Dear Dean/Professor X:

The Association for Information Systems (AIS) is pleased to announce the publication of
two, new electronic journals, 7he 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. CA/S Editors
review all articles, and authors submitting papers may reguest that their submissions be
peer reviewed as well.

We are writing to encourage you to consider these two journals as you would eguivalent
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 guestions about the guality 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
guality. Our objective is for the Journal of AIS to achieve a level of guality that eguals
the best print journals in our field, publications like /nformation Systems Research and
MIS Ouarterly. The Communications of AIS stresses guality; 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 CA/S and JAIS as the eguivalent to the best print
publications.