Panels

The Future of IRIS

The landscape of scholarship and publication demands is shifting. In the Information Systems (IS) research community, the Association for Information Systems (AIS) has been active on promoting the need to improve rigor of conducting research, the importance of theory development within our own discipline, and also the importance of promoting high quality journals.

On the other hand the funding bodies; i.e. the governments in the Nordic countries, are adjusting their funding principles towards a higher emphasis on the quality of the research outputs. In Finland, for example, the national ranking system is already directly linked to the funding of the universities. Similar developments are in progress in Norway and Denmark. Therefore, it becomes vital to the IRIS community how our conferences are ranked in the different national systems. In Finland, e.g., the universities will see a very significant drop (90%) in the government based funding for the non-ranked research outlets in year 2016.

These aspects impact the research landscape that we work in today and the objective of this panel is to spark a debate that can provide guidance for the community and its leadership of how we wish to impact this development and how we perceive our role and position in this wider research community.

The panel starts with short presentations from the panelists on their view on the current situation and near future prospects of the impact of the research ranking systems at national and/or global level. This is followed by a discussion with the audience.

Panel participants:

Prof. Tuure Tuunanen (Univ. of Jyväskylä), Moderator

Prof. Judith Molka-Danielsen (Molde University College)

Prof. Karin Axelsson (Univ. of Linköping)

Prof. Samuli Pekkola (Univ. of Jyväskylä), Member of The Finnish Publication Forum

Prof. Jan Pries-Heje (Roskilde University)

Prof. Virpi Tuunainen (Aalto Univ), Vice-President of Publications for the AIS