What is in a page charge?

According to the Electron Devices Society policy, all manuscripts submitted for publication in the Transactions on Electron Devices and Electron Device Letters must be accompanied with a page charge statement. This statement reflects the author’s intentions of honoring the page charge if the submission is accepted for publication. The purpose of imposing the page charge is to partially offset the cost of publishing. For instance, in 2003 alone we published 3500 pages in the Transactions and Letters at a cost of $650,000.  According to IEEE policy, a page charge is not mandatory. Also, the Electron Devices Society is among the few entities within IEEE that refrain from practices such as mandatory charges for over-length articles and publication queue preferences based on payment of page charges. Going forward we would like to continue to do the same. It is our philosophy that each published manuscript should be of the right length in relation to its technical impact. The technical impact is arrived at through the peer review process. We have had considerable success using this process over the last 10 years and have seen a healthy trend towards the elimination of verbose sections from published material and consequent improvement in overall quality, which are independent of the author’s ability to pay.

The purpose of this note is to bring to your attention a trend that has emerged. The gap between authors/institutions that promise to honor the page charge and the subset that actually ends up honoring them is on the rise. While the page charge, as mentioned earlier, is not mandatory, from the budgetary perspective, it is imperative that your response accurately reflects your intentions. We would like to remind the authors and their sponsoring institutions that the page charge is a legitimate research investment and hence needs to be part of any R&D proposal. It is in this spirit that we appeal to you to honor all page charges and keep this in mind the next time you respond to a page charge query. If there is anything that we can do to help in this process, please let us know. As always, we appreciate your feedback.

Please remember that both T-ED and EDL are your publications needing your support to flourish as the media of choice for the dissemination of best results in the field of Electron Devices.

Thank you,

Renuka P. Jindal
EDS Vice-President of Publications