In a traditional address to readers, editor-in-chief Tatiana Ershova writes:

“The August heat of 2022 made me remember my favorite poets:

August – asters, August – stars … (Marina Tsvetaeva).

There is something beautiful in summer, and with summer there is something beautiful in us (Sergei Yesenin).

August. Peaches and candied fruits and mowing in honeydew (Federico Garcia Lorca).

That August, like a yellow flame Breaking through the smoke, That August rose above us, Like a fiery seraph (Anna Akhmatova).

The latter turned out to be very relevant: this year, 12 years after the heat of 2010, August again brought us not only warmth and beauty, but also fires. This issue of our journal was made up just in the smoke from the burning Ryazan forests. By evening the wind blew and carried the smoke away from Moscow. This time the capital was not greatly hurt, but from the reports of recent days it became known that it was burning not only in the Ryazan region, but also in other Russian regions: Yakutia, the Komi Republic, the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, Nizhny Novgorod, Ivanovo and others. By the end of August, the area of ​​forest fires in Russia amounted to more than 120,000 hectares. According to Federal Forestry Agency, one of the main causes of fires was a violation of fire safety rules.

Digital technologies, specifically unmanned aerial vehicles, can help to effectively fight fires. Rossiyskaya Gazeta writes: “Experts consider the use of drones to be a truly innovative way to monitor and analyze the forest, aтв also a driver of digitalization of the forest industry.” If in 2020 there were no more than two hundred devices of this kind, then by 2024 more than two thousand UAVs will be used only for the protection of forests from fires. We hope that the production of drones, which are in demand in various areas of the Russian economy, will soon reach the required scale. And our editors are already thinking about a new thematic heading like “Digital Technologies for Life Safety” and filling it with scientific and analytical content. We welcome submissions on this subject.

The current issue is dominated by publications under the headings “Information Society and Law” and “Information Society and Media” (3 articles each), as well as “Education in the Information Society” (2 articles). It is gratifying that such important sections as “Social and Economic Aspects of the Information Society”, “Culture in the Information Society” and “Foreign Experience. The international cooperation” have been also filled by articles. Among our authors there are representatives of Kazan (1), Moscow (11), Nizhny Novgorod (1), Omsk (1), St. Petersburg (2) and Vladimir (1). Of these, 8 have the degree of candidate of science, 4 – doctor of science, two of which have the academic title of professor. We also included in the issue the papers of one PhD student, one Master degree holder and four authors without a degree, which passed the review and the necessary revision.

Since March of this year, there has been a noticeable increase in the flow of materials sent to the Information Society journal. In this regard, we will impose even more stringent requirements for scientific content, literary quality and design of articles.”

All content of the issue is available on the journal’s digital platform.

The full version of the 6th issue for 2020, in which 7 articles were published, can be viewed on the journal’s website.

In the past year, we published exactly 50 articles by various authors from Astrakhan, Volgograd, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, Nalchik, Novosibirsk, Orel, Perm, Pskov, Rostov-on-Don, St. Petersburg, Saransk, Stavropol, Tomsk, Yakutsk – we have not yet had such a coverage of Russian territory. We had four foreign researchers from Baku, from the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. Among the authors of this year’s articles there were 46 candidates of science and 21 doctors of science. There were also graduate students, specialists without academic degrees, and even students for whom our journal is by no means closed, if they write together with their mentors or send interesting and high-quality independent works.

The most popular topics were “Digital Economy” (8 publications), “Socio-economic aspects of the information society” (6), “Education in the information society” (6), “Information society technologies” (6) and “Information society and the media” (5), which naturally reflected the general situation that influenced our life in 2020. This was followed by the headings “Human in the information society”, “Information society and state power”, “Trust and security in the information society” (3 publications each), followed by “Culture in the information society”, “Science and innovation in the information society”, “Information society and law”, “Measuring the information society” (2 publications each). The topics “Fundamental research in the field of information society” and “Foreign experience. International cooperation” were populated only by one publication each. But the topics “Leaders of the information society”, “Information society: policy and drivers”, “Healthcare in the information society”, “Sports and tourism in the information society” remained empty.

The above statistics suggest that we need to purposefully work with scientists and specialists from different fields of knowledge, especially those that remained uncovered this year. We also plan to work more actively with foreign authors, publishing their works in English. We have already taken the first step on this path in the fifth issue of our journal and we are not going to stop there.

In this issue we have posted ten articles by authors from Baku, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Moscow and St. Petersburg, dedicated to various aspects of digitalization.

This is the impact of digital technologies on the development of international trade (section “Digital Economy”), and a possible strategy for the safe and responsible implementation of artificial intelligence based on a human-centered approach (the section “The Human in the Information Society”), and the creation of the informational and technological basis of Justice of Peace in the region and the use of big data analytics to model the public sector of the future (under the heading “Information Society and State Power”).

The section “Education in the Information Society” examines the problems and prospects for the development of literacy in the field of working with data as one of the basic digital competencies, the use of digital educational technologies during the coronavirus pandemic, and the introduction of digital technologies in military education.

The thematic section “Trust and Security in the Information Society” has been supplemented with interesting material on the use of folklore to identify and prevent the propaganda of crimes and violent acts.

The section “Information Society and Mass Media” contains an article on the transformation of print media in accordance with the business models of the platform economy. And in the section “Measuring the Information Society”, based on the results of market monitoring, the benefits associated with the use of digital technologies in Russian manufacturing enterprises are investigated. For the first time in the history of the journal, we have published an article in English and intend to continue this practice.

