Article production changes at the ISJ and their consequences

Abstract

In late 2023, Wiley, the publisher of the ISJ, informed the editor in chief that from volume 34 no. 3 (May 2024) onwards, changes would be introduced to the way accepted papers are assigned to an issue. Prior to May 2024, the editor in chief selected articles to be included in an issue and communicated this information to a production editor, who then compiled the issue and published it. The editor would also write up an editorial introduction to that issue, with a commentary on a topic relevant to the IS community and an introduction to the articles published in that issue. Although it was common practice for the articles that had been accepted longer ago (and that had therefore been in Early View for a longer time) to be published first, articles accepted for special issues were generally held back until all articles for that special issue had been accepted. The time lag between the acceptance of the first article accepted for a special issue and the last article for the same special issue could be quite considerable, in the order of 12–24 months. Such held back articles would still be visible in Early View, with their own DOI, which meant that they could be cited accurately.

Starting from May 2024, a new arrangement is in place. First, control over which articles are included in which issue is transferred from the editor in chief to the production editor. The production editor will still select the articles that have been in Early View longest, but will not hold back articles accepted for special issues. Instead, these special issue articles will appear in regular issues, mixed in with other regular articles. Since, at the time of writing, there is a considerable backlog of special issue articles in Early View, I expect that the first couple of issues to appear following this change will consist entirely of special issue articles, but from multiple special issues. In order to preserve the integrity of the special issue, a new feature called a virtual issue will be created. Virtual issues, which will be accessible via the standard menu on the journal's home page, will then capture all the articles accepted for the special issue. Virtual issues will also have an editorial introduction, created by the guest editors of the special issue. This editorial introduction will have its own DOI and so will be citable in its own right. Indeed, it will also be possible to curate accepted articles that were not published as part of a special issue into a new virtual issue on the basis of their collective contribution to a particular part of the discourse in IS research. This may bring together articles published many years apart.

Given the above changes to the management of issue production, the institution of writing an editorial to introduce the articles published in each regular issue will cease and the nature of an editorial at the ISJ will also change. Although we will no longer use editorials to introduce the articles published in an issue, we will still publish editorials as standalone reflections or commentaries on contemporary themes relevant to the IS discipline by the editors of the journal. While some journals permit anyone to write an editorial, we will reserve the editorial for the editors (including Senior and Associate editors, and the members of the editorial advisory board) of the ISJ. Several editorials of this new type are already in progress and will appear in the ISJ in due course.