El Profesional de la Información (Special issue, Scopus Q1, wos Q3)

Deadline: July 10, 2022

Issue: v. 32, n. 1

http://www.profesionaldelainformacion.com/notas/cfp-transparency/

About this issue

Information transparency refers to different spheres of political, communicative and social life. The diverse use of the term in the digital context has turned it into a talismanic word that promises to provide answers to a range of problems and improve processes within the public and private sector. More democracy, more freedom of information and more political efficiency are expected from transparency. Since Barack Obama's Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government in 2009, there has been a significant increase in research on transparency and open data worldwide (Matheus; Janssen, 2019), new access to information standards have been adopted and transparency-based initiatives have been launched, such as the Open Government Partnership (Cuccinello et al., 2017).

Transparency can be considered to have become an ideology (Han, 2015). In a postmodernist context, transparency is interpreted as an asset in Western society (Etzioni, 2018), which advocates transforming management and accountability into information and data. However, there are certain aspects of transparency that provide a glazed view of political action, where digital platforms and social networks increasingly resemble panopticons that deform public debate. In addition, the evolution of technology is generating new needs where transparency is again presented as a problem and as a solution. Theoretical and empirical studies are therefore needed to investigate the redefinition of the term and to propose critical approaches to the transparency society in the digital ecosystem.

In the political sphere, political parties have taken up the regenerative discourse of transparency in an attempt to regain the credibility and trust of citizens. This is deeply related to the crisis of legitimacy, representation and mediatization of the digital public sphere and its effects on democracy. Civil society has also implemented mechanisms to demand and review political and institutional transparency. Transparency has also been valued as an element of great interest for information professionals, due to its potential for data journalism, fact-checking or for the promotion of ethics in the information process (Karlsson; Clerwall, 2018).

Although its scope remains difficult to estimate, the culture of transparency assumes that data should be used by citizens or any other agent for whom it may be useful and should be available in portals and data repositories that are accessible, understandable, updated and reusable (Lourenço, 2015; King; Youngblood, 2016). It is pertinent, therefore, to explore who uses this data, with what objectives and scope.

This single-subject issue aims to delve into the theoretical and empirical discourses on information transparency, analyze the initiatives and practices that characterize it and discuss its limits and possibilities in the digital context.

Topics

Research papers of an analytical, theoretical, methodological, or review nature –preferably international in scope– are invited on the following topics and lines of research:

- The society of transparency, society of trust and society of control.

- Transparent political communication. Characteristics and strategies

- Critical studies on transparency

- Limits of transparency

- Transparency policies

- Case studies and comparative studies on international initiatives and good practices.

- Mechanisms for measuring and evaluating transparency

- Perspectives on transparency

- Political discourse on transparency

- Open data portal and data journalism

- Transparency and disinformation

- Fact-checking and transparency

- Transparency and political credibility

- Dissemination of the culture of transparency

- Transparency of platforms for political and public debate.

- Transparency as an instrument of media governance.

- Lobbying transparency

- Necessary transparency reforms

- What is transparency for and what is it used for?

- Pro-transparency activism and organizations

- Parliamentarism and Transparency

- Transfer of transparency between the public and private sectors.

Guest editors

Eva Campos-Domínguez, Professor of Journalism, University of Valladolid, Spain, eva.campos@uva.es

María Díez-Garrido, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Valladolid, Spain, maria.diez.garrido@uva.es

Timeline

July 10th, 2022 - Manuscript submission deadline (articles of up to 8,000 words)

January-February 2023 - Publication date

Manuscript submission

If you wish to submit an article, please read carefully the journal’s acceptance criteria and rules for authors:

http://www.profesionaldelainformacion.com/authors.html

And then send us your article through the OJS journal manager on:

https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/submissions

Important for authors

If you are not yet registered as an author, do so here:

https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/user/register

Evaluation

All articles published in EPI are double blind peer reviewed by 2 or more members of the international Scientific Committee of the journal, and other reviewers, always external to the Editorial Board. The journal undertakes to reply with the review results.