eddology • by edd dumbill, An open access journal for Big Data

I’m happy to be the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Big Data, a new peer-reviewed publication offering an integrative approach to the subject of big data.  In advance of the publication of our first issue in February 2013, I wanted to outline why Big Data exists, and why I believe it’s important this journal be published open access.  As a discipline, big data is broad. It brings in diverse topics from areas such as database design, machine learning, statistics, visualization, social media, policy, privacy and ethics. All these things come together to underpin the work being done by today’s data-centric organizations...  Hitherto, all these areas have their own journals and conferences, and different academic communities. By bringing the areas together, I hope to foster dialogue between the various technical and user communities. For example, issues such as fine-grained user control over privacy will require engineering at the database level to efficiently accomplish.  Secondly, in big data there is a short cycle from R&D to production. In fact, many of the influential papers in the field, such as Google’s MapReduce paper, were published after the work described had been running in production for some time. This underlines that a successful forum for the area must draw together industrial and research contributions, and take a pragmatic hands-on approach. Method, professional and industrial experience are as important as results..."

A similar model in my mind as I edit the journal is the Communications of the ACM, which melds experience with research articles.