Vision & Goals
Academic publication, especially academic journal publication, is undergoing a transformation that has its origins in the conflict between the profit-motive of commercial publishers on the one hand, and the desire of scholars to share knowledge on the other. Complicating this tension is increasing pressure on scholars to publish in high-quality, high-impact venues that has become central to the culture of promotion and tenure.
As more information becomes available electronically, as storage becomes cheaper and methods of discovery become more sophisticated, scholarship itself is changing. It is now possible to not only cite the results of research, but to link to the data on which the conclusions were based. It is now possible to present director’s notes and commentary together with a streamed video of a given performance. It is also possible to provide non-linear, interactive, access to materials that used to be restricted to linear argument by the nature of print publication. Scholars are already embracing these possibilities. As they do, the stakeholders in scholarly communication (authors, libraries, publishers, and scholars) need to rethink how best to organize, provide, access to, and preserve this multilayered and data-rich scholarly record. At the same time the academy will need to find ways to integrate these works into the culture of promotion and tenure.
As the journal of education in library and information studies, JELIS should take a leadership role in this transformation through demonstrating proactive, state-of-the-art editorial practice. If JELIS is to survive and thrive, the editors must provide the vision and leadership to move the journal from its current status as a little-known and unranked paper publication with a relatively low circulation rate and even lower impact factor to an electronic journal contributed to and read by not only LIS scholars and practitioners, but also by those in related disciplines such as education, social science and communication.
To achieve this goal, we propose to improve or change editorial practices in four areas:
- Content;
- Publicity;
- Indexing; and
- Access.
We fully recognize that these areas are intertwined and cannot be addressed in isolation; we therefore propose an integrative approach to problem analysis and solution, and have delineated related objectives for each area.
