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    ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER ON  REASONING ABOUT ACTIONS AND CHANGE        
Issue 98016             Editor: Erik Sandewall             10.2.1998
Back issues available at http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/njl/
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                    *********  TODAY  *********

        ---  NEWS JOURNAL BECOMES OFFICIAL PUBLICATION  ---

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.


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 This Newsletter is issued whenever there is new news, and is sent
 by automatic E-mail and without charge to a list of subscribers. 
 To obtain or change a subscription, please send mail to the editor,
 erisa@ida.liu.se. Contributions are welcomed to the same address.
 Instructions for contributors and other additional information is
 found at:   http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/njl/
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