Today

Since the necessary formalities have now been completed, the Electronic News Journal on Reasoning about Actions and Change (ENRAC) has become a published journal. It will be issued monthly; each issue will contain the accumulated and edited contents of Newsletters during the same month, produced using Latex to generate a postscript encoded file that has a journal-like "look and feel".

The purpose of creating this News Journal is:

• to offer convenient reading to those subscribers who do not follow the Newsletter on a day-by-day basis, but who wish to catch up from to time with what is happening in our area;

• to facilitate for everyone to look back at past discussions;

• to make it possible to cite past discussions in future articles. In particular, we believe that reference to ENRAC discussions can sometimes be appropriate in the initial ("problem statement") and concluding ("related work") sections of regular research articles;

• to provide a forum where short notes can be published rapidly. We think then of notes of only a few pages, that is, significantly shorter than the Research Notes of the A I Journal. Until now there has not been any reasonable way of publishing such short notes.

Past issues of the News Journal contain several examples of using short notes, for example for panel position statements, long discussion contributions, and amendments to previously published articles. Examples and counterexamples for proposed approaches to actions and change would also fit well as short notes. We invite all subscribers to make use of this new style of communicating research results.

In order for the News Journal to represent a complete coverage of Newsletter discussions, we are editing and formatting News Journals for the past months. Each issue is dated by the month during which its contents were actually circulated in Newsletters and posted on the web. Editing has now been completed for issues up to and including the discussions of October 1997; issues for the subsequent months will follow shortly.

Important: if you have contributed to the discussions during the past months, please check in the presently posted News Journal editions that your contribution has been rendered correctly. It will be fixed in a couple of days.

All News Journal issues are accessible via the web page for the ENRAC Newsletter by clicking "Back issues". The easiest way to obtain them is that you download them to your own printer, but a limited edition will be printed by Linkoping University Electronic Press and distributed on an exchange basis.