As I leave my position as the vice president of publications for IEEE PES after serving two years in this position, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you the progress we have made in this arena for our society.  I would like to highlight the following three areas.

The first is new publications

In 2013 we have launched a new periodical, IEEE Electrification Magazine.  It is a quarterly magazine dedicated to disseminating information on all matters related to microgrids onboard electric vehicles, ships, trains, planes, and off-grid applications. Microgrids refer to an electric network in a car, a ship, a plane or an electric train, which has a limited number of sources and multiple loads. Off-grid applications include small-scale electricity supply in areas away from high voltage power networks. Feature articles will focus on advanced concepts, technologies, and practices associated with all aspects of electrification in the transportation and off-grid sectors from a technical perspective in synergy with nontechnical areas such as business, environmental, and social concerns. While the PES flagship magazine, Power & Energy, covers all areas in the field of interest of our society, the Electrification Magazine focuses on new areas of electrification.

The first issue of this magazine was published this fall.  The second issue is scheduled for December 2013. It is published both in traditional paper format and digital media. All members of Power & Energy Society (PES) will have free access to the digital version of this magazine for 2013 and all of 2014.

PES is also launching a new open access journal called, IEEE Power & Energy Technology Systems  (PETS) Journal. This journal will follow the author-pay model thereby making the content freely available on the IEEE Xplore platform. Due to strong industry representation in our society, it was felt that we need to publish an archival journal with content targeted to practicing engineers where articles will be written primarily by them.  The PETS journal is intended to be a technical journal containing practice-oriented articles focusing on the development, planning, design, construction, maintenance, installation and operation of equipment, structures, materials and power systems for the safe, sustainable, economic and reliable conversion, generation, transmission, distribution, storage and usage of electric energy, including its measurement and control.  It covers the full field of interest of the Power & Energy Society. This journal is expected to come out in the second half of 2014.

The second issue is indexing of our two latest publications

PES launched the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy and IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid in 2010.  In the fall of 2013 both periodicals were accepted for indexing in Thomson Reuter’s products and services. Beginning with V.1 (1) 2010, these two publications will be indexed and abstracted in:

• Science Citation Index Expanded (also known as SciSearch®)
• Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition
• Current Contents®/Physical Chemical and Earth Sciences
• Current Contents®/Engineering Computing and Technology

This indexing will now offer these journal authors a higher level of recognition for their work. This, we expect, will attract more authors to publish in these journals.

The third issue is growth of the existing PES publications.

Along with launching two new publications and getting recognition (indexing and abstracting) for our two recently launched journals, both the quality and the breadth of articles have significantly increased in the past two years in all our journals. Even though the acceptance rate in our five journals have gone down, we continue to receive a large number of high quality papers. In order to accommodate the very best quality papers in our journals we have increased the page counts as shown in the following table. Historically, all of our five transactions have been quarterly. In order to accommodate the high volume of papers, we will publish bimonthly (six times per year) issues for the following journals beginning in 2014. The P&E Magazine will continue to be published bi-monthly.

• Transactions on Power Systems (T-PWRS)
• Transactions on Smart Grid (T-SG)
• Transactions on Power Delivery (T-PWRD)

The following two journals will continue to be published four times a year.

• Transactions on Sustainable Energy (T-STE)
• Transactions of Energy Conversion (T-EC)

Page count for PES journals and magazines

I hope you will continue to enjoy the PES periodicals both as authors and readers.

Saifur Rahman
VP of PES Publications (2012-2013)