Microsoft Word - AJIS Vol 19.docx iii Editorial March 2015 We are often reminded that we live in an era of rapid change, and the changes that we all have been instrumental in ushering in are often called disruptive changes as a result of their effect on the previous status quo. AJIS is not exempt from these changes. Since 1993, when AJIS first appeared, changes have been made to its format, it began open access electronic publication including mounting all articles back to Volume 1 Issue 1. Not many journals can say that. Having said that, AJIS still has some aspects in which it could improve. In 2015 we address several of those. Firstly, the Volume numbering has been brought into alignment with calendar years. Previously Volumes spanned two years – the first issue came in the second half of one year and the second issue came in the first half of the following year. The final issue for 2014 was 18(3), and from now Volumes will match calendar years with this year being Vol 19, 2016 Vol 20 et seq. This now allows for a change which should greatly benefit our community of authors. From Volume 19, AJIS moves to progressive publication of articles. The practice of having separate issues in a Volume was a compromise required in the days of hard copy publication. An annual Volume makes sense as a convenient linear collation. Having issues is a trade-off between releasing a single annual Volume and the consequent delay in the appearance of an article, and breaking up the Volume by having multiple issues to allow a more speedy appearance. Electronic publication removes the need for issues, as it allows for the immediate appearance of an article once accepted and copyedited. While I have always advocated this, the need was dramatically brought home to me when releasing Issue 18(2). The following week an article went into copyediting, and was consigned to the locker for six months to appear in Issue 18(3)! That helps nobody. From Vol 19 ordinary Research Articles will appear as soon as they are accepted and copyedited. Special issues will become special sections of AJIS, and all articles in a special section will appear simultaneously once the Section Editors have cleared them. Given these changes, it is almost trivial to mention that AJIS will revert to an A4 format, which is more convenient for electronic reading, machine readable copyright advice appears at the article level and QR codes now appear with articles for ease of locating the journal entry for the article. The latter changes move AJIS towards best practice in the area of open access journals. A new style has also been adopted, as I hope you have noticed, to provide a more clearly defined and more easily readable presentation of AJIS articles. I would like to acknowledge the considered input received from Dr Craig Parker on the design of the new style. Dr John Lamp AJIS Editor-in-Chief Deakin University iv Copyright: © 2015 John W Lamp. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and AJIS are credited.