From the Editors

Welcome to the third issue of volume 33. As you will notice, this issue marks the first that no longer lists departmental editors. We have discovered that the departments themselves did not seem to keep pace with changes in research streams. We have been receiving submissions that did not fall well under any department. This made the role of departments and departmental editors rather unclear. As a result, we no longer have specific departments. Instead, we have editorial board members who assume the role of senior editor on submitted manuscripts.We are very pleased to announce that several former departmental editors will take on the role of editorial board member for a period of two years, including Randy Cooper, Dennis Galletta, Varun Grover, Sajda Qureshi, Laurie Schatzberg, Al Segars, Janice Sipior, and Antonis Stylianou. We are also pleased that several new editorial board members will be joining Data Base for a period of three years, including Maryam Alavi, Benoit Aubert, Brent Gallupe, Abhijit Gopal, Barbara Marcolin, Leyland Pitt, Blaize Reich, Detmar Straub, and Rick Watson. We are looking very forward to working with these distinguished colleagues who share with us a desire to publish high quality research.We would also like to express deep gratitude to the service of departmental editors who have faithfully helped Data Base over the past years, in some case many years. These include Dinesh Batra, Brian Fitzgerald, Mark Frolick, George Kasper, JP Shim, Veda Storey, and Vijay Vaishnavi. Collectively, they have handled a great number of submissions.We have included four papers in this issue that represent a wide diversity of theory and methodology. We are grateful to the previous editors for handing over to us enough accepted papers to complete volume 33 and part of volume 34, so that we have not had to unduly rush the review and, more importantly, revision process of newly submitted papers. Leading off this issue is an excellent assessment of research on ethics in the field of IS by H. Jeff Smith. The paper very clearly organizes and explains different ethical theories and their relevance to IS. The second paper, by Se-Joon Hong and F. Javier Lerch, reports on a laboratory study of software consumers' preferences and behaviors. The paper hypothesizes about various aspects of software components and the influence of these on customer preference and behavior. The third paper, by David Gefen, reports on the influence of trust and trustworthiness on online purchasing. Lastly, the paper by Solomon R. Antony and Dinesh Batra describes the features of a prototype tool, called CODASYS, which helps novice database designers engaged in conceptual data modeling.