IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2015 - 6

leader's corner

Miroslav Begovic

a review of 2014
a recap of our accomplishments

Though This column was wriTten earlier, you will be reading it in
January 2015. at that time i will be
beginning my second year as iEEE
Power & Energy society (PEs) president, and it is an appropriate time to
review some of our accomplishments
and happenings of 2014.
The year began with the PEs governing Board meeting/Joint Technical
committee meeting in new orleans,
louisiana. The meeting was well organized and facilitated meetings between
the technical committees (Tcs) and
members of the governing Board. The
ongoing work on assessing the Tc
structure was helped by the collocation of those two events. Preceding the
governing Board meeting was a longrange Planning committee meeting,
which concluded a two-year effort to
devleop a new PEs strategic plan for the
years 2014-2018. The plan was developed by three subcommittees, one dedicated to issues of business assessment
and development, as well as projections
of the financial situations in the forthcoming five-year period. The subcommittee developed financial projections
for multiple anticipated scenarios and
estimated budgets for the coming years.
Though the accuracy of such projections
can never be too high, it is important
to assess the revenue levels to ensure
funding for value-added membership
services. The first subcommittee concluded that, in the absence of major disruptive factors, the health and financial
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2014.2362475
Date of publication: 7 January 2015

ieee power & energy magazine

growth of PEs will continue and should
be able to provide for the growing membership and increasing number of PEs
chapters around the world.
The second subcommittee, led by
PEs President-Elect Damir novosel,
focused on the organization of technical
activities and related revenue-generating
businesses supported by them. it concentrated on several issues related to the interaction of various technical activities units
with external counterparts and required
measures to accommodate and enhance
those activities in the future. one of the
ongoing activities is an assessment of the
current organizational structure of the
technical communities and the development of a report with suggestions of possible modifications and enhancements.
Technical activities represent the core of
PEs existence; they are the foundation
of all of our revenue-generating activities and strongly support them. without
strong technical activities, PEs would
not be have well-recognized international
conferences, of which we are offering
about 40 annually, as well as a portfolio
of very well-respected PEs publications,
three of which are on the list of 20 iEEE
publications with the highest impact factors. That list, of course, also includes this
publication, IEEE Power & Energy Magazine, which is widely read worldwide
and appreciated for its extraordinarily
well-chosen topical content provided in
bimonthly issues through the collaboration of its editor, melvin olken, and various guest editors.
The third subcommittee focused on
the growth and management of membership, chapters, and outreach and was

led by PEs Vice President of chapters
Frank lambert. all of the subcommittees provided qualitative and quantitative goals in developing the new strategic
plan, which was unanimously approved
by the long-range Planning committee
and the PEs governing Board.
our publications represent state-ofthe-art information for the engineering community. The feedback about
the impact of new publications is very
encouraging. For example, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, under
the leadership of its Editor in chief
Bikash Pal, is attracting, on average,
nearly 6.5 citations per published article
over a two-year period post publication.
at the same time, the number of selfcitations is kept at the very low level of
less than 10% of all citations. our other
transactions are also doing very well.
one of the challenges that is often
discussed within iEEE is the growing
interest in the open access publication
concept, which requires rethinking the
entire business model on which iEEE
publications have been traditionally
based. PEs is actively participating in
editorial experimentations with open
access by having all of its transactions
operate as hybrid journals (accepting
articles as either open access or as conventional publication, for which the
authors are not required to pay publication fees). while it is still hard to tell how
well open access will shape the future
success of iEEE publications and the
business model that they represent, the
current level of open access activities is
not impacting our financial results in a
major way, and it is estimated that the
january/february 2015

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