Every day we are mercilessly bombarded by emails offering to publish our work in journals of all shades and hues: from the ‘pay for publication’ vanity publishers to the subscription-based traditional journals. So why on earth would we need another journal? What are we playing at?
As editors of this journal our long term goal is to be instrumental in enabling the development of an effective and accepted paradigm for evidence-based information systems (EBIS): providing evidence of its value and impact on information systems practice. Drawing on definitions from the health field (Muir Gray, 1997; Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, & Richardson, 1996) we define EBIS as “an approach to decision making in the design, adoption and implementation of information systems that uses the best evidence available, from both practitioner expertise and systematic research, in consultation with all stakeholders”. In 2013, we argued that to achieve EBIS the information systems (IS) community needed to adopt a seven point agenda to provide the foundations for EBIS (B. J. Oates, Wainwright, & Edwards, 2013). Table 1 develops this call and includes an eighth action ‘building the community’.