By IQ Editors | June 30, 2026
Dear IASSISTers,
Welcome to IASSIST Quarterly Vol. 50 No. 2 .
It was nice to see so many old and new (some attending for the first time) colleagues at the IASSIST 2026 Virtual Conference - the Best IASSIST Ever (even if virtual)! It is always exciting to learn about the innovative work that is being done by members of this community.
We would like to encourage those who presented their work at the conference to turn their conference presentations into a paper and submit it to IQ . This will allow you to share your research and expertise with a wider audience.
We had several excellent submissions to this year’s IASSIST Conference Paper Competition. If you could not attend the conference, you may have missed the announcement about the 2026 Competition’s winner:
- How impact factors shape actual open data practices in sociology and political science journals
- authored by Anja Perry and Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen.
The authors use a unique dataset of social science and political science researchers that allows them to identify whether respondents who have self-reported practicing open data have indeed practiced it. Using this dataset allowed them to distinguish between the influence of journal characteristics and of personal characteristics on actual open science practices.
Congratulations to this year’s winning authors! The award for IASSIST Conference Paper Competition winner includes free registration for the first author to the following year’s IASSIST conference, in addition to bragging rights.
We are grateful to Meryl Brodsky, the competition coordinator, and Sophia Lafferty-Hess, last year’s winner, who joined the journal’s editors in reviewing the competition submissions.
We encourage all the paper competition authors to submit their manuscripts to IQ, and we look forward to publishing them in a future IQ issue.
We would like to take this opportunity to remind you that effective June 1st, 2026, we have implemented a Data Policy in IQ , requiring that all manuscripts submitted to the IASSIST Quarterly include a Data Availability Statement.
Although we had hoped to include an in-memoriam article for Walter Giesbrecht in this issue, that has been delayed to a future issue.
The three articles in the current issue, IQ 50(2), share a common focus on improving how research data and knowledge are organized, documented, and made accessible. Collectively, they underscore the growing importance of standardized, well-documented, and thoughtfully curated data ecosystems in enabling rigorous research, facilitating knowledge sharing, and supporting the evolving role of information professionals.
In their article, Introducing Open Data Format – A platform-independent, non-proprietary, metadata-enriched, multilingual data format for tabular data, Tom Hartl, Xiaoyao Han, and Knut Wenzig present the Open Data Format (ODF), a platform-independent solution for tabular data. ODF integrates structured, multilingual metadata directly into the data file using the DDI-Codebook standard, enabling seamless access to both data and its documentation within common statistical environments.
Diana Magnuson traces the development of the IPUMS Bibliography from 1994 to the present. In the article The IPUMS Bibliography: Harnessing organizational knowledge, the author demonstrates the benefit of harnessing organizational knowledge within an organization and suggests the potential for leveraging organizational knowledge to support robust social science research.
In A surfeit of sources: An annotated bibliography of data management books for librarians, Kristin Briney and Abigial Goben provide a retrospective of books for an academic librarian audience that have been published in the past decade about data management, including both foundational and continuing education materials. In addition to summarizing publishers, price and availability, they provide a topical overview for each book and a brief critical summary. Concluding with recommendations for the most useful titles for targeted audiences, the authors address trends, gaps, and limitations of the present corpus.
We hope you enjoy reading and wish you a relaxing summer.
Ofira Schwartz and Michele Hayslett, June 2026
Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. Authors may take a look at the instructions and layout . We are available via e-mail for questions, or proposals for special issues: editor.iassistquarterly ( at ) gmail.com.