The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION is a quarterly publication with distribution in excess of 3000 copies per issue. It is directed to practicing engineers and scientists, technical project and program managers, and writers and editors who have a significant interest in or responsibility for the communication of technical information, This TRANSACTIONS is indexed and abstracted worldwide.

in concept, then, these are the three broad categories of contributed papers we are seeking.Each paper should have as its obvious and ultimate intent the increase, if not the maximization, of understanding and retention of technical information by the recipient-user.A supplementary description of types of papers serving the goals of this TRANSACTIONS includes (1) clear, concise, pragmatic guides (e.g., on organization and design) for the author-presenter of technical in formation, and (2) discussion of ideas, methods, and media in the realm of audio/visual communication.Naturally, artwork will play a significant role in this topical issue, and authors should anticipate that edi torial comment will be no less likely for it than for their text.

The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION is a quarterly publication with distribution in excess of 3000 copies per issue. It is directed to practicing engineers and scientists, technical project and program managers, and writers and editors who have a significant interest in or responsibility for the communication of technical information. This TRANSACTIONS is indexed and abstracted worldwide.

The psychology and mechanics of creating and publishing a nonfiction book involve many considerations. Among those discussed here are evaluation of the audience, outlining structure and content, establishing a writing habit, including graphic material, credits and acknowledgments, editorial help, agents and publishers, contracts, galley and page proofs, and indexing.

The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION is a quarterly publication with distribution in excess of 3000 copies per issue. It is directed to practicing engineers and scientists, technical project and program managers, and writers and editors who have a significant interest in or responsibility for the communication of technical information. This TRANSACTIONS is indexed and abstracted worldwide.

THE United States will soon have in effect the first major revision of its copyright law since 1909. This revision was made necessary largely by the successful engineering of xerography into increasingly convenient and economic copying machines. The new law legitimizes most examples of single, personal-use copying but severely proscribes multiple and systematic copying without copyright-holder authorization.

THE next issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, completing vol. PC-20, will appear in December. Subsequent issues will be published on a regular quarterly schedule in 1978: March, June, September, and December.

The decision to create a new journal starts — or should start-with the determination of the need for a new, separate, and continuing forum for the interchange of information within a discipline or field. Critical criteria include the choice of editor and editorial board; estimates of the amount of material to be published; assessment of the total potential audience and of the probable percent capture; direct costs (which vary with the publishing organization); and the subscription price. Other factors include growth potential, society support, page charges, reprint sales, advertising sales, and patience.

THE design of the Third IEEE Conference on Scientific Journals was largely, like that of the second, the work of Charles W. N. Thompson of Northwestern University, who owed part of his inspiration to the success of the first Conference, held in New York in 1973, which in turn was based on a suggestion by George Schindler of Bell Laboratories and was organized mainly by John Phillips of RCA. The success of all three Conferences owes more to these people than to anyone else, and they deserve special mention here.

In 1929 there was almost no scientific periodical publishing in Canada. The National Research Council of Canada, in response to the scientific community, undertook to publish the Canadian Journal of Research. In 1935 this became two publications, each with two sections. In 1944 six separate sectional publications were in being, and in 1950 these became six individual journals. Since then five new journals have been added to meet Canadian needs.

THE next issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, completing vol. PC-20, will appear in December. Subsequent issues will be published on a regular quarterly schedule in 1978: March, June, September, and December.

The implications of a new government administration, technology, and social attitudes are viewed in terms of their effects on the publishers of scientific material. It is expected that there will be less government regulation, greater response to social and occupational needs and trends, increased use of information networks, and further specialization of small technical journals.

The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION is a quarterly publication with distribution in excess of 3000 copies per issue. It is directed to practicing engineers and scientists, technical project and program managers, and writers and editors who have a significant interest in or responsibility for the communication of technical information. This TRANSACTIONS is indexed and abstracted worