Preface to Volume 13

Introduction As of 1 January 2011, I have been two years as Editor-in-Chief of Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline (InformSciJ). As Volume 13 is readied for printing, I felt the time is right to assess our progress towards achieving the goals I proposed two years ago. Progress towards Our Mission When I became Editor-in-Chief, I described the mission of InformSciJ as follows: Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline shall be the principal channel for sharing knowledge about and encouraging interest in informing across a diverse body of researchers drawn from many disciplines and nations. In many ways, we have remained true to this mission. A quick look at the articles that we have published over the past two years shows that we have continued to be very international in flavor. Historically, less than 50% of our publications have been from U.S. institutions and authors. This is unusual for any journal published in the U.S. and is a trend well worth continuing. We also continue to publish work from many different disciplines and, particularly welcome, see that many of our articles represent collaborations between authors coming from different disciplines. Such broad representation and collaboration is the lifeblood of a transdiscipline. It is all too easy for a journal to gravitate towards a particular perspective on research. It is heartening to see that the authors submitting their work to InformSciJ are resisting that tendency. I am also happy to report that the linkage between our research and the general problem of "informing" has grown much tighter over the past two years. While there was a time when InformSciJ would publish almost any high quality submission from its contributing disciplines (e.g., MIS, education, communications, philosophy, instructional technology), that is no longer the case. Today, every article we publish identifies how its topic relates to informing. I will admit that, in the past, I have been somewhat heavy handed in enforcing that such a linkage be present. Recently, however, I have found authors increasingly taking it upon themselves to relate their findings to informing without my intervention. While the journal has missed the opportunity to publish some excellent work as a result, I am convinced that our long term interests are best served by being true to the central problem that we are studying. Finally, while we have quite a ways to go before we could be considered the "principal channel" of anything, we have started to gain quiet recognition in other disciplines. In just the past few months, I have been asked to offer the informing science perspective on the research agenda of MIS as part of a panel at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS, 2010), held in Saint Louis. In spring 2011, a symposium on academic informing systems in engineering is to be held for the first time in Orlando, Florida. In both cases the parties involved approached us after becoming acquainted with work published in Informing Science Institute outlets. While informing science has yet to become a household name, it is clear that the work we are doing is starting to spread outside our tight community of scholars. Hopes for the Coming Years While I am obviously pleased that informing science continues to move forward as a transdiscipline and that InformSciJ continues to evolve as a journal, I remain convinced that there are areas where there is room for further progress. In my open letter to the informing science community of two years ago (Gill, 2009), I identified a number of different types of research that InformSciJ was eager to publish. The list I proposed was as follows: * Synthesis: An existing body of theory and observations are organized into a more cohesive whole. A literature review may fall into this category, but only if it attempts to propose a novel systematic organization for the existing literature. …