meant that some papers that should have been published in this
issue will have to wait until January - my apologies to the authors. Also, at
this point, not all of the papers on the site have been properly proof-read; I
simply wasn't able to get them to Rae-Ann so that she could do the proofing. Of
course, one of the advantages of electronic publication is that we can correct
the papers at any time and we shall do so as time goes by. No doubt, however,
there are other errors lurking in the system somewhere: if you come across any,
do let me know.

        In this issue

        We have the usual multi-national contributions to this issue, with
papers from Greece, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. From Sweden, we have a
second paper from AnnBritt Enochsson on the use of the Internet by children;
from Hungary a study of environmental scanning by companies in Western Europe
and, coincidentally, another paper on environmental scanning by Greek companies
from a Greek research, Liana Kourteli; and, if that was not enough on the
subject, yet another, from the USA on environmental scanning by clinicians in
substance abuse treatment clinics. Perhaps this ought to have been a special
issue on environmental scanning. Finally, we have a couple of papers in
Spanish: one on the extent to which academics at the University of Murcia
publish in the international journals, and the other on a scientometric study
of academic collaboration by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de
Valencia.

        It is interesting to note that the papers in Spanish that have been
published in Information Research are 'hit' to just about the same extent as
the papers in English. This makes me wonder why more scholarly journals are not
multilingual. I can understand the problems of accomplishing it, of course,
especially for print-on-paper journals, but for open access journals (i.e.,
true open access, not author-charged) the costs are minimal when collaboration
with colleagues abroad is so easily accomplished. The multilingual (or, more
correctly, bilingual) character of Information Research surely encourages more
native English speakers who understand Spanish to read these papers, while
Spanish speakers get the opportunity at least to read the abstracts of the
English papers in Spanish, even if they are not sufficiently bilingual to read
the entire paper.

        Finally...

        Readers of the reviews (and I understand that there are some of you out
there who are more likely to read these than any of the papers!) will notice a
not too subtle change with this issue. Information Research has become an
Amazon Associate. Each review now carries a link to an Amazon site, enabling
you to buy the book reviewed immediately - whether for yourself or for your
organization. If you do click on the links to Amazon, the journal gets a small
payment for each book bought, thereby helping us to keep the journal going.

        I'm also experimenting with Google: initially, you'll find a search box
at the end of the reference list on each paper with the search terms already
entered. Just click on search and you'll be presented (on a new page) with
output of a search on Scholar Google. Let me know if you think it is a good
idea.



___________________________________________________
Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD
Publisher/Editor in Chief
Information Research
InformationR.net
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TN,  UK
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web site: http://InformationR.net/
___________________________________________________