The Dawn of a New Era? Australian Library & Information Studies (LIS) Researchers Further Ranking of LIS Journals‪.‬

As reported by Smith & Middleton (2009), the Australian library and information academic community undertook a significant project in 2007-8 to meet the requirement of the forerunner to the Australian federal government's Excellence in Research Australian (ERA) policy initiative, the Research Quality Framework (ROF), that the Australian LIS researcher community rank the .journals they use. It was also noted in this paper that the list, as submitted, was not perfect and that if another opportunity arose, amendments should be made. The opportunity to amend the ROF journal list presented itself in the second half of 2009, when the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) was contacted by the Australian Research Council's (ARC) ERA office to check progress on a revised list. Concurrently; this author was contacted by the coordinator of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) FoR code 08 journal listing process being undertaken by Computing Research and Education Association (CORE). Code 08: Information and Computing Sciences, includes Library and Information Studies under the code 0807. As with the RQF exercise, CoRE again decided to allow the Australia LIS profession to work out their journal listings independent of parallel work by CoRE on the same project. CoRE would then absorb the Australian LIS journal list for 0807 into its final listing for 08. ALIA, through its Research Committee, accepted the opportunity to revise the LIS journal list. The profession was also asked whether or not it wished to rank conferences using the same methodologies and definitions, as this would be the practice of the main CoRE parties.