Dear Dean/Professor X:

The Association for Information Systems (AIS) is pleased to announce the publication of two, new electronic journals, The Communications of AIS (CAIS) and the Journal of AIS (JAIS). The Journal publishes rigorously researched articles on all aspects of information systems. It is a highly refereed, peer-reviewed journal. The Communications publishes articles on a wide range of subjects of interest in addition to research. CAIS Editors review all articles, and authors submitting papers may request that their submissions be peer reviewed as well.

We are writing to encourage you to consider these two journals as you would equivalent print journals in promotion and tenure decisions. We believe that eventually most academic journals will become electronic; the economics of Web publishing are much more attractive than printing and distributing paper journals. In fact, it is doubtful that AIS could afford to produce a single journal using the traditional paper publishing model. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), with approximately 80,000 members, has invested heavily in a digital library and has announced that it will end print publications at some point in the future. There are many electronic journals being published today, and more are planned.

This transition to electronic publishing raises some questions about the quality of papers published electronically and whether the review of these papers meets traditional standards. The AIS publications committee and journal editors are committed to the review policies stated above, and most important, to creating journals of the highest quality. Our objective is for the Journal of AIS to achieve a level of quality that equals the best print journals in our field, publications like Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly. The Communications of AIS stresses quality; it is also a place to publish papers that do not deal with research such as tutorials, teaching cases and innovative ideas on teaching and curriculum.

Promotion and tenure committees can be confident that AIS electronic publications are refereed with the same rigor and have been subjected to the same high standards as the traditional printed journals in our field. Faculty should have no reservations about treating refereed articles in CAIS and JAIS as the equivalent to the best print publications.

Thank you for your interest; please feel free to contact either of us to discuss the AIS journals further.

Sincerely,