By mhayslett | May 2, 2018
Welcome to the first issue of Volume 41 of the IASSIST Quarterly. It has taken extra time for this issue to appear. The cause of this is not that we have been extra lazy. The paradoxical cause is that a great many people have been extra busy. Thanks to the team of people in the editorial group of the IASSIST Quarterly and - not least - the great help from Sonya Betz working as Digital Initiatives Projects Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries in Canada, the IASSIST Quarterly has now moved to the Open Journal System (OJS) at the University of Alberta. We believe this shift is going to benefit all stakeholders of the IQ. It is mostly the inner workings of the production that has changed. As a potential author you are still very welcome to mail the editor.
The first issue of Volume 41 (2017) at the same time becomes the last issue of that volume. In order to get close to the real time we are catching up by jumping three issues. Therefore, this issue is labelled as Vol. 41 1-4 of 2017. Next issue will be 42 1 of 2018.
The new issue of IASSIST Quarterly is placed as the ‘Current’ issue in the Open Journal System on the web at:
https://www.iassistquarterly.com
We hope you will enjoy the new open journal system. We also encourage you to ‘Register’ as an author on the website. See more about submitting a paper for the IQ under ‘For Authors’ and ‘Submissions’.
The archives of the IQ issues are transferred to the new IQ website. As the website is new there might be things concerning the IASSIST Quarterly that might not have been updated both on iassistquarterly.com and iassistdata.org. The website for the IASSIST organization continues, it is only the IQ that is moving to its own website. Please report errors and confusions, thanks.
The Vol. 40 (2017) is labeled ‘The data is out there - just like the truth!’
The first article concerns data for published articles in journals. The paper ‘Journals in Economic Sciences: Paying Lip Service to Reproducible Research?’ is by Sven Vlaeminck and Felix Podkrajac. Sven Vlaeminck works in research data management for ZBW – German National Library for Economics / Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in Hamburg, Germany. Felix Podkrajac is an academic subject librarian at the Library and Information System of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Some economic journals have a ‘data availability policy’, and Vlaeminck and Podkrajac are presenting a study of the compliance of actual research to such policies.
The second paper in this IQ issue is titled ‘Designing the Cyberinfrastructure for Spatial Data Curation, Visualization, and Sharing’ by the authors Yue Li, Nicole Kong, and Stanislav Pejša. All three authors are working at Purdue University Libraries as respectively GIS analyst, assistant professor, and data curator. They argue that spatial data is an important component in many studies and has promoted interdisciplinary research development. In their development project at Purdue they have streamlined spatial data curation, visualization and sharing by connecting the institutional research data repository with the library’s GIS server set and spatial data portal.
The last paper is also addressing data management. The paper ‘Research Data Management: A proposed framework to boost research in Higher Educational Institutes’ is a collaboration between Bhojaraju Gunjal at Central Library of the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, Odisha, India, and Panorea Gaitanou of the Department of Archives, Library Science and Museum Studies, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. They begin with an abstract of Research Data Management (RDM) issues where they promise ‘a detailed literature review regarding the RDM aspects adopted in libraries globally’.
Taking good care of data is worth writing articles about and is also worth writing books about. In this issue we present two book reviews: ‘Databrarianship: The Academic Data Librarian in Theory and Practice’ by Lynda Kellam and Kristi Thompson is reviewed by Chubing Tripepi of Columbia University, while ‘The Data Librarian’s Handbook’ by Robin Rice and John Southall is reviewed by Ann Glusker of The National Network of Libraries of Medicine.
Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, and from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution. We permit authors ‘deep links’ into the IQ as well as deposition of the paper in your local repository. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the session participants, and will be readily available on the IASSIST website at https://www.iassistdata.org.
Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout: https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions.
Authors can also contact me via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you.
Karsten Boye Rasmussen, November 2017