Well, almost. JoDI, the Journal of Digital Information, founded by Wendy Hall and Gary Marchionini, has been publishing papers online since 1997 with Cliff McKnight as the Editor-in-Chief. JoDI is a peer-reviewed online journal organized into several themes, including digital libraries, hypermedia systems, hypertext criticism, information discovery, information management, social issues of digital information, and usability of digital information.
JoDI started out at the University of Southampton, where its original pages are still archived, with the first paper entitled “The World Wide Web – past, present and future“ by Tim Berners-Lee; the paper was a transcript of his July 17, 1996 presentation to the British Computer Society when he was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship. Not a bad way to start an online publication!
So twelve years on, the journal has a new home in the Texas Digital Library, and a new Editor-in-Chief in John Leggett. While the mission has not changed in principle, the new boss is shaking things up a bit, appointing new theme editors and trying to rejuvenate the journal. The goal is to get good work published and for JoDI to be seen as a valuable resources for a number of communities.
With this preamble, I am pleased to announce that I will be the new editor for the Information Discovery Theme. I guess this was John’s way of getting back at me for annoying him at all the Digital Libraries conferences. I was attracted to this position for several reasons
- by the open nature of publication: who doesn’t want their papers to be findable and downloadable in these days of Google-driven lit searches?
- by the possibility of shaping the Information Discovery Theme to make it into a home for high-quality journal publications around the area of information retrieval, with a particular emphasis on human-computer interaction.
- by the opportunity to work with John.
We are still working out the details, which will be published on the journal web site and, as appropriate, on this blog.
In the meantime, please don’t mind if we appear sullen or shy. We’ll get over it.
JoDI was actually founded by Wendy, Cliff, Gary and John after several conversations at several conferences in several bars. Wendy graciously agreed to seek funding and partnership with OUP and we twisted Cliff’s arm to be the EIC.
Thanks for clarifying that bit of history, John! I had no doubt there was lubrication involved, but it was hard to tell from the old pages what the process of getting JoDI running was like.
[…] there are other models for open-source publishing that don’t involve authors’ fees. JoDI, for which I am a Theme Editor, is one such […]