Dear readers of Electronic Markets,

You may be aware of the close ties between our journal and the Bled eConference. Both have become of age and passed their adolescence with Electronic Markets in its 23rd year and the Bled eConference in its 26th. The vivid relationship is based on a mutual support of both the conference attendees and officers on the one hand as well as the members of the Editorial Board and authors of research articles in Electronic Markets on the other. In particular, most annual meetings of the Editorial Board have been hosted in the picturesque surroundings of Lake Bled. Two special issues (see editorials from Schmid & Buchet 2000 and Zimmermann et al. 2007) and several papers for our general research section have been developed from the conference for publication in Electronic Markets. In order to reflect this relationship the editors of Electronic Markets together with the officials of the Bled Conference decided to enter into a strategic partnership in 2006.

We value the Bled eConference community as a strong supporter of our journal and are honored that two colleagues followed our invitation to summarize the main research streams at the conference. In their paper, Andreja Pucihar from the host university of the Bled eConference and Roger Clarke who has served in many functions at the conference almost from the beginning identify the three phases of IS research in relation to “e”: EDI (1988–1995), eCommerce (1996–2004), and eInteraction (2005-now) (Clarke and Pucihar 2013). Their research is based on the remarkable total of 824 double-blind reviewed research papers which were published at the conference between 1995 and 2012. The paper tells the compelling story of the Bled eConference and also takes a critical look at how research topics were (not) taken up by practitioners. From this perspective the authors provide some insights into how conferences and reviewing policies may be designed to foster relevant and rigorous research. We are convinced that the results of this paper will serve as a reference for future research in the field of electronic business, as well as for the discussion of research design in our discipline. To support this purpose, this paper will also be available via the open access option and we look forward to its broad dissemination.

In addition the invited paper provides an introduction to the articles in this special issue which presents a selection of papers from the Bled conferences in 2011 and 2012. All six papers show the scope of the topics that were relevant for the Bled conferences. They are more or less directly related to the interorganizational application of information systems (IOS) and vary regarding their perspective from interaction with consumers, the governance of security, methodologies guiding research stakeholder analyses in IOS and the link to enterprise information systems. We are glad that one of the papers, i.e. the article on “Dynamic stakeholder interaction analysis: Innovative smart living design cases” is also freely accessible via Electronic Market’s SpringerLink website (Solaimani, Guldemond and Bouwman 2013). The papers are introduced by the guest editors in their separate preface which was jointly written by Research Track Chairs of the Bled eConference in 2011 (Ulrike Lechner) and 2012 (Hans-Dieter Zimmermann). Both guided and directed an intensive review process where the conference papers received fundamental revisions. We would like to thank the guest editors, all reviewers, and, of course, the authors for their efforts.

This issue with enhanced conference papers also presents an opportunity to reflect on the publication of accepted conference papers in Electronic Markets. The discourse among researchers at conferences provides a unique chance for direct, face-to-face interaction and allows also young researchers to make them as well as their results known within the academic community. Conferences provide aspiring researchers with the chance to present their finding in a less rigorous environment. Moreover, due to shorter review processes with less iterations conferences allow for faster publication of research results. Therefore, the academic discourse facilitated by conferences, such as the Bled eConference, is as critical for advancing academic work as the feedback received during the repeated review cycles which occur when articles are developed for publication in a journal.

While we welcome submissions which originate from conference publications, it is strongly emphasized that authors need to substantially advance their research. Ideally, these enhancements of approximately one third of the paper do not only relate to comments from the reviewers at the conference, but also to the feedback that was received from the presentation at the conference. Authors should take advantage of journal articles which offer more space and provide more opportunity to develop the motivation, the literature review, the research framework, and, in particular, the findings and conclusions. To avoid any cases of plagiarism, Electronic Markets requires that submitting authors refer to the underlying conference publication and provide a brief summary of the enhancements made compared to the conference publication. Since the journal publication builds on the conference publication, the underlying data set should be improved when necessary, but can be reused (see also Albers and Sureth 2012).

We hope that you consider Electronic Markets as an outlet of your work in the future. It is our goal to improve papers accepted for the review process together with the authors to become publishable. Finally, we also invite conference track chairs to organize a special issue as Guest Editor in Electronic Markets based on their conference track. The theme of the conference should fit in the scope of Electronic Markets and the team of guest editors should include members from various continents. The special issue will be published with a minimum of three accepted papers - which of course have to meet the requirements described for conference papers - otherwise the accepted papers will be included in the general research section. As always, the editorial team of Electronic Markets is open for your feedback and will be glad to provide guidance in case questions arise.

Best regards from Leipzig and St. Gallen,

Rainer Alt

Hubert Österle