President's Message

After a relaxing summer, your executive has been very active.

It was extremely pleasing to welcome six new Academy Fellows from six different economies of Denmark, France, Turkey, Switzerland, New Zealand, and China. All are worthy members who will add a lot to the organization. Please extend a welcome to them.

We are pleased to announce that Bao Jigang and his team at Sun Yat-Sen University have graciously offered to host the 2017 Academy conference. The venue will be their new four star hotel overlooking located on the University's campus in Guangzhou. It should be a great event and we look forward to having as many Academy members and is possible.

The Executive Committee outlined an ambitious agenda that we wish to pursue over the next two years. The main goal is to extend the outreach of the Academy. To that end, I am pleased to announce that two major publishers (Elsevier and Sage) have agreed in principle, to allow us to post full journal articles on our website on an open access basis, making them available to the broader academic community. Details are still being finalized, but it appears that we will be able to post papers on a rotating basis, making them available for six months or so.

We are also currently developing a template to aid in the creation of a series of power point slides or lectures that we can also post on the website. The goal of this initiative is to have the individuals who developed some of the core concepts that underlie the development of tourism principles, theory and practice, to prepare specific lecture notes and power point aids to ensure that the material they have developed is presented in an accurate manner. It has been my experience that many junior staff rely on textbooks and other secondary or tertiary sources to present core concepts. Many do not have access to the original documents and as such tend present materials in a superficial and sometimes inaccurate manner. Academy members developing teaching materials from their own works will help alleviate this situation and ensure that what we have produced is presented accurately. Please stay tuned for more details.

We have also been working to update the Academy website and will hopefully have some sample sites for members to comment on in the next few weeks.

The various ad hoc committees that were established at the Greece conference to look into membership revisions and the journal are working apace.

Developing a Wikipedia entry for both the Academy and individual members is proving to be a very frustrating process. We have submitted the application of number of times and it has been rejected for reasons that seem to be rather frivolous. The draft entry can be found at (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:
International_Academy_For_The_Study_of_Tourism). A number of Fellows have offered advice, but we still are having difficulties getting the listing approved. Please contact the executive if you have any further suggestions.
I wish everyone and enjoyable (northern) autumn or (southern) spring.

Best wishes,

Bob
bob.mckercher@polyu.edu.hk