A message from the president

The last issue of the Newsletter contained information about a prospective policy chan e in the Transactions page charges. The minutes o f the January 7 AdCom meeting summarized the action that resulted in a decision to change the break oint for the mandatory excessive paper length charge Pro m 7 pages to 4. My column commented that we would study the implications of this rather drastic action ourselves, before putting a request through the Publications and Technical Activities Boards. Ron Fante agreed to chair a committee of publications-experienced AP-S members to revisit the issues associated with the AdCom action. Specifically, the concern is for the considerable backlog of papers waiting to be published and the very long delay time AP-S authors are experiencing. Ron´s committee (Bob McIntosh, Dan Schaubert, Jay Schindler, with input from Walt Kahn and Ron Pogorzelski) responded rapidly with two recommendations, namely, that we increase the Transactions page budget to 2000 pages on a once-only basis for 1990, and that the mandatory page limit be reduced to 6 pages instead of 4. A mail ballot then went to all voting AdCom members asking them to decide whether to go with the January 7 decision, requesting PUB and TAB to act on the recommendations of the Fante committee, or to return the entire matter to AdCom on June 25 for further discussion. The majority vote favored the Fante committee´s recommendation, which has now been referred to PUB and TAB. Both bodies will act on it before our next AdCom meeting, and we will be able to put the new policy in place for 1990. Many thanks to Ron and his committee.