ITORMS Online Archive is Now Available!

ITORMS was the first electronic journal of INFORMS. Art Geoffrion encouraged the launch of this journal, first underway in 1996, and Ramesh Sharda was the founding editor. ITORMS aimed to publish original, scholarly high-quality articles and bibliographic essays that provid a perspective view of the OR/MS discipline and exploit the interactivity offered by the Internet.

Interactivity implied two dimensions in this context. First, the published articles were to be constantly updated by the authors to offer the most recent literature on the topic. Second, interactivity would allow the readers to learn not only from the paper being read, but would also provide access to other related resources available on the Internet. Although it is now common to find related material and linked papers on the web, the challenges of asking the authors to not only develop the first paper in an interactive form but also maintain a continuously updated paper on the web proved to be a really difficult task. Recall that web authoring tools in mid-90’s were quite primitive. The authors had to invest a lot of effort in getting their papers ready for ITORMS and eventually most other journals began to offer online supplements. As a result, ITORMS ceased publication in 2001.

Thanks to the efforts of INFORMS Publications staff and Ramesh Sharda’s graduate assistant Yogen Shah, all of the papers published in ITORMS volumes 1-4 are now available in PDF format through the INFORMS Publications Archive. The papers published in ITORMS provide a wealth of bibliographic information on some key topics. The authors in ITORMS include some major INFORMS leaders and pioneers. We hope that you will find this archive to be a great resource for bibliographies and perspectives on the topics covered.