Dear Member,

First of all, a warm welcome to the new year – let us make it one of success for sustainable development and growth for ISDRS!

To begin the year, we have two announcements. Firstly, news and requests regarding the 2019 Best article award and secondly, an invitation to volunteer to be on the ISDRS audit committee 2020-2023. 

Best Article Award 2019

In 2020 ISDRS will hand out the Best Article Award for the best sustainable development publication of the previous year for the third time.

You are all warmly invited to nominate 1 article each, published in 2019, according to the criteria specified below.

The nomination should be accompanied by DOI number. Members can nominate their own work, but this will be noted in the selection procedure. Please spread the word to friends and colleagues and invite them to participate – they only have to register as followers, with no strings attached, to be able to join both the nominating and later the voting.

A key element of the process is the ISDRS jury which selects the shortlist of papers for voting from those nominated. The Award Jury reviews the suggested articles briefly and nominates a shortlist of 5 papers: each Jury member reviews a batch of the suggested articles, assessing these on a 1-10 points scale. Each article is assessed by 3 Jury members.

The 5 nominated articles will be made available on a special website page of the ISDRS homepage, allowing for registration, submission and voting. The voting will be online, by all members and followers, up to 3000 professionals. They will determine the winner: each member will be able to select the best article to her opinion, resulting in a ranking of papers.

While grateful for those members who already declared their willingness to serve on the jury, we would still welcome additional jurors  (who need to be paying members). Please consider becoming a member of the jury and inform the chair and the secretariat that you are available as a juror.

For your information, these are the criteria the jury will base its decision on:

1.            The article has been accepted and published (including online early view versions) in the preceding year in a scientific peer-reviewed journal, accepted by commonly used scientific literature databases (like ISI, Scopus, etc.);

2.            The articles should be in English;

3.            The content of the article addresses a sustainable development topic with an inter-disciplinary or transdisciplinary perspective;

4.            The article makes a well-defined contribution to academic debates and shows awareness of the complex nature of sustainable development;

5.            The article offers or at least provides hints for possible solutions to sustainability problems;

6.            The article enables positive societal impacts, bridging between science and society.

 To visit the ISDRS Best Article 2019 page click here

To submit an article click here

Thank you in advance for your support

Pauline Deutz, ISDRS President

Joachim H. Spangenberg, Jury chair

ISDRS Audit Committee

The ISDRS is a not-for-profit organisation, as such relies on members (i.e., fee-paying) to volunteer for the undertaking of tasks such as our annual audit. The Audit Committee annually reviews the financial report of the ISDRS and is given access to all information required for the execution of this task. In accordance with our charter, two or three members, who are not Board members, and have been members of the ISDRS for over one year, form the audit committee.

We therefore invite you to nominate yourself to be a member of the ISDRS Audit Committee. This position will be for the duration of 2020 to 2023. Once nominations are received, our members will vote for their favourite candidates via online voting.

Please contact our assistant, Charlotte Mummery (assistant@isdrs.org) if you are interested in this position.

Best wishes,

Sigurd Vildåsen, ISDRS Treasurer