Dear Colleagues,

As I write this, we are setting in motion a momentous initiative designed to help take the society publications profile firmly into the 21st century.

You probably already have received correspondence from the IEEE announcing the launch of the IEEE Access Education Section, a venue for open access publication of high-quality scholarship in all areas of interest for our Society.

IEEE Access responds to a growing need among our membership to have a high-profile Gold Open Access (Plan S compliant) venue in which to publish their work. Since its conception, IEEE Access has established itself as a strong brand for the IEEE and has rapidly emerged with excellent metrics, listings in major citation databases, and inclusion in the Clarivate Analytics statistics supplied to many agencies and governments worldwide.

More information is available on the IEEE Web Site (https://ieeeaccess.ieee.org/learn-more-about-ieee-access/). I am very proud to welcome our initial team of six editors for the Access Section, which can be found here.

As your VP for Publications, and in close collaboration with the Society President and the EIC’s of our three journals, we have successfully shepherded our publications through the Periodical Review (PRAC) process. This involves a strong collegial review of the structure, governing documents, and composition of the Associate Editor teams as well as the processes in place to ensure timelines and publication schedules. We are proud to report that this review confirms our conviction that we have a portfolio of high-quality journals, serving the important function of curating a strong knowledge base for our profession. I wish to offer my sincere thanks to our Society President, Treasurer, Conference Catalysts (in particular the support of Brittian Parkinson), and the EIC’s for a fantastic performance. As a result of the PRAC review, we will be making some improvements to our processes and revising some of the governing documents. In particular, we will revisit the issue of diversity in our teams of Associate Editors aiming for increased participation across all demographics and broad geographic representation. We will also increase the rate of publication of Transactions on Learning Technologies to six issues annually from 2021. Enhancing the impact and status of IEEE RITA is also a strong priority and the EIC is working tirelessly to develop this unique multilingual publication.

While there is no shortage of submissions to our journals, we do encourage all our members to review the publication profiles of our journals and to give them serious consideration when publishing your work. The strength of our publications depends on their relevance and quality, and also on how we as a community refer to, and cite, our corpus of scholarship. Since we transitioned to electronic production and distribution we have been able to reduce production costs and expand the number of pages we can publish per year. This helps to permit us to support authors doing work that is difficult to report adequately within a six-page limit, and we will be launching future initiatives to support the publication of articles drawing on qualitative data analysis approaches.

One observation that I have drawn from my own experience since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is the enormous changes this has forced upon us as engineering educators and engineering practitioners. I encourage all of us to reflect on these experiences, document, and analyze them. What can we learn from the last six to eight months about digitalization and the potential of digital delivery and other digital technologies to radically transform educational work practices, workflows, and the educational and learning experience from all perspectives? It behooves our society to take a leading role in documenting and analyzing this momentous epoch in our history of technological development and live up to the IEEE catchphrase “Advancing Technology for Humanity”.

As we enter the Autumn term in Europe, and Spring on the other half of the globe I wish you all safe and well wherever you may be!

Yours in Service to the Education Society

Arnold Pears
IEEE Education Society Vice President of Publications