All materials of the issue are freely available on the new digital platform of the journal (texts primarily in Russian with English metadata and abstracts).

The third issue of the journal for 2020 has been published. It is completely open to reading on a new digital platform (in Russian, with metadata and abstracts in English).

The article by Inna Andreyanova from Pskov State University shows the key problems and prospects of digital transformation of higher education.

The active introduction of ICT into vocational training provides a mechanism for the digital transformation of the educational system. An article by Anna Rozhkova (Pskov State University) is devoted to the development of digital rights and competences of workers in the regions of Russia; alternative forms of employment (temporary, part-time, distance, e-employment and self-employment) are analyzed.

The work of a group of authors from the Institute for System Analysis of Dmitry Chereshkin, Grigory Roizenson and Vladimir Britkov analyzes artificial intelligence (AI) methods from the point of view of their applicability for risk analysis in socio-economic systems (SES). It is proposed to link SES properties, AI methods, as well as risk measurement methods within the framework of building a unified classification.

In the work of Felix Ereshko, Viktor Medennikov and Vladimir Kulba, a scientific approach to the formation of a unified digital platform of the agro-industrial complex based on an appropriate mathematical model is considered. As part of mathematical modeling of the digital platform of the agro-industrial complex, digital standards were obtained that are common to all sectors of the economy. The proposed unified digital platform and digital standards represent cross-cutting management technologies in the agro-industrial complex.

Andrey Kuznetsov and Elena Nikitina (Perm State Research University) consider some problems of Russian universities in connection with the massive use of information technologies and the transition to the digital economy and information society.

Evgeny Bryndin (Research Center “Natural Informatics”, Novosibirsk) present a work, which shows that the implementation of artificial intelligence by a robot is based on the criterion of preferences for accumulated professional and behavioral creative innovative competences and skills.

And, finally, in the work of Alexei Potemkin (Academy of the Federal Security Service, city of Orel), a neural network architecture is proposed for processing heterogeneous information. The proposed architecture includes separate inputs for textual, graphic, tabular, graph and meta information. An experimental study of the efficiency indicators of the developed architecture for solving the problem of identifying information operations on the Internet is carried out.

The second issue of the journal for 2020 has been published. It is completely open to reading on a new digital platform (texts in Russian with English metadata and abstracts).

The work of a group of Moscow authors Tatiana Ershova, Alexander Raikov and Yuri Hohlov is aimed at building a system for monitoring the needs of the real economy in digital technologies and platforms. An approach to formalized needs assessments based on the terminology of the user domain and automated real-time market tracking is proposed. The article by Walfried Treyer, Doctor of Technical Sciences, examines the place and forms of placing digital platforms in the organizational structure of the “digital economy”. Doctor of Economics from Nalchik Gumar Batov explores the peculiarities of the formation and development of the digital infrastructure of the North Caucasus Federal District.

The article by Maxim Yurevich, Natalya Ekimova and Evgeny Balatsky is devoted to the study of new promising trends in economics related to digitalization processes (the use of big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning). Natalia Elchaninova investigates the legal issues of ensuring the security of critical information infrastructure.

The article by Anastasia Dobronravova and Varvara Chumakova discusses the features of media literacy of rural residents of Russia based on data collected in 5 field expeditions to rural areas in 2012-2018 (Kostroma region, Rostov region, Republic of Tatarstan, Irkutsk region, Tambov region).

The article by Yulia Lektorova and Andrey Prudnikov presents the experience of a regional high-tech company, one of the world’s top 100 startups, in the field of communication promotion of an IT product in a highly competitive environment.

The scientific article by Anna Shirokanova and Olesya Volchenko is devoted to the problem of the attitude of residents of European countries to the state monitoring of the public space online and electronic personal correspondence.

In 2020, the publication of the scientific and analytical journal “Information Society” is fully transferred to the online format. It is in this format that the first issue of the journal for 2020 was published. It is completely open to reading on a new digital platform (texts in Russian with English metadata and abstracts).

Inna Lola and Murat Bakeev from the Higher School of Economics presented the results of a study of digital activity with an assessment of the intensity of digital transformation of Russian manufacturing enterprises based on the generalized opinions of entrepreneurs and managers regarding the introduction of digital technologies in production sector.

Yulia Stakhovskaya, representing Tomsk State University, put forward and confirmed a hypothesis about the connection between the strategy of self-presentation of representatives of the digital generation and the context of the Russian social networks, each having its own unique culture of communication. The article by Yulia Koblova from the Saratov Socio-Economic Institute examines the specifics of the formation of virtual space in the modern information-network economy. The motives of the activity of virtual space agents, based on the established values ​​of the Internet, are described, and the features of behavioral practices are also revealed. An article by Viktor Naumov and Svetlana Lyalkova (Dentons) is devoted to the issue of legal protection of digital cultural heritage.

Andrey Druzhinin (Academy of Media Industry) conducted a comprehensive study of the problem field associated with the work of news aggregators. The article by Alexander Efanov (National Research University Higher School of Economics) analyzes the so-called “Laws on fake news” adopted in 2019 and its main methodological collisions. Authors from Novosibirsk State University – Yulia Otmakhova, Dmitry Devyatkin, Alexey Kreskin and Natalya Usenko – identify key centers of competence in radiation technologies for irradiation of food and raw materials, using methods of full-text search, analysis of publications and patent analysis of Russian and foreign patents.

Polad Heydarov from the Institute of Systems Management of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan proposes the creation of a system where all information from all purchases and buyer’s data will be sent to a single center and stored in a single database for subsequent use of these data in various other areas of government activity.