Note from the IEEE Education Society VP Publications

Greetings to my colleagues around the world, it is my privilege to serve you in the role of Vice President for Publications of our society for the calendar year 2019 by appointment of our President, Professor Russ Meier. In the role of VP Publications, it is my responsibility to have guide the strategic development of our journals and other publications with a view to enhancing their role in the service of our profession and the curation and dissemination of knowledge.

I have been a longstanding member of the Education Society, taking my PhD in Computer Science at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia in 1994. During the last decade I have also served on the Board of Governors of the Computer Society and as Conference liaison for the IEEE/ASEE Frontiers in Education conference, where I have also served in a variety of roles in the FIE Steering Committee. I am currently an IEEE Senior member and Professor of Engineering Education Research at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. I have also served on the Sweden Section Board, and as Chair of the Nordic Chapter of the Education Society.

During my term as VP for Publications I will work on enhancing the role of our journals and conferences in disseminating knowledge within academia, and between academia and the professions. In particular I am interested in the role that our conferences and journals play in building a knowledge community around educational issues in schools, universities and industry. Pursuing this goal requires us to engage with some emerging challenges.

There are several forces at play in the scholarly publishing world that may well change the face of research publishing over the next few years. The most significant of these is the move towards Open Access and in particular the European Plan S initiative. Plan S proposes that research funded through the research councils of signatory countries would be required to be

published in venues that are fully open access. Further details of the Open Access coalition and the timeline for proposed implementation of Plan S can be found on the coalition’s web site https://www.coalition-s.org. This move to Open Access, and the associated IEEE fee models currently in place has the potential to have a significant impact on the profession and on our ability to continue to publish research. I am very concerned about a wide scale shift to upfront fees for publication, since these fees may limit access to publication opportunities in our journals for researches without access to funding.

Another issue that faces us as a community concerns Impact Factors and associated bibliometrics and the use of these measures for the purposes of University Rankings, as well as in academic promotion and funding processes. To understand how our journals are positioned within the field, as well as to better understand how we can support the careers of our community through the journal publication venues we provide, we are analyzing the impact metric performance of the Transactions on Education and the Transactions on Learning Technologies. I will write more about these evaluation exercises in future newsletters.

I reiterate that it is indeed a privilege to serve the community as VP Publications and I hope to meet many of you at conferences and other IEEE meetings during the coming year.

Arnold Pears