Georgina M. Gómez
Chief Editor

The International Journal of Community Currency Research renews itself. In this Summer Issue of Volume 20 it introduces a number of changes, including a lighter design and easier to navigate features for those that prefer to read articles on the screen. IJCCR welcomes suggestions to make the template more user-friendly and volunteers to take responsibility for the formatting stage of the publication process.

Furthermore, in collaboration with the libraries of the Universities of Delft and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. IJCCR articles will now have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). The metadata of each article will be stored in association with a DOI name and a location, in this case the URL at IJCCR.net, where it can be found. A DOI allows researchers to uniquely identify databases, electronic documents, and so on, facilitating their dissemination and identifications in academic hubs such as Research gate, Academia.edu and Google Scholar. The DOI for a document is permanent, whereas its location and other metadata may change. In other words, referring to an online document by its DOI provides more stable linking than simply referring to it by its URL, because if its URL changes, the
publisher needs only to update the metadata for the DOI to link to the new URL. Articles in past IJCCR volumes will gradually be given a DOI. The Editorial Board of IJCCR regards this new coding as a step forward in making the journal more visible and professional. We are working towards including the IJCCR in indexed academic databases in the near future. Please continue submitting your research for publication in the IJCCR, as the number of articles and their regularity are two criteria that will be considered.

These changes follow the milestone announced in June, 2016, when the IJCCR became the official publication of the newly created Research Association on Monetary Innovation and Complementary and Community Currencies (https://ramics.org/). A group of social scientists from around the world believed that it was time to form an organization that would enhance research on the myriad of monetary innovations and non-monetary exchange modalities that have been emerging globally in the last decades. They were convinced that systematic academic research was of crucial importance to acknowledge the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the practitioners and the grassroots organisations that launched most of these initiatives. IJCCR is a critical resource for newcomers and potential researchers on complementary currencies and other alternative exchange modalities, defined in a broad manner. Apart from present-day community and complementary currencies, RAMICS defines its field of studies broadly and includes historic currencies, monetary plurality and other monetary innovations such as cryptographic currencies. RAMICS focuses in particular on socio-economic innovations on the monetary system which contribute to economic diversity, social cohesion, democratic participation and environmental sustainability. The association already welcomes new members who want to join and support the initiative.