This is an issue that contains a total of 7 papers, each of them interesting in its own way. 

The first four papers included in this issue are selected papers from the conferences I-KNOW and I-MEDIA in 2007 which are both part of the conference series TRIPLE-I committed to New Media Technologies and Knowledge Management. (For the conference in 2008 see http://triple-i.tugraz.at/). All of the selected papers deal with collaboration or interaction from different perspectives. Gisela Granitzer, one of the guest editors responsible for the publication of the papers, writes: 

The first paper deals with optimizing office space in order to enhance knowledge work productivity. The idea is that knowledge work productivity can be improved if the assignment of office space is done according to requirements of flexible and mobile ways of working and if employees are bundled alongside common projects and themes. The authors introduce a concept, discuss the implementation of the corresponding solution and report evaluation results.

The second paper also follows the idea of improving knowledge work productivity. However, its focus is on social software. The authors discuss the analysis of knowledge exchange processes as occurring in wikis. In the paper it is shown how the interrelationships between people, information, and events in a wiki information space can be investigated by network analysis and how the resulting structure can be used for the optimal deployment of people and information.

The third paper deals with another prominent social software application, namely weblogs. Its main focus is on answering the question which factors make a weblog successful in the sense of attracting visitors and receiving contributions. By analysing the weblog space of a well known Austrian newspaper, it could be shown that success is highly related to the activity of the user.

The fourth paper refers to web 2.0, especially to interactive advertising, but takes the point of advertisers and publishers, not of users. It discusses the selection of appropriate payment models depending on the aim of the campaign/the ad, the goal of the user, and the type of the product."

These four papers were selected and the review process coordinated by Gisela Granitzer and Klaus Tochtermann from the KNOW-Center Graz whom I want to thank cordially!

The other three papers went through the usual refereeing process. 

The paper "A Linear Time Approximation Algorithm for Ruler Folding Problem" deals with "chains". A chain is a sequence of n links whose lengths are fixed and are joined together from their endpoints, free to turn about their endpoints, which act as joints. The "Ruler Folding Problem", which is NP-Complete is to find the minimum length of the folded chain. 

The best linear approximation algorithm for this was proposed by Hopcroft et al. The authors improve on the linear approximation algorithm by demonstrating a linear time approximation algorithm using only O(1) additional space.

The next paper "Publication Bias in the Computer Science Education Research Literature" discusses publication bias in the computer science education. Publication bias is the tendency for investigations with primarily non-statistically significant findings to be withheld from the research record. Because publication bias has serious negative consequences for research and practice, the authors gathered information about the prevalence and predictors of publication bias in the computer science education literature and report on this in the paper at issue.

Finally, in the last paper "Spatial Queries in Road Networkds Based on PINE" of this issue the authors propose a new algorithm for answering CKNN (continuous K Nearest Neighbour) queries in special network databases, where the important measure for the shortest path is network distances rather than Euclidean Distances usually considered. The authors show in experiments that their approach is better than the one using the so-called intersection examination technique. 

I believe that this issue is again an interesting mix and should be of interest to many readers!

There is one further point that I want to bring to your attention at the request of a number of readers. How popular is J.UCS, and has the popularity changed since it has become a free access journal at the end of 2006?

Well, the comparison of the two years 2006 and 2007 is indeed very interesting. Have a look:
 

So what does this mean? First, even when J.UCS was not free access it was quite popular, however, the number of page views has further increased dramatically within one year by 75%. That the number of PDF files downloaded has more than tripled indicates that now, since it is free access, readers are more often not just reading the abstracts, but are downloading the full papers, afterwards. 

It is more difficult to calculate how often papers are downloaded on average, simply because even now a substantial number of the downloaded papers come from earlier issues, even from issues published as early as 1995 and 1995. To be specific, in 2007 papers from vol.1 (1995) were still downloaded 22.192 times. In 2007 papers from vol. 11 (2005) were downloaded 61.383 times. Taking the number of papers in that year into account means that papers of 2005 were (on the average) still downloaded 500 times in 2007.

A rough calculation thus yields that over the years, papers are downloaded an average of more than 3.000 times each.

Well, is this not a reason to start or keep publishing in J.UCS?

Yours sincerely,

Hermann Maurer, Managing Editor
Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
Email: hmaurer@iicm.edu