Roundtable Q&A video session moderated by Arthur
Winston, 2004 IEEE President with the two
President-Elect candidates.
The
candidates answered the
following questions asked by members:
QUESTION 1
Should
the IEEE welcome to its membership all who work in
its fields of interest, or, should IEEE
membership be for EEs and computer
professionals only?
QUESTION
2
IEEE
members pay for access to the work of other
members. Work that is contributed to the
journals, accompanied by per-page charges to defray
the cost of publications, peer reviewed by
volunteers, and sold to outside
organizations. The marginal cost of PDF
distribution is essentially zero, so there is
no overhead involved providing the papers
after they have been formatted for
publication.
Why not
make the papers freely available as PDF files to
IEEE members, so that we can derive benefit
from the work of our peers? That would be a
"member benefit."
QUESTION
3
I would
like the candidates to express their views on
desirable and undesirable evolutions in the
business model for IEEE publications,
specifically in the context of open access to the
scientific literature: how do you justify who
should bear the burden of publication costs and
who should not?
QUESTION
4
How do
you propose to maintain IEEE's collegial structure,
professional society stature, and efforts in
service to the public (which sometimes
knowingly lose money) while the focus of IEEE
projects and staff interests seemingly drift
(or are pushed) toward seeing IEEE primarily as
a business, with money-losing or inefficient efforts
left behind regardless of their non-monetary
value to IEEE, the members, or the public?
QUESTION
5
How will
the candidates encourage more participation from the
engineers in the developing countries?
QUESTION
6
Over the
many years as a member, I noticed the uptrend in the
IEEE membership fee and also the IEEE
expenses. May I have the view from the
candidates on whether this a good, acceptable, or
bad trend and what action would you take to
change it, if any?
