From the Editor

Guanrong (Ron) Chen Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine

-publishing: appalling or appealing? tional newspaper publishing business. The 146-year-old On March 17 this year, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., well-established Seattle Post published its last print ver- Epublisher of The New York Times (NYT) and chair- sion on March 17, 2009 and was then converted entirely man of the board of the NYT company, wrote in “A Let- to an e-newspaper, followed by another popular cen- ter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions” on the tury-old newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor. Two website www.nytimes.com: other longstanding U.S. newspapers, the Tucson Newspa- per People and the Ann Arbor News, also stopped their “Today marks a significant transition for The New mechanical printers in 2009, prior to the now-declining York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. print version of the NYT. More recently in February … On March 28, we will begin offering digital sub- this year, the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain Bor- scriptions in the U.S. and the rest of the world.” ders filed for bankruptcy protection, while the largest U.S. bookstore chain Barnes & Noble stays intact mainly The NYT was founded in New York City in 1851 and con- due to the success of its Nook e- reader sales and tinuously published as the largest local metropolitan online services. newspaper in the U.S. It has been considered a model On the bright side, e-publishing brings to the whole and flagship newspaper worldwide, with the motto “All of society (not just to academia) many advantages and the News That’s Fit to Print” appearing in the upper left- benefits as well as resources and opportunities. It pro- hand corner of its front page everyday. As the mean- vides humanity with tremendous conveniences such as ing of “printing” has evolved from traditional paper-ink digital publication of e- and e-articles, as well as press to electronic layout however, the market of the the establishment of digital libraries and web-catalogues NYT has drastically fallen since the 1980s, with less alike. If e-publishing is able to survive, sustain itself, and than a million hard copies printed daily. So have most, if even rapidly develop, it will no doubt be providing many not all, traditional newspapers everywhere. benefits to society. Its user-friendly convenience, rapid If all these are considered failures, blame it on transmission, exclusive retrieval processes, wide cover- e-publishing. age, broad accessibility, low cost and small-sized stor- Arthur Sulzberger is willing to take risks in his quest age, ease of text modification, copying and reproduc- to find a new business model that can adequately sus- tion are just a few of its obvious advantages. In addition, tain the NYT. His plan is to work with Google to imple- attractive features such as sound and motion effects, ment First Click Free, so as “to ensure that NYTimes.com dynamic and interactive graphic abilities, and web-link continues to be part of the open web ecosystem.” As a browsing functions that were impossible with paper- matter of fact, the NYT has already been made available printed books and articles will become ubiquitous. on the iPhone and iPod Touch since 2008 and on iPad All kinds of e-publishing materials may be conve- mobile devices since 2010. On top of that, the NYT web- niently downloaded, viewed and saved in e-readers site is now the most popular American online newspa- (i.e., e-book readers), by way of small hand-held devices per, reportedly receiving more than 30 million unique commonly equipped with wireless connections (e.g., visitors per month. Wi-Fi, 3G or Bluetooth) with e-mail and web-browsing If all these are considered successes, thank e-pub- capabilities. Typical models include the Kindle, lishing. Apple iPad, Orizon, eGriver and IDEO Like it or not, e-publishing is a strongly growing from Condor Technology, Entourage eDGe, Hanvon medium and has become, de facto, a threat to the tradi- WISEreader, iLiad and Digital Reader from iRex Technol- ogies, Notionink Adam, PocketBook Pro, Editions, and so on. E-publishing and its associated Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2011.941074 Date of publication: 27 May 2011 products are indeed exploding today.

4 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE SECOND QUARTER 2011 Now is not the time to predict whether traditional 1) The IEEE will engage in the public dialogue to ensure paper-print publications will stay or go. The fact is that that the publication of high-quality, peer-reviewed, more and more governmental and educational organiza- fi nancially-sustainable journals remains an essential tions, even commercial publishing companies, are tak- part of IEEE’s mission as a learned society. ing advantage of the e-publishing to promote knowledge 2) Open access can coexist with traditional pub- exchange and business, by means of offering online open lishing. access to available e-books, e-journals, e-newspapers, 3) Public access is best done on existing platforms e-archives, etc. The Directory of Open Access Journals, of publishers. for example, has over 6,000 collections with more than 4) Any public access approach must respect the 300 in IEEE fields, in which more than 2,600 are search- intellectual property rights of authors and pub- able at the article level. lishers. PLoS ONE is probably the best-known open access 5) The IEEE will continue experimentation with scientific journal published since 2006 by the Public open access and monitor its impact on the orga- Library of Science, a non-profit organization of scien- nization. tists with a mission of making the world’s scientific and On August 16, the IEEE BoD approved the principle of medical literature freely accessible to the public. It is a providing open access as one effective way to enhance typical model of open access supported by publication dissemination of publicly-funded research results, so fees of $1,350 per article paid by the authors, which are as to mobilize and strengthen science and engineering, used to cover the cost of peer review, editing, dissemi- to encourage innovation, and to serve for the growing nation, and perpetual maintenance of an ever-growing interests of the society and beyond. volume of online archives. The IEEE is a non-profit professional organization with As another example, last year the University of Hong many volunteers in different roles such as editors and Kong established an HKU Scholars Hub, which is an insti- reviewers. To support and sustain open access services, tutional repository of the university, with free and open the IEEE recommended a “hybrid model” of open access: access to the public, where archives already collected the traditional subscription-based policy would be main- include some treatises published in as early as 1941. tained while offering authors the option to pay $3,000 per Their mission is to make this Hub available to the widest publication to make their article freely available. Sooner possible audiences worldwide. or later, the open access option will be mandatory for Even commercial companies have or will provide every IEEE journal in order to provide consistency to all some sort of free open access services. One example in stakeholders in the scholarly publishing community. point is the Nature Publishing Group, a division of Mac- While open access to e-publishing is foreseeable, Millan Publishing Limited. They have announced the semi-open access to e-publishing materials is already in launch of a new e-journal, Scientific Reports, to appear place. This refers to e-publishing databases mainly in the this summer. It will be a new primary research journal form of Digital Libraries, mostly accessible by member- published by Nature magazine, aiming to cover all areas ship today and could be free to the public in the future. of the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, The IEEE Xplore Digital Library, for example, now provides physics and earth sciences. It costs publication fees of access to over two million documents including books, $1,350 per article, yet free of charge for internet readers. research articles, standards, transactions and confer- It is encouraging to see that open access offers unfet- ence publications, as well as educational courses and the tered research and knowledge exchange to anyone who like, to all subscribing IEEE members. Following it imme- has access to the internet. The 2002 Budapest Open diately, the IEEE Computer Society, the Communications Access Initiative referred to open access as “world-wide Society and the Power and Energy Society all established electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal lit- their own smaller-scale digital libraries. Perhaps it is now erature and completely free and unrestricted access time for our Circuits and Systems Society to do the same. to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and Looking back and looking forward, one can see that other curious minds.” This certainly is welcome by sci- e-publishing has its share of pros and cons. Its ultimate entific researchers as well as the public. future is still somewhat uncertain now; yet one thing for The IEEE Publication Services and Products Board sure is that it will continue to grow quickly and spread (PSPB) and the IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB), far and wide. in the eleventh edition of the IEEE PSPB Quarterly News- E-publishing: both appalling and appealing. letter published online 21 July 2010 recommended the following five statements to the IEEE Board of Directors (BoD) with respect to open access:

6 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE SECOND QUARTER 2011