Information Research

Vol. 30 No. 1 2025

Editorial – IR Jan 2025 issue

Welcome to 2025 and a new year in Information Research. 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Information Research, a major milestone in the life of an academic journal founded to provide a forum for research in Information Science (please watch our website for our call for submissions to a 30th anniversary special issue!). Notably, the journal still follows an open access publication model as it did from its inception at a time when ideas around open science tended not to be at the heart of research and publishing.

Traditionally, journals have and often continue to work with a business model, whereby authors sign over their copyright ownership to a journal upon publication of their work, and the journal then sells subscriptions to provide access to the published work. In a more recent publication trend, some journals offer an open access option, in which authors can choose for their work to be made available as an open access publication, but the author must usually pay a significant fee to the publisher to invoke this option.

Approaches to research processes continue to evolve. The recent open science movement holds that all aspects of research and its publication should be inclusive and freely accessible. For instance, UNESCO defines open science as

An inclusive construct that combines various movements and practices aiming to make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone, to increase scientific collaborations and sharing of information for the benefits of science and society, and to open the processes of scientific knowledge creation, evaluation and communication to societal actors beyond the traditional scientific community. It comprises all scientific disciplines and aspects of scholarly practices, including basic and applied sciences, natural and social sciences and the humanities, and it builds on the following key pillars: open scientific knowledge, open science infrastructures, science communication, open engagement of societal actors and open dialogue with other knowledge systems (UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, 2021).

Open access is a term long used in connection with open science. Two definitions stand out in the development of open access, which are advocated by organisations, such as the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA Statement on Open Access – Clarifying IFLA’s Position and Strategy, 2018): the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003), and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI, 2002).

The Berlin declaration provides the following definition, used internationally:

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions: The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving (Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, 2003).

The Budapest Open Access Initiative defines open access to research literature as

…its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited (BOAI, 2002).

Critically, open access publication not only supports free access to published works, but also benefits society by enabling wider access and dissemination of research for immediate and long term application to solving problems, making decisions, and building foundations for ongoing research. Open access publication is a cornerstone of Information Research. Access to content published in Information Research is open and free to everyone, including authors, researchers, and the public. There is no charge for authors to submit their work. There is no paywall for those who wish to read works published in Information Research.

Open does not mean reduced quality of research; submitted papers are peer-reviewed by our volunteer reviewers and authors are supported through the publication process by our team of volunteer Regional Editors. Information Research is also indexed widely by ACM Digital Library, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Google Scholar, INSPEC: Engineering Village, Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Scopus, and Thomson Reuters Web of Science. Open access does not mean zero cost to publication; however, our journal management team works diligently to maintain minimal production costs.

As part of our open access publication approach, in 2025 Information Research will be hosted on the National Library of Sweden’s digital platform for open access journals, Publicera. Publicera uses open-source software and offers a free interface across journals that allows editorial teams to manage the publication process (National Library of Sweden, 2024). Importantly, Publicera also supports a repository of all issues of Information Research. While this transition is happening behind-the-scenes, access to Information Research will still be found at https://informationr.net/infres; the link will seamlessly take our journal community to https://publicera.kb.se/ir when the Publicera site launches.

In the meantime, Happy New Year! We look forward to working with you in 2025.

Professor Crystal Fulton
Editor in Chief