What is published in our journals cannot change unless we do
European Journal of Information Systems (2009) 18, 189–191. doi:10.1057/ejis.2009.21 What is published in our journals? Complaints I have just come back from a conference where there was a ‘Meet the Editors’ Panel’. At the end of the meeting there was a discussion session, which showed some widespread lack of understanding about the process of getting an author’s paper published. This is in spite of my article four years ago that went into the issue quite thoroughly (Paul, 2005). The reader is recommended to visit this article if it has not been read yet. I have also experienced some fairly robust comments from rejected authors, which give me the impression that talking about getting a paper published would be worthwhile. Hence this editorial. First though, an unhelpful view of publishing is to distinguish editors and their teams from authors. It is as if the former came down from Mars, and as alien life forms were making life difficult for the latter. In reality, we are all part of the same community, from which some of us have been selected, or volunteered, or through some other democratic selection process, have taken on these review roles. So, if we as a community do not like anything about what is published in our subject, then it is up to all of us to do something about it, not just editors. For example: Complaint: it takes too long to get a paper into print, sometimes three or more years. Responses:
Research Quality Matters
This paper discusses issues that arise when considering what is meant by the expression 'research quality' in universities. Popular measures of research quality are often based on determining the quality of a published journal paper, or of using these to publish journal league tables based on the assumption that the journal quality represents the quality of the papers published by the journal. This paper argues that measuring the quality of a research publication cannot be done. Therefore a journal league table also has no meaning. The issue of the use of the surrogate of Journal League Tables is used to exemplify some of the issues that need to be addressed by the community to avoid the inequality quality trap. A number of suggestions are made to establish a sounder basis for dealing with real quality properly. This is not an information systems crisis paper or similar nonsense, but one possible positive way forward.
Using Fuzzy-Delphi technique to determine the concession period in BOT projects
BOT projects are affected by several risks and uncertainties. One of the most important issues in this type of contract is to determine the length of concession period considering these uncertainties. The previous studies have developed several models to determine the concession period. However, the uncertainties are not taking into account in most of the previous works. Moreover, none of the previous researches has the capability to aggregate the opinions of different experts being involved in a project regarding the values of the uncertain input parameters. In this research, a Fuzzy-Delphi technique is implemented to determine the length of concession period considering uncertainties. Using the proposed Fuzzy-Delphi technique, the values of different uncertain factors affecting a BOT project is determined considering opinions of a group of experts. The NPV value is calculated considering the resulted aggregated values of uncertain input parameters. Finally, the concession period is determined using fuzzy approach. A case study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology. It is shown that the concession period is determined more effectively using the proposed approach.