Editorial Board Accepting Papers from Multiple Disciplines

The editorial office of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality—a multidisciplinary journal focused on the interface of social, computer, and statistical sciences—has migrated to Cornell University, where it is now managed by Lars Vilhuber at the Labor Dynamics Institute.

In 2008, Cynthia Dwork of Harvard, Stephen Fienberg of Carnegie Mellon, and Alan Karr of RTI issued a call for papers on privacy and confidentiality to be published in a new journal—the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality. The novelty of their call was that it was addressed to multiple, usually separate, constituencies. Statisticians, computer scientists, lawyers and social scientists, health researchers, and survey designers have all responded to the call over the years and been published in the journal.

In the editorial of the first issue, US Census Bureau Chief Scientist John Abowd, Kobbi Nissim of Georgetown University, and Chris Skinner of the London School of Economics noted that “Gargantuan online services gather petabytes of data on search queries, online purchases, email exchanges, […] many data users from all of the fields listed above perform analyses that are conditioned on the privacy and confidentiality protections imposed on their work without all the means to assess the consequences of those measures on the inferences they have made.” Those concerns continue to resonate today.

For nearly seven years, Fienberg was the editor-in-chief of the journal. With his passing in 2016, the journal needed a new home. Vilhuber has assumed the role of managing editor and migrated the journal infrastructure to a new system (Open Journal System). Dwork, Karr, Nissim, and Abowd continue to serve on the editorial board. The Edmund Ezra Day Chair at Cornell University contributes funding to the journal’s operating budget.

The journal is open access, and there is no submission fee. Academics and practitioners from all domains are invited to submit their papers.