Mary Lanzerotti of IBM, Paul Doto of IEEE, and Janet O’Neil attended the 2005 IEEE Panel of Editors Meeting. Mary is the Editor of the LEOS Newsletter for the Lasers and Electro Optics Society. Paul produces the LEOS and EMCS Newsletters at IEEE.

The Dynamics of IEEE Electronic Publishing
This year’s IEEE Panel of Editors Meeting was held April 8-9 in New Orleans, Louisiana. This meeting attracts the editors of various IEEE publications, most notably the editors of the various Society Transactions and Magazine editors, as well as a few Society Newsletter editors. The IEEE Publications Department organizes this annual meeting to facilitate an exchange of information between IEEE and the editors. There were 67 IEEE staff members present, and 101 volunteers present, including yours truly and Flavio Canavero, Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on EMC.
I recall attending this meeting several years ago in 1999 and hearing about the new IEEE program called “IEEE Xplore™”. At that time, electronic publishing was a fledgling activity and not very common. Anthony Durniak, IEEE Staff Executive, Publications, gave a presentation on why electronic publishing was important to addressing the top two reasons why people join the IEEE, namely, remaining technically current, and obtaining IEEE publications. Mr. Durniak advised that IEEE intended to invest two million dollars (US) in this new program.
Today, this investment has provided tremendous returns to IEEE and its members. In fact, “Publications” represent half of IEEE’s revenue from operations. Members are benefiting from the convenient and timely access to technical information. At the Panel of Editors meeting, a graph was shown which documented the total PDF downloads from IEEE Xplore™ monthly from 2002 to 2004. The total PDF downloads in 2002 was 21 million. In 2004, that number jumped to 52 million plus! Of these downloaded PDF documents, 54% were from IEEE Periodicals (such as Transactions), 45% were from IEEE Conference Proceedings, and 1% were from Standards.
Since its launch in 2000, IEEE Xplore™ has been continuously improved and refined. As one small example, IEEE participated in a Google/Cross Reference search pilot in 2004. Now Google Scholar helps direct readers to the IEEE Xplore™ site and has resulted in more visits to the site. Following are a few statistics that might interest you about IEEE Xplore™.

The top three periodicals in 2004:

The top three publications in 2004:

Regarding interest specifically in the EMC Society material on IEEE Xplore™, in 2004 the Transactions on EMC was ranked 64 of all periodicals in the IEEE Xplore™ database, putting it in the top half! The EMC Society had 130,700 article PDFs retrieved by users in 2004, up 35% from the 96,800 articles retrieved in 2003. Usage of EMCS material grew slightly faster than the average across all IEEE periodicals, which saw a 32% growth in usage between 2003 and 2004. I take this to be an indication of the continued awareness of the importance of EMC in this increasingly wireless world!
Also, this exposure to electronic publishing resulted in one new development for the EMC Society: Flavio Canavero discussed “rapid posting” with the IEEE’s Anthony Durniak at the meeting and will implement this soon for the Transactions on EMC. In fact, many new developments for the Transactions on EMC were discussed at this meeting. Stay tuned to the next issue of the Newsletter for more information! EMC

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