Information systems are the software and hardware systems that support data-intensive applications. Information Systems publishes articles concerning the design and implementation of languages, data models, software and hardware for information systems. Subject areas include data management issues as presented in the principal international database conferences (eg ACM SIGMOD, ACM PODS, VLDB and EDBT) as well as data-related issues from the fields of knowledge-based systems, information retrieval, programming languages, and organizational behavior. We seek papers that improve on, and are aware of, the best industrial practice and the best academic research. The style should be clear, direct, active and even occasionally amusing. The English should be fluent. Submitted papers should motivate the problems they address with compelling examples from real or potential applications. Systems papers must be serious about experimentation either on real systems or simulations based on traces from real systems. Papers from industrial organizations that discuss the practical implementation of systems are welcome. Theoretical papers should have a clear motivation from applications. They should either break significant new ground or unify and extend existing algorithms. Such papers should clearly state which ideas have potentially wide applicability. In addition to publishing submitted articles, the Editors-in-Chief will invite retrospective articles that describe significant projects by the principal architects of those projects. Authors of such articles should write in the first person, tracing the social as well as technical history of their projects, describing the evolution of ideas, mistakes made, and reality tests. Technical results should be explained in a uniform notation with the emphasis on clarity and on ideas that may have applications outside of the environment of that research. Particularly complex details may be summarized with references to previously published papers. The IBM articles about System R constitute one example. Information Systems is establishing a firm association with leading European database conferences, in particular the bi-annual EDBT conference, and will contribute to the broader dissemination of outstanding results through occasional special issues based on expanded versions of selected papers from such conferences.