Informing science

Informing science is a transdiscipline that was established to promote the study of informing processes across a diverse set of academic disciplines, including management information systems, education, business, instructional technology, computer science, communications, psychology, philosophy, library science, information science and many others. Its principal unit of analysis is the informing system, a collection of informers, clients and channels that has been designed or has evolved to serve a particular informing need. The organization created to advance the informing science transdiscipline is the Informing Science Institute (ISI), whose founder, Eli Cohen, proposed the need for field in his article 'Reconceptualizing Information Systems as a Field of the Transdiscipline Informing Science: From Ugly Duckling to Swan' (Cohen, 1999). The ISI presently host an annual conference (Informing Science & Information Technology Education (InSITE)), publishes seven academic journals, and—through its Informing Science Press—has published for dozens of books. Both its journals and books are open access at no cost online, as well as being available for purchase in print form. Informing science is a transdiscipline that was established to promote the study of informing processes across a diverse set of academic disciplines, including management information systems, education, business, instructional technology, computer science, communications, psychology, philosophy, library science, information science and many others. Its principal unit of analysis is the informing system, a collection of informers, clients and channels that has been designed or has evolved to serve a particular informing need. The organization created to advance the informing science transdiscipline is the Informing Science Institute (ISI), whose founder, Eli Cohen, proposed the need for field in his article 'Reconceptualizing Information Systems as a Field of the Transdiscipline Informing Science: From Ugly Duckling to Swan' (Cohen, 1999). The ISI presently host an annual conference (Informing Science & Information Technology Education (InSITE)), publishes seven academic journals, and—through its Informing Science Press—has published for dozens of books. Both its journals and books are open access at no cost online, as well as being available for purchase in print form. Informing science came into being as a transdiscipline around 1998. During that year, two key events occurred. The seminal article that defined the field (Cohen, 1999) was accepted for publication and the field's flagship journal--Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline—was launched. The theme of Cohen's (1999) article was relatively simple, and resonated with many in the global academic community. In brief, he argued that many different disciplines are studying the same types of issues: teaching programming, communicating effectively, designing systems to provide information to clients, and so forth, as illustrated in Table 1. This situation was not only inefficient from a research standpoint, but it also tended to promote research silos in which researchers from one discipline were unable to benefit from the research of colleagues in other disciplines. In the long run, he asserted that such a situation would be highly deleterious to our overall understanding of these processes. He expressed particular concern with the situation in his own research discipline, management information systems, which was already becoming fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to practice.