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The objective of this work is to identify the different names, positions, and roles of editorial board members (EBMs) of journals in the Information Science and Library Science (ISLS) field of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and to establish a classification of the different roles to improve communication between editors and researchers. Among the 86 journals included in the ISLS field, the first and last names, position, and institutional affiliation of each EBM were extracted from 84 journals that allowed access to committee information. The information was standardized, and the positions were classified by consensus into major groups according to the role they play in the journals. The 84 journals included 4,122 positions held by EBMs, distributed in 201 positions and classified into 11 broad categories. The majority of positions were included in the Editorial Board category (n = 1,516), followed by Editorial Advisory Board (n = 734) and Associate Editor (n = 566). The journals were published by 36 publishers, with Elsevier and Taylor & Francis contributing the most journals (11 each). The journals in which the EBMs had the highest percentage of foreign members were those published in the Netherlands. This study provides a picture of the broad distribution of the roles and terminological titles that EBMs have in Information Science and Library Science journals. Because of this diversity, it is advisable to develop a guide to good editorial practices that includes both a description of the complex range of roles performed by EBMs and a unified nomenclature for these universal positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of the situation of scientific communication in 2011 highlights some of the more relevant events, news and issues. Topics discussed include: the open access initiative and institutional repositories, semantic interoperability and linked data, use of the internet, right to information, rise of professional and academic profiles on the Web, trends in bibliometric indicators, consolidation of national scientific evaluation tools, trends observed in conferences and congresses, and the race for rankings in scientific publication between the United States, China and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impact Factor measures the average number of times that articles published in the last two years are cited in the current year. In spite of its limitations, the evaluation agencies of some countries like Spain use it in research assessment, generating a deep unease within some circles that consider its use inappropriate and indiscriminate. As an alternative to the Impact Factor of Thomson ISI, other indicators have been proposed, although none of them have achieved sufficient acceptance and widespread use to be systematically applied. Among Spanish initiatives, most notable are the Potential Impact Factor of The Spanish Medical Journals, developed by the Siniac team (Information systems and research activity indicators) from the Instituto de Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación López Piñero (Valencia, Spain), and the Índice de impacto de las revistas españolas de ciencias sociales (In-Recs), developed by the EC3 EC research group at Library and Documentation department of Granada University (Spain). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]