Dear Colleagues,

As I write to you now our professions, whatever they may be, are experiencing profound change. In this intensive period of change, we must help to disseminate insights into how these changes have affected education at all levels. Many of us are active educators in different national systems of higher education, others may be educators in industry or government contexts. However, we all have a common interest in education; and how that education process is improved through research and innovation. With all the changes going on around us it is important that we also focus on documenting these transformations and play an active role in analyzing and identifying good practices and successful learning innovations in the digital domain.

Facilitating the dissemination of the insights of our community's thought leaders and empirical studies with significance for the development of Education worldwide, and at all levels of STEM education is one of the most important aspects of our Society mission. We provide access to new theories, new empirical studies demonstrating ways to improve learning outcomes, as well as research into the development, deployment, use and impact of learning technologies.

The scope and publication strategies for our three major publications IEEE RITA, IEEE Transactions on Education, and IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies has been a matter of considerable discussion in the Board of Governors as well as in the meetings of the VP Publications and the Editors in Chief over the last 18 months. We have been considering the challenges presented by Plan S in Europe, and the pressure on our Society to provide a broader, but high impact, Open Access publication venue. Initial discussion focused on moving some, or all, of the existing publications to an Open Access model. However, we have concluded that this would not serve our membership well since up-front publication fees discriminate in favor of authors from more affluent research and education systems.

The IEEE Education Society response to a need for an Open Access venue is to launch an Education section of IEEE Access, the IEEE-wide Open Access title. This combines the high impact factor of an IEEE journal with the breadth of reviewing competence, and Open Access profile, required by many of our members working in countries where national research council funded results must be published Open Access. The goal of the Society is to fast-track the Access Section with a launch date in the second half of the year. Please stay tuned for future information on the Section as work proceeds.

While the Access Section provides a new venue to our members, we expect that the existing journal titles will continue to attract the usual high volumes of research in their target areas, and serve the international engineering education and learning technology communities well. It is also our expectation that the Access Section will be able to accommodate a wider range of practitioner research and correspondingly have increased relevance for practicing professionals in all areas of education.

I hope to read work from many of you in our journals over the next few years! In the meantime, maintain physical distance, follow appropriate health authority guidelines, and stay healthy and happy.

In due time I am sure we will all be meeting again at the conferences we so greatly enjoy, sharing ideas over meals and the occasional drink.

Until those times return, I remain yours in service to the Education Society,

Arnold Pears
Professor and Chair of the Department of Learning in Engineering Sciences
School of Industrial Technology and Management (ITM),
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
IEEE Education Society VP for Publications