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Volume 15 No. 2 of Information Research should be online by tomorrow morning
(19th June).  Here's the editorial:

Introduction

I changed the timing of the journal's publication to take the pressure off
Christmas, but this year I've managed to arrange publication date of the
journal to fall into the first week of my annual holiday - brilliant timing!
Not surprisingly, then, we've missed the publication date - but not by long
and, in any event, having to deal with a couple of papers at the last minute
would have led to delays. I'm forced by circumstances to put the papers up
before they have all been fully validated for accurate XHTML coding - this
will be put right as and when I can get reasonably fast access to the W3C
validator site - it seems to be slow in responding to requests from Italy!

In this issue, we have five papers that have been through all of the hoops:
editorial acceptance, peer-review, revision, further peer-review (often),
copy-editing, and final copy preparation by the Editor. For anyone who still
believes that digital-only, open access journals are somehow inferior to
print plus digital journals, Information Research has quality criteria that
refute that proposition in every issue.

I would like to start offering a conversion to xhtml service to users, so if
there is anyone out there who would be interested in playing a more direct
role in the open access mission by becoming a layout editor, please contact
me at [log in to unmask] - there's no money in it, only the satisfaction of
helping the journal to meet more of the needs of its authors and, through
them, the needs of our readers. We use a template for the papers in the
journal, so the basic framework for papers already exists and most of the
work would involve cutting paragraphs from a Word document and pasting them
into <p> tags. The tricky part is seeing to the tables, but we have a
template for that too, which helps.
In this issue

In this quarter's issue Amber Cushing reports on a study of the experiences
of the offspring of sperm-donors, noting, nor surprisingly, that the search
for donors is motivated in part by a need to understand one's genetic
heritage, but also to determine whether the person is likely to be prone to
particular illnesses. Under these circumstances one can readily understand
the emotional content of the search process.

Our second paper is in Spanish (you can use Google Translate for a rough
translation - it's not perfect, but you can get a good idea of the content)
and deals with the effect of quality dimensions on the traffic received by
Websites: in this case, the Websites of Spanish banks. The paper offers
guidelines to enable banks to increase Website traffic.

Ann-Christin Persson and colleagues from Lund University's Faculty of
Engineering library report on a study of testing and re-designing the
library's Web pages. They discovered from both students and academic staff
what features they wanted on the library Web pages and then proceeded to
implement the desired changes. The authors point out, wisely, that this is
not a one-off operation: the Web pages must be re-tested at some time in the
future, since wants may change or the revised pages may not fully meet the
needs originally expressed.

Next, Jan Nolin of the Swedish School of Library and Information Science,
proposes the concept of 'sustainable information' as a corollary to
'sustainable development' - I shan't spoil his story by telling it for him,
but I think that this paper will be of value to those seeking to develop a
better role for information in development.

Finally, Soojung Kim, of the University of Maryland explores how users of
the Yahoo! Answers question and answer site make credibility judgements on
the answers they receive. As you can imagine, a variety of factors enter
into this process and much depends on the nature of the question.
In conclusion

My thanks to my Associate Editors for seeing papers through the review
process, to the referees who spent time assessing the virtues of the papers
they received, and our copy-editors who try to ensure that the papers you
see in the journal are readable and properly referenced!

-- 
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Professor Tom Wilson, PhD, PhD (h.c.),
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Publisher and Editor in Chief: Information Research: an international
electronic journal
Website - http://InformationR.net/ir/
Blog - http://info-research.blogspot.com/
Photoblog - http://tomwilson.shutterchance.com/
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E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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