Vice President’s Report

While the last few years have been difficult ones financially for the IEEE, I am pleased to say that the situation has gotten a lot better. The IEEE as a whole is once again operating in the black, and our focus is shifting from “survival mode” to more forward looking activities. Within the NPSS, one major focus is conferences. Little has changed recently in the “conference scene” — the conferences that we sponsor continue to be highly regarded scientifically (our primary concern), although the financial woes of the past few years mean that they have gotten considerably more financial scrutiny (which is also a good thing). We strive to make all of our conferences affordable, and are pleased to report that a recent study finds that our conferences are not only less expensive than competing conferences, but they also tend to be longer in duration and include more “extras” (such as a CD containing manuscripts presented at the conference). In other words, we provide more bang for less bucks!

Publications are our other major activity, and I anticipate a lot of changes in the coming years. While our primary concern is maintaining the high scientific quality of our publications, the last few years have again taught us that the business aspects cannot be ignored. High quality is useless if we cannot afford to publish the journal! It is clear that the importance of electronic publication is rapidly growing and that of paper is rapidly declining. If we extrapolate this trend to all-electronic publishing, we are faced with numerous intriguing questions. Will the notion of a “journal” become obsolete, replaced by a search engine that finds articles on related topics (or those presented at a specific conference)? Would you subscribe to such a “journal,” or would you pay per article downloaded? Would libraries be replaced by site licenses? How could “Open Access” (a proposal whereby all government funded scientific papers would be freely accessible to all) fit in? These questions are presently unanswered, but they promise significant changes in the future.

Finally, we have always received a tremendous amount of help from our volunteers, who have generously donated their time, effort, and intellect to advancing their professions. I would like to thank two of our volunteers who are stepping down for their excellent work — John Valentine is stepping down as the Associate Editor for Transactions on Nuclear Science (TNS) who was responsible for manuscripts associated with the NSS, and Vern Price will be cutting back on his Membership and Recruitment activities. We need enthusiastic people to replace them, so please let me know if you (or somebody that you know) would be interested! In addition, the IEEE Women in Engineering is asking for Society representatives / liaisons. Please email Cary Loh (c.loh@ieee.org) with questions or if you know anybody who is interested.

Bill Moses can be reached at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, One Cyclotron Road, MS55-121 Berkeley, CA 94720-8099, E-mail:wwmoses@lbl.gov.