IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 16

Possible Future for Publishing
Blogs

CrowdSourced
Content

Comments
Analysis
and Day's
Research

Scholars Build Articles Incrementally, with
Each Version Tracked and Open Online,
Available for Collaboration and Comment
Throughout

Post Data
and
Software
Code

"Share Early, Share Often" Web-Based
Dissemination Increasingly Pervades
the Research Process

FIgURE 6. Research, Publishing, Peer Review, and Communities.

metrics to judge the research activity of
faculty-consider implementing a similar
policy in your institution or research
facility. The future of publication is, in
many senses, in our own hands!

tools will we see a disruptive shift toward
"share-early, share-often" web-based
technical research? Only time will tell.

STRATEGIC ISSUES

PUBLICATION SERVICES
AND PRODUCTS BOARD-
OPS MANUAL UPDATE

I'll wrap up this discussion of the main
PoE keynote with a summary of several
strategic questions that were posed to
the audience at the end of the keynote.
The first of these was to consider if
technical journals as we know them
today will still exist in 2030. Or will
they be replaced with a different container or mechanism of dissemination
of knowledge? How will peer review
evolve to handle the increasing stresses that have manifested themselves
across 2014 and 2015? Can we find
new models to replace traditional peer
review mechanisms? Or can new tools
and technologies help reviewers to
become more productive and reduce
the burden in terms of time and effort
required by reviewers?
And finally, how will the IEEE technical communities morph by 2030 with all
of these changes and pressures on today's
publication models? With more content
being open access, with increasing sophistication in version tracking and management systems and increasing emphasis on
collaborative social-media style research

PoE isn't just about visionary keynote
talks-there is a lot of day-to-day activity that goes on. One very important set
of activities is the operations manual of
the Publication Services and Products
Board (PSPB)-this is a key document
that spells out IEEE policies and procedures for all of us involved in editorial
work for the IEEE.
This year, there were three main activities completed by the PSPB and incorporated into the operations manual: 1) review
of the publications prescreening process;
2) a review of article processing charges;
and 3) review and improvement of the
guidelines for republication of articles
and papers.
Very briefly, the prescreening process is
an option for the main administrator or editor-in-chief of a journal or article to reject
submitted manuscripts before they enter the
formal peer-review process. It is designed
to allow articles that are out of scope or that
clearly do not meet the guidelines for a
publication to be rejected without review.
To give an example in the context of IEEE
Consumer Electronics Magazine-if you

16 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

october 2015

submitted an archival research paper by
mistake, you may have got back an e-mail
from me suggesting that you instead submit it to IEEE Transactions on Consumer
Electronics because your manuscript was
not suitable for the magazine.
Article processing charges are exactly that-IEEE Publications incurs costs
in preparing manuscripts for final publication, and it costs money to both physically and electronically publish material.
This is also why many journals will
have an excess pages charge-to cover
these costs. These policies and procedures have to be reviewed and updated
every three to four years.
Finally, a topic that often comes up at
board level or in discussions at our conferences-can we republish interesting
articles that might be of interest to our
readers that were already published in
another journal or magazine? Well, the
good news is that there is now a formal
set of guidelines for such activities. I
won't go into the minutiae, but, in principle, where material is going to a new
audience that has a particular interest in
the core topic/subject of the paper or article, then republication is no longer
frowned upon. For the full details, you'll
need to track down the PSPB operations
manual and read the relevant sections.
Finally, the PSPB also outlined some
of its planned activities for 2015-2016.
These included an IEEE-wide review of
the term limits for editors, with a review
and consideration of existing policies and
how these are implemented and supported
by the PSPB. The PSPB will also be looking into appeals processes against editorial
decisions and determining if the existing
process is fit for purpose, or if new guidelines and procedures are required. It will
also be looking for volunteers who want
to take on more than one senior editorial
position and give consideration to how to
manage and provide oversight on senior
editorial appointments.

IEEE COLLABRATEC-A HYBRID
OF gROUPS AND MENDELEY
If you are a serious IEEE groupie, you
have probably already signed up for the
test phase of Collabratec (Figures 7 and 8).
If you haven't, then let me remind you that
IEEE signed a deal with Google that

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015