Dear all,
i am very happy for your reaction to our initiative and i do believe that we can make something different and important. The obvious reason for this is the fact that almost every scientific-acadmic community worldwide is thinking about the one-way road of open access, open research etc.

I decided to boost this initiative for one reason that maybe it sounds stupid. Recently in the European Conference of Information Systems (ECIS 2005) I attended to one session entitled "Meet the editors" whre 5 editors of 5 top IS journals presented their publication strategy. I was very courious to see their approaches and thinking. So after a hard 20 minutes shaking of my hand they gave me the opportunity to ask my question. and I just asked the obvious:

"What about open access? What about the fact that 3 years is required for a publication in an A journal like MISQ etc". The result was NO ANSWER. They didnt even said a word as an answer!!! This was the momment that I felt that we have to act!!! Because rigorous journals get their value from the contributors that need just support in the developmental process of their ideas and the highest possible dissemination of their research.

Recently one more fact forced me to act. As the editor in chief of 3 Journals I face the anxiety of publishers to cover the expanses of the publications (the fixed costs plus marketing etc), so in one journal we have to pursue the X number of subscribers in the next year in order to have a sustained "business model" that will help us to continue contributing to our communities. It is almost evident that printed publications  suffer from the subscribers syndrome which i like to call the non-flexible pricing mechanisms of publishers. In a next mail i will explain further what i mean as non-flexible pricing mechanisms or the misconception of pricing.

I will try very brief to point out some bullets that provide a vision for the open research society:

1) We need to establish our Society as an "Association". So we have to develop our by-laws and maybe we have to make this in a legal form for many reasons. This is an issue of discussion.

2) It is critical to extend the real meaning of OPEN RESEARCH. To this direction my very best friend Amjorn Naeve from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has expressed many aspects and is one of the most important contributors of our vision. Very soon i will ask him to contribute to our debate. (http://kmr.nada.kth.se). In a way this must be done in combination with what i call Humanistic TechnoManagement. In simple words it would be very interesting to see our society under the general title OPEN SOCIETY which means that all of our efforts are concentrated on actions that proove how technologies and research can be applied for the common wealth. Think about a TECHNO-LEAD  "GREENPEACE like" OPEN SOCIETY which cultivates new social sensitive objectives. This is for me a life time dream and objective and i think we can pursue it. This means that we can establish national branches of this OPEN SOCIETY and to go for worldwide actions through emerging technologies. We could try this at the beggining in a X number of countries. I think that it is quite easy to try it in 25 countries until the end of the year.

I have developed a draft document on such a model of organization but we have to put our creative thinking in order to adress a real wordwide need for the developemnt of our OS.

3. After this discussion for the vision and the organization of O(R)S we have to think about our communication means. I think that we can act in many different directions. Here are some thoughts:


-> ORS must help people who are interested in the launch of OPEN RESEARCH journals. This means that we could provide them our know how and infrastrucutres as well as our high quality standards for publications. This is maybe a longterm objective. In the short term I think we must concentrate to some priorities:

-> We must go ASAP to the launch of the International Journal of OPEN (RESEARCH) SOCIETY. This will help us to communicate and to develop our scope trough essays, vision papers, non typical as well as full research papers. This is for me one of the first actions.

-> We must decide in the next month 3 key journals for our society. The one must be the OPEN RESEARCH on IS, a journal that very soon we will promote and deliver a CFP fior the inaugural issue. I have several other relevant titles on my mind but we can reach to a final decision on this.

Of course all these things require resources. I am very optimistic on this and  we can discuss what is required at the beginning.

From the 100s of mails i received one made me really happy. At the beggining there was the expression of interest to our initiative by a very good guy. At the bootom of the mail it was left the initial forward of one of his collegues stating with my announcment. In the communication of the two friends was told:
"It sound like mad but this is something we were thinking and discussed many times. The success depends on the people behind it:)".

So my friends we will SUCCEED!!!

The MAD miltiadis:)

PS: for the operational issues of our journals we can conclude to a great review and publication model. To be continued...