When less is more: where the Communications Society's publications are headed

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. Our three publications - Communications Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Communications, and the Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - cover an area of technology that is surely one of the most exciting and exuberant today. Electronic communications makes headlines in the daily press, creates whole new industries, and has an ever-increasing effect on everyone's life. The technical details captured in our pages are, or at least should be, closely tied to the strong currents of technological change which are sweeping through society. In order to capture thjs spirit of newness and excitement, our publications need to serve our readers by staking out claims in the new areas and publishing more in those areas. Personal computer communications, the role of electronic countermeasures in recent international events, the revolution in device fabrication for communications applications, new optical fiber communications systems, and the new products and services brought on by communication deregulation are all "hot" topics which should be given more emphasis, and will be. We would welcome your additions to this list. On the other hand, there are constraints on this process. The Communications Society spends more money on its publications than on anything else. Thus, it is unavoidable that we publish less on subjects which are old and overworked and do not represent the future. Our finite page limits compel us to be selective and to emphasize papers which are both of high quality and in the ground-breaking subject areas. The three of us are asking our editors and reviewers to impose a stricter standard of significance on papers so as to emphasize those that make a sizeable increment in the state of the art or wnich favor new topics over old ones. Higher rejection ratios may be expected in some areas. We want to hear from you how this is working, because feedback from readers is the most desirable and reliable guide for our editorial policies. Please do not expect any large immediate changes in the content of the publications. Yet, we hope that within six months you will begin to find the articles ·more interesting, relevant, and original, and above all that you are actually reading more of them. This will be the real test of our new policies.