This issue is the first of ISJ's 25th volume and, as is customary on such anniversaries, this editorial reflects on the life of the ISJ and on its future. The editors-in-chiefs have periodically analysed the nature of the papers that ISJ publishes, most recently in the valedictory editorial by David Avison and Guy Fitzgerald in volume 22 (Avison & Fitzgerald, 2012). This looked at papers in the first 21 volumes. Here we update this analysis by reflecting on the content in the last three volumes and consider how we need to develop the journal further. The last three volumes, 22-24, comprised 64 papers. ISJ has moved from four issues a year to six and the number of papers published in each volume has increased from around 17.3 to 21.3. The move to six issues a year was occasioned by increases in good quality submissions and a desire to ensure that the time between acceptance and publication was shorter. In these 64 papers, we see many of the publication trends identified in earlier papers exacerbated. The 64 papers were produced by 177 authors (some authors produced more than one paper, of course) with an average of 2.77 authors per paper. Remarkably, only 4 single authored papers were published (6.25%) cementing a decreasing trend of 32.4% single authored papers in volumes 1-17 and 13.6% in volumes 18-21. Papers with four authors are now quite common, and some have five or six. While single authored papers are often preferred by tenure and promotions committees, the trend in IS, or at least in the ISJ, is for multi-authored papers. ISJ is continuing to becoming more global, with the authors of papers more geographically diverse. Avison and Fitzgerald identified the reduction in UK papers in the ISJ, the plateauing of contributions from North America and the increases from Asia-Pacific. UK contributions in the most recent volumes have fallen from 16% to 14.2%. North American contributions drop from 40.8% to 36.7%, while Asia-Pacific authors now comprise 20.3% of the total (up from 18.9%) and Europe (excluding the UK) hosts 28.2% of contributors (up from 22.3%). Taken together, the increase in author numbers and their greater geographical spread means that more papers are co-authored by people from different geographical regions. Indeed, within regions there is a sense that co-authors work in different countries, and even within countries, co-authors are seldom co-located in the same institution – and where they are, they are often not in the same academic unit. Given the global nature of IS, and the multiple perspectives upon it that need to be brought to bear, this diversity appears healthy. In a different aspect of diversity, the gender balance of authors continues to become more even. 35% of the most recent paper authors are female, compared to 14.4% in volumes 1-6, 19.8% in volumes 13-17 and 28% in the volumes 18-21. As in the earlier analyses, virtually all the most recent authors are academics. Fewer than 4% of papers are co-authored by practitioners, down from 7.1% in the last analysis. While, we are improving diversity in many respects, we are not attracting (or publishing) papers by practitioners. If this reflects less research, or poorer research, being undertaken by or with practitioner co-authors then this is a concern for a discipline such as IS. The trend over time has been for more ISJ authors to be located in business and management schools or departments. Most recently, this percentage has increased again – from 43.3% to 46.3%. The percentage in IS departments has dropped again to 31.6%, while that from computer science has increased from a very low base to just over 5% and the number from ‘other’ has nearly doubled to 13%. However, caution needs to be exercised over the home academic units as the data is taken from the addresses of authors. Some authors may be in a department, within a school that is part of a faculty that is itself an element of a college which is a unit of an institution. Thus, someone may be in an IS department that is within a business school. The address they choose to use may refer to either (or both) – but perhaps reflects their preference for the unit they would most like to be associated with. Likewise, there is a diversity of titles for units that make classification problematic – departments of Tourism Information, Health Administration, Social Informatics, and Business Education for example. So, what does the ‘typical’ authorship of an ISJ paper look like? There will be multiple authors, of both genders who are unlikely to work in the same institution or even in the same country and whose departmental home disciplines are different. What these co-authors are researching remains diverse too. While ISJ has been known as an interpretivist journal around a third of papers are positivist. About half the papers are qualitative. In terms of the 10 questions and challenges that Avison & Fitzgerald (2012) posed in their final editorial, the ISJ has, recently, published more papers from under-represented regions, it has improved the gender balance of authors, and it has remained generalist in its outlook. We have published more papers, more issues and more special issues. We can continue to do better in these aspects, and other challenges remain. We would like to be more risk taking, we have plans for additional sections to reflect different aspects of IS and of research, and the journal needs to reflect the need that the IS community has identified for the impact of its research to be better understood and better communicated. We will take up these issues throughout this year. When we assumed the role of editors-in-chief in July 2012, we introduced a new era for the Information Systems Journal as management of the journal shifted to us from the founding editors. In our inaugural editorial we indicated our desire to retain the commitment to publishing high-quality research that is consistent with the founding mission of the journal. That is, the motivation for founding ISJ was a desire to publish work that pushed out the boundaries of acceptable methodology for conducting information systems research. Since the methodological norm in 1991 was quantitative and positivist research, ISJ was established to be a publication outlet for qualitative interpretive and later critical research. Going forward into the next 25 years we are committed to the founding principles of ISJ, as we interpret them today. First, we will continue to publish high quality research that is informed by the interpretive tradition. This means that while positivist and quantitative research is welcome, and indeed, has been published in significant quantity, the production of numbers and the testing of hypotheses are not sufficient. The paper must also ‘tell a good story’ with the literature review, the analysis of data, and the discussion. Second, we will continue to publish work that pushes out the boundaries of acceptable information systems research. But in 2015 this is less about methodology than it is about content. Therefore, while we continue to welcome and publish research about information system development and management, we also welcome and want to publish research on emerging topics of relevance to the information systems field. This would include, for example: papers about societal/environmental influences on information systems; research about information systems professionals; and the consequences of information systems – intended and unintended, positive and negative. We also encourage research on the effect of new technologies – such as 3D printing, ubiquitous computing, wearable computing, and the Internet of things – on information systems development and practice. Finally, we welcome research that will explore a future in which information systems are an ever more important component. For instance, information systems are increasingly embedded in organisations, in societies and even in people. However, these embedded systems and their implications for privacy, convenience or control are rarely subjected to in-depth investigations. Throughout 2015, as part of the ISJ 25th anniversary, we will publish, in addition to our regular papers and special issues, a set of invited papers. We invited all those who published in our very first volume, and some others, to consider submitting a paper for volume 25. Many accepted our invitation. It is remarkable how many of the people who published in ISJ 1(1-4) are still active in the field. This may reflect the youth of the discipline, the youth of those working in it 25 years ago, that ISJ attracted submissions from very young academics, or that continual reductions in pension entitlements globally have meant many people have continued working for longer than they had anticipated. The first paper in this issue is by Lee, Thomas and Baskerville who argue for the restoration of the IS artifact in design science. They do so by unpacking the concept of the IT artifact. In doing so they remind us that what is being designed is not the IT artifact, but the IS artifact, which consists of three artifacts: the technology artifact (the hardware and software), the information artifact (the message) and the social artifact (human actions). They illustrate the primacy of the IS artifact in design science with material from three cases. The result is to restore the idea that the study of design in information systems needs to consider the design of the entire IS artifact, not just the technology artifact. This result encourages an expansion in the use of design science research methodology to study a broader set of artifacts. Three cases serve as a reminder that the component parts of the IS artifact - the information artifact, the technology artifact, and the social artifact - all interact and combine into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the second paper, Myers and Baskerville contribute new methodological insights in their argument for active engagement by IS researchers during the conduct of ethnographic work. While most ethnographic research in information systems has been based on the traditional anthropological model in which the ethnographer observes but does not actively seek to change the situation, they argue for the incorporation of action research perspectives into ethnographic research. They do so by describing two existing types of research that relate ethnography and design. The first type is ethnography for design, in which the results of the ethnographic study of some context informs the subsequent design process. The second type is ethnography to study design. Here, the ethnographer is studying those who are engaged in the design activity. They contrast these with the third type, design ethnography, in which the ethnographer is actively engaged in the activity of design, production or introduction of artifacts. Hence, the researcher is intervening in changing the context being researched. The researcher is actively engaged with others in a future-oriented way: designing, creating, innovating, and improvising artifacts that may affect the cultural and social values under study. Hence, rather than being a passive observer of changes in human behavior or organizations and human society more generally, the design ethnographer becomes an active participant in shaping these changes. In the third paper of this issue, Alter passionately engages with the concept of the “IT artifact” and trenchantly argues that it is no longer useful, it has outlived its usefulness. IT artifacts are ubiquitous in research, yet there is a huge amount of inconsistency in the way the term is used, with the result that it no longer means anything in particular at all. Alter traces the way the definition of IT artifact has morphed since it was first used by Orlikowski & Iacono (2001) to definitions in 2013 that are so loose and all-encompassing as to be essentially meaningless. Alter also suggests that cousins of the IT artifact, notably the IS artifact, the sociotechnical artifact, the social artifact and the technical artifact, simply confuse the issue further, each overlaps to some extent with other artifacts. In order to fill the yawning void that will be created when the IT artifact is retired, Alter proposes three ways forward, the most ambitious of which develops Alter's own notion of IT-enabled work systems (Alter, 2013). As Alter notes in his conclusion, retiring the IT artifact will help to enhance the rigour of our research because we will not use terminology that is meaningless. Indeed, we will also focus on more useful research that is meaningful.
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