From the editors

Welcome to the final issue of 2006 and to our final issue as Co-Editors. We recall being very happy that the outgoing editors in 2002 left us with sufficient papers to fill most of the issues of 2002. We too are pleased to be able to do the same for the new incoming editors, Tom Stafford and Patrick Chau, in 2007. The first three issues of 2007 are already slated and we expect that there will be some acceptances come through in early 2007 that will fill the final issue. There are many excellent articles currently under revision and we hope that the authors will turn around their revisions as quickly as possible.In preparing this editorial, we returned to our first editorial, written in 2002, to critique our own service over the past five years. In our first editorial, we stated as part of our agenda the establishment of an electronic submission and tracking system. Early in our term, we in fact had discussed, and received funding for, the implementation of an online system. However, we also began to realize early in our term that the submission rate to Data Base simply made the system unnecessary. The rate of submissions was easily manageable with an email-based system. On our end, we saw disadvantages to a full online system: impersonal submissions, impersonal requests to reviewers for reviews, impersonal reminders for reviews, lack of clarity of "whom" to ask in the event of some question. Presumably the advantages were that the system should save somebody some time, but in reality, what slows review processes is not the email exchanges with a managing editor, but the screening of papers, the lining up of reviewers, the actual time until the reviews are received, and then of course the time it takes to revise a manuscript. Hence, in our view, the online system ultimately would not have shortened the time it took to perform reviews, but would have only made the process a bit less personal.Another initiative we outlined in our first editorial concerned an emphasis on review papers. We have been very happy with the reviews that have been submitted to, and published in Data Base, since our term begin. These include: Powell, Picolli and Ives review on Virtual Teams Dibbern, Goles, Hirschheim, Jayatilaka review on Outsourcing Elgarah, Falaeeva, Saunders, Ilie, Shim, and Courtney review on Data Exchange in Interorganizational Relationships and a fourth review paper, on security, is scheduled for publication in early 2007. We hope that authors will continue to submit review papers to Data Base. Review papers make big contributions to the field and are very helpful to those who want a broad view of the research done in a particular area.Some other initiatives for which we are still quite excited and hope to see them continue in the future include our international expansion in which we added Senior Editors from Spain, France, and Germany who accept submissions in Spanish, French, and German respectively, and conduct the entire review process in the authors' native language. Only after acceptance is the article then translated. In our view, this lessens the perceived deterrent of submitting to a "foreign language" journal in that the authors do not need to incur the cost and time of translating their work until after it has been guaranteed acceptance. We are very grateful to Jose Luis Roldan, Emmanuel Monod, and Jens Dibbern for taking on these innovative and important roles.The many Special Issues that have been published in Data Base since 2002 have been critical in helping provide a steady stream of excellent articles to publish. One challenge that Data Base and indeed many journals face, is that of keeping the pipeline of accepted articles full. Without the special issues, we would not have had enough regular articles to publish. We are very grateful to the many Special Issue Editors for their fine work. We do hope that the idea for a Research Note special issue we published this year will be something that next editors will continue on either an annual or bi-annual basis. This special issue attracted many excellent submissions.We owe many people well-deserved and hard-earned thanks. Laurie Schatzberg was an enormous resource in helping us learn the ropes. She walked us patiently through the technical editing and always provided much appreciated emotional support and encouragement as well. Irene Frawley at ACM has been consistently helpful, providing friendly reminders and updates, and always answering our questions very quickly. We have very much enjoyed working with Irene. We are grateful to the work of Fred Niederman and Thomas Ferratt in bridging the SIG-MIS research with the SIG-CPR research. Fred has overseen special CPR sections each year for Data Base and Thomas took on the important SE role overseeing CPR related submissions. Our support staff at Baylor: Tim Kayworth, Gina Green, and Denny Kramer: as well as our newly appointed (as of January 2006) Managing Editor Andy Schwarz have been excellent. Finally, but certainly not least, we are very grateful to our dedicated Senior Editors who have made it a pleasure for us working with Data Base. We have been very impressed with the quality of the reports drafted by our Senior Editors. In hindsight, we probably should have expressed this sentiment to our board more frequently. As it is, this last editorial provides us with a final opportunity to express our extreme gratitude for their service.In closing, we wish our new incoming editors Tom Stafford and Patrick Chau great success with Data Base. Our readers might be interested in the editorial selection process at Data Base. We can only say that while we encouraged various researchers in our academy to apply, we ultimately were not involved in the proposal evaluation or selection process. Thus, we are not in position to leak any information or steal any thunder from Tom or Patrick. The Data Base readership along with us will simply have to wait until next year.Thanks again to all the readers of Data Base, and members of SIG-MIS, for support for the journal. We strongly believe that Data Base is an important journal for IS research.