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As I write this article a few days before New Years
Eve, “out with the old and in with the new” seems to be
a highly appropriate theme. The terms of four elected AdCom members
(Tom Lewellen, Mark Rader, Erik Heijne, and Mike Unterweger) and
three Technical Committee Chairs (Bob Reinovsky, Bruce Brown, and
Christian Boulin) end in a few days and six new people will take
over their positions on AdCom (Chris Deeney, Ron Jaszczak, Uwe Bratzler,
Gerry Cooperstein, Ilan Ben-Zvi, and Jean-Pierre Martin). I would
like to thank the outgoing members and Chairs for four years of
hard work, and to welcome their replacements; I look forward to
their contributions. I also welcome our new AdCom Vice-President,
Jane Lehr of Sandia National Laboratory. Jane will become the AdCom
President when my term is completed (in two years), and I’m
confident that she will do an outstanding job. Although she was
elected less than two months ago, she has already been a great help
in running AdCom. Finally, I would like to thank Tony Lavietes for
taking on the job of Assistant NPSS Treasurer, and Igor Alexeff
and Peter Winokur for adding two more years onto their AdCom service
in the roles performed by the Past-Presidents.
You may have also noticed that we have a new Editor for this Newsletter.
I thank Albe Larsen for taking on the job and especially thank Ken
Dawson for nine years of outstanding service as Newsletter Editor.
I’m glad to say that Ken is staying on as Editor Emeritus,
which means that we will continue to have all of the quips and quotes
that have become an essential part of the Newsletter!
There have also been significant changes in the editorial staff
of Transactions on Nuclear Science (TNS). The death of Ed Hoffman,
who edited the papers submitted to the Medical Imaging Conference
(MIC) portion of the NSS/MIC Meeting, coupled with John Valentine
stepping down as the Editor for TNS manuscripts associated with
the NSS, meant that we did not have Editors for approximately half
of the papers that appear in TNS. It has been a challenging six
months as we worked to recover from this double blow, but we are
now in excellent shape. During this time John Valentine and Paul
Kinahan, as interim Editors, kept the flow of manuscripts from being
interrupted while, in parallel, a committee led by Steve Gold took
a close look at the TNS editorial process. This committee recommended
two highly desirable changes: 1) add approximately a dozen Associate
Editors, to create another editorial “layer” but reduce
the work load on the Editors, and 2) eliminate the distinction between
manuscripts submitted in association with a conference and those
not associated with a conference. We are now implementing these
changes and have an Editor-in-Chief (Paul Dressendorfer), four Senior
Editors (Zane Bell for Radiation Instrumentation, Joel Karp for
Nuclear Medical and Imaging Sciences, John Cressler for Radiation
Effects, and Jean-Pierre Dufey for Real-Time Computer Applications),
and are in the process of naming Associate Editors. The only changes
that authors and readers should see are improved quality and consistency
of review, as well as shorter review time!
The final change is one that is coming inexorably, but whose exact
form is uncertain. That is Open Access, the idea that, as taxpayers
have paid for the research that is presented in many refereed journals,
these articles should be available to everybody at no cost. That
is, if the research reported in an article was supported by government
funding, the publisher of that article (such as IEEE) would have
to provide an electronic copy of that article to anybody who requested
it (even if they did not have a subscription to that journal). This
movement is rapidly gaining momentum and my belief is that it will
be common before my term as President is over. As a user of information,
I eagerly await Open Access and applaud the concept. As a publisher
of journals, it scares the pants off me. There are substantial costs
associated with producing a journal, and it is uncertain just how
these will get paid for in Open Access. At first glance it seems
that putting an electronic manuscript on the Web should cost very
little, and that is true provided that it is essentially a duplicate
of an article that has already been produced in paper format. However,
the number of printed copies of our publications is falling rapidly,
so the electronic publication needs to share the cost to produce
the “original” copy and may soon need to bear the entire
cost. In addition, we demand more features from electronic articles
than we do from paper, such as live links to the references in the
manuscript (or to articles that cite the one we are reading), so
the cost to produce electronic copy actually exceeds that to produce
paper copy. Finally, IEEE provides literally millions of papers,
and the overhead of managing all of them (as well as maintaining
the systems to store and deliver them) is non-trivial. Thus, “Open
Access” will probably not mean “Free Access,” as
these costs must be paid for. I do not know what form it will be
— whether there will be a return to something like page charges,
whether there will be some form of external support, or whether
there will be some form of search or download fee. However, I’m
certain that the way that IEEE charges for publications will change
significantly in the next few years and I look forward to NPSS being
part of the evolution.
If you have any thoughts on these or any other issues, please feel
free to contact me.
Bill Moses can be reached at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
MS 55-12, One Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA; Phone:+1 510
486-4432; Fax: +1 510 486-4768; E-mail: wwmoses@lbl.gov.
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