Dear Colleagues,

This has been a stressful year for many of us, and I hope that you are all well and that your universities and companies are returning to some version of the “new normal.” As many of you might be aware, I had the huge privilege to be reappointed as VP for Publications at the last Board of Governors meeting in October, and I will serve a second term in this role from 2022 to 2023.

As VP for Publications, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy and secure festive season with family, colleagues, friends, and also to reflect on some of the great things we as a society have achieved during 2021. Firstly, I would like to thank my hardworking Editors in Chief. Without these individuals, our Journals would not continue, and our community would not benefit from the broad dissemination of results we achieve through the inclusion of our publications in the IEEE digital library Xplore. To Professors, Mark Lee, John Mitchell, Martin Llamas Nistal, and Carina Gonzales, please accept my profound appreciation for your efforts in support of our publications. Though they are too numerous to list here by name I also wish to extend my appreciation to all our associate editors for their hard work during 2021.

Journals are a peer publication enterprise, and it is only through peer review and collegiality that we can sustain the curation of leading scholarship. Our journals are always in need of new associate editors, and this is a fantastic way to contribute to our community and help it to develop. We welcome input, and nominations of new names for Associate Editors should be made to the respective Editor in Chief. Please contribute to the development of our publications and the curation of leading scholarship. This is one of our primary missions.

Finally, our society participated in the Society Review process this year and emerged with flying colors and words of commendation in terms of our development of open access venues and accessible scholarship, as well as the organization of our publication’s portfolio. Again, we should all be very proud of what we can achieve as a scholarly community. In 2022 we will explore new models which add value for authors as a part of our publication’s ecosystem. In particular, we will explore models for parallel submission, in which a paper can be simultaneously submitted to a journal and a conference, and where acceptance at the journal level allows the conference submission to make a transition to a presentation of the work at the conference, while the archival version remains the one published in the journal. We hope that this will help authors to gain exposure for their ideas, and also to enhance the accessibility of new scholarship to a broad audience.

In closing, I wish you all the best for 2022 and look forward to meeting and collaborating with many of you in the period 2022-2023.

Arnold Pears