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A Report on IEEE and UFFC Society Publications
by John Vig
UFFC-S VP, Publications and AdCom Member Emeritus

The following is based on the presentation John Vig made to the UFFC-S Administrative Committee (AdCom) in May 2014. Some of the information consists of updates to the report, “UFFC-S Statistics/Metrics,” that appeared in the September/October 2012 issue of the UFFC-S Newsletter.

IEEE Xplore is IEEE’s digital library. It provides access to technical content published by the IEEE and its publishing partners. It contained 3.8 million documents as of August 2014. This number is growing at a rate of about 200 000 documents a year. In addition to IEEE’s 171 journals, transactions and magazines, IEEE Xplore also contains publications of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), American Physical Society (APS), and IBM. Recently, publications of the MIT Press and the Bell System Technical Journal became part of IEEE Xplore.

In a typical month, IEEE Xplore has more than 3 million unique visitors — who download 8 million articles. There were 49.3 million downloads during the first half of 2014.

Some new Xplore features include the ability to include author names in other than English (e.g., in both English and Chinese), ORCID, and mobile friendliness.

ORCID, Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is intended to solve the problems of distinguishing the research activities of authors with similar names, of name changes (such as with marriage), and of different ways of writing the same names (e.g., is author J.C. Smith, the same as John C. Smith and J. Smith?) ORCID provides a persistent identity for humans, similar to the way the Digital Object Identifier, DOI, provides a persistent identity for publications.

IEEE Xplore now provides information about patent citations too, not just citations in journals and conference papers.

IEEE Xplore is now also smartphone and tablet friendly.

During 2013 there were 240 000 downloads of T-UFFC papers from IEEE Xplore, about the same as in 2012. Our Transactions is 50th in downloads among IEEE’s 171 journals, transactions and magazines.

The number of downloads is important because it is related to the UFFC Society’s share of IEEE’s publications revenues; the higher the T-UFFC’s share of the total number of downloads, the higher is the UFFC Society’s share of IEEE’s publication revenues.

Revenues from publications are a major source of revenues for UFFC-S. (The amount far exceeds the revenues from membership dues. It is the revenues from publications and conferences that have allowed UFFC-S to not raise the membership dues for many years.)

Our technical community values our old papers too, as evidenced by the downloads. Only 28% of the 2013 downloads were of 2013 and 2012 papers. The rest were of older papers. Before the Transactions on UFFC there was the IEEE Transactions on Sonics and Ultrasonics, and, before that, the Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Ultrasonic Engineering. Papers from the two predecessor journals are still being downloaded even though they stopped publication decades ago. For the history, see

From PGUE To G-SU To UFFC-S, 1953-1997: A Historical Perspective.

The number of print subscriptions has been declining as evidenced by the table below. The costs of providing a print subscription have been increasing but the price of a print subscription has remained at US$40-; that is, UFFC-S has been heavily subsidizing its print subscribers. Moreover, those who must have printed copies can print their own.

Therefore, a motion to increase the price of a print subscription to the actual cost by 2016 was presented. An AdCom member pointed out that a subscription price of about US$200- a year made little sense and proposed a substitute motion; that is, to discontinue providing print subscriptions. The motion passed by a wide margin.

As a footnote, UFFC-S will not be the first to offer no print subscriptions; 24 IEEE journals already offer no print subscriptions.

 

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