EDITORIAL

 

Editorial: Transitions

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Philip Machanick

Department of Computer Science, Rhodes University, South Africa. sacj.editor@gmail.com

 

 

Introduction

As 2018 reaches a close, we have some transitions.

It is the last to be worked on by Production Editor James Dibley, who moves on to a new job that does not allow the time to work on SACJ. James did excellent work in converting the journal over to a new single-column format that is designed to be a lot easier to read online than the old two-column format. His LATeX skills will be much missed.

We also have a change in the editorial panel; Emma Coleman leaves us and is replaced as an Information Systems editor by Caroline Khene. I would like to thank the outgoing editor for her service and welcome the new one.

 

Commercial versus Free Publication

SACJ joined the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA platform in July 2018. SciELO aggregates South African open access journals. Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) manages SciELO SA, with funding from the South African Department of Science and Technology. SACJ was invited to join the platform. The practical effect is that the journal is easier to discover, in line with our policy of joining indexes that readers typically use to find quality material, such as Scopus.

SciELO (http://www.scielo.org/php/index.php) at time of writing includes journal publication sites in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Uruguay and Venezuela, with Ecuador and Paraguay in the process of developing sites.

We have been approached by a commercial publisher to host and run the journal and we will give this some thought. Since the journal has a reputation for quality, this gives us bargaining power to ensure we do not lose its character to commercialisation. We would like to maintain our open access policy, ensure that authors retain copyright and that the existing Creative Commons license applies to new material. We would also require that SciELO be able to continue to republish and our other publisher Sabinet will still be able to publish as long as they want to, for continuity.

Going the commercial publishing route will have some advantages - we will not longer need a production editor, we will no longer need to maintain our own systems and we will be more visible through the publisher's marketing. However, we will not rush into this move as there are potential downsides too.

The ongoing debate on the merits and demerits of commercial publishing is a long one and is far from over.

 

In this issue

In this issue, we have 2 research papers and a viewpoint. The research papers are:

• Chiyangwa and Ernest Mnkandla: "Agile methodology perceived success and its use: The moderating effect of perceived compatibility"

• Lee Son et al.: "Designing a Natural User Interface to Support Information Sharing among Co-Located Mobile Devices"¹

• Leppan et al.: "Process Model for Differentiated Instruction using Learning Analytics"²

Ian Sanders, one of our Computer Science editors, provides a Viewpoint in "Publishing in Good Journals". Anyone without experience of journals publishing should find it useful.

 

 

1 This paper extends a SAICSIT 2016 conference paper.
2 This paper was originally submitted for the special issue on ICT in Education (vol. 29, no 2, OCtober 2017).