EDITORIAL

 

Editorial: A new era for SACJ

 

 

Katherine M. Malan

Department of Decision Sciences, University of South Africa. sacj.editor@gmail.com

 

 

SACJ joins Khulisa Journals

The first editions of SACJ (then under the name Questiones Informatics) were printed on paper. In 2010, SACJ took a bold step from the traditional printed journal and published its first online issue as an open-source journal. December 2023 comes with another change, as the first SACJ issue to be published from the platform hosted by Khulisa Journals. With our URL in place (https://www.sacj.org.za/), we trust that the transition will not be too disruptive for our authors, reviewers and readers. In the transition period (as we complete submissions currently under review on the old site and build up the archive of back issues on the new site), the current site, http://sacj.cs.uct.ac.za - kindly hosted by UCT's Department of Computer Science - will stay open, but not for new submissions. We are happy to have a formal association with the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) via Khulisa Journals, and look forward to fruitful collaboration with our fellow South African scientific publishing community.

Reflecting on the move from printed to digital media is appropriate this month for another reason. Prof. Jan Kroeze, recipient of the SAICSIT Pioneer award in 2022, will be retiring at the end of the month as Professor from the School of Computing, UNISA. As part of his handover, he will be driving a boot-load of printed issues of SACJ to Potchefstroom to add to the collection of the North-West University Library. These are from the personal collections of Prof. Derrick Kourie, Prof. Judith Bishop, Prof. Ruth de Villiers and Prof. Jan Kroeze. We are grateful for this donation to the NWU Library, in so doing ensuring that we have a full collection of the printed issues of our journal safely archived in one place. Thank you also to Mr. Nestus Venter and the Science Library at NWU for hosting the collection.

 

In memory of Conrad Mueller

To start the issue, we honour the life of Conrad Mueller - another point of synchronicity as we reflect on the history of SACJ. After some digging in historical records, I have deduced that Conrad served our community as the first production editor of SACJ (when it was called Questiones Informatics). An extract from the editorial of Volume 6, Number 1, 1988, in Figure 1 confirms that Conrad preceded Quintin Gee, whom Derrick Kourie erroneously names as the first to be responsible for the "onerous task" of professional typesetting of the journal (Bishop, 1988; Kourie, 2010). The editor at the time of the 1988 issue, Judith Bishop, refers to Conrad as a "pioneer" with his tools being an IBM mainframe and a laser writer.

 

Research in this issue

We have a wide range of research papers included in this issue, across different topics and from different institutions in South Africa:

• Spectrum-Aware Transitive On-Demand Routing Protocol for Military Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks by Phaswana and Velempini, Department of Computer Science, University of Limpopo.

• The Influence of Change Management Process on Cloud Transitioning by Miyen and Marne-wick, Department of Applied Information Systems, University of Johannesburg.

• Virtual learner experience (VLX): A new dimension of virtual reality environments for the assessment ofknowledge transfer by Steynberg, van Biljon and Pilkington, School of Computing, University of South Africa.

• Online Platform Privacy Policies: An Exploration of Users' Perceptions, Attitudes and Behaviours Online by Mugadza and Mwalemba, Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town. This paper is part of a special issue of extended papers from the SAICSIT 2022 conference handled by guest editor, Prof. Aurona Gerber. Another two extended papers from SAICSIT 2022 will be published in the next issue of SACJ.

• Challenges of Implementing Enterprise Resource Planning and the Role of Knowledge Management: Evidence from National Youth Development Agency by Zuma and Sibindi, Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, University of the Western Cape. This paper was presented at the Knowledge Management South Africa Imbizo 2023, handled by Prof. Hanlie Smuts.

In addition to the peer-reviewed research papers, we also have two Viewpoints from our colleagues in war-torn Ukraine. As in the last issue of SACJ, we are playing a small part in supporting the work of researchers from the Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine by disseminating their work.

 

References

Bishop, J. M. (1988). Editorial. Quastiones Informatica?, 6(1), 1. https://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/23824/1988_QI_06_01_De%20Villiers_von_Solms.pdf        [ Links ]

Kourie, D. G. (2010). The South African Computer Journal: 1989 to 2010. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 65(2), 107-111. https://doi.org/10.1080/0035919x.2010.510664.         [ Links ]