Dear JISA Reader,

It's our great pleasure to welcome the start of JISA as an Open Access Journal. Following a decision of the JISA Steering Committee, from now on we will be part of SpringerOpen: all JISA papers will be freely accessible to anyone across the globe with a Creative Commons License and the copyright of the papers will remain with their authors.

We are very happy with the new configuration of the journal as it democratizes access to the information, which we expect to be valuable for our community. It will also help with respect to publicizing the journal and will have a positive influence on the journal impact factor.

We start the new year with three interesting papers. Fonseca et al. address the mapping of virtual networks onto substrate networks; Ranjan et al. presents the MediaWise cloud content orchestrator; and Riedel et al. describe how data replication services enable data-intensive computing of terabytes or even petabytes of data emerging from the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) projects.

A happy new year to all of you.

With best wishes,
Fabio Kon and Gordon Blair