Editorial

Journal Update from EBLIP9

Lorie Kloda

Editor-in-Chief

Associate University Librarian, Planning and Community Relations

Concordia University

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

2017 Kloda. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one.

This past June, the 9^th International on Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference (EBLIP9) was held at Drexel University, in Philadephia (see the conference website http://eblip9.org/). This issue of the journal contains a feature highlighting some of the presentations and posters from the conference, as well as an editorial from the two conference co-chairs, Danita Nitecki and John Wiggins.

At the conference, it’s been a long-held tradition for a member of the Editorial Board to give a presentation on Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP). The short presentation offers an overview of the journal’s editorial team, provides some usage and acceptance rate figures, and highlights recent achievement and upcoming changes. For readers who were not in attendance, I’m providing a summary of the presentation here.

In addition to the journal’s Editorial Board members, EBLIP has 4 editorial advisors, 65 peer reviewers, 10 copyeditors, 14 evidence summary writers, and 4 writing assistants. The journal is in its 12 year of publications (with this issue, that will make a total of 48 published issues). The journal publishes several types of publications, including editorials, research articles, review articles, evidence summaries, classics, using evidence in practice, commentaries, news, and features.

An average issue includes 16 peer reviewed articles. Research articles, review articles, evidence summaries and classics all undergo double-blind peer review. The acceptance rate for research and review articles in 2016 was 39%. In 2016 it took an average of 73 days to peer review a submission, and 187 days from submission to publication for those that were accepted.

EBLIP is indexed in LISA, Library Literature, LISTA, Google Scholar, Scopus, the Informed Librarian Online, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). As I reported in my editorial in 12(2), EBLIP recently was approved in the reapplication process of the DOAJ and received the DOAJ Seal, which recognizes a journal’s commitment to open access best practices.

As of June 2017, there were 4,487 registered readers of EBLIP. The journal’s pages were viewed a total of 273,128 times between May 1, 2016 and April 30, 2017. At that time our Twitter account (@eblip) had 1,180 followers. The EBLIP website visits come mainly from the United States (34%), followed by the United Kingdom (13%), Canada (12%), and Australia (7%). The remaining 18% of visits are from people located in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Malaysia, Sweden, and South Africa.

The journal has several initiatives underway, which you can expect to hear more about in the coming year. These are: a data sharing policy, a controlled vocabulary for indexing, and peer reviewer and editor recognition through a partnership with Publons (https://publons.com). I look forward to sharing the outcomes of these initiatives, as well as hearing from you about what you think the journal should be doing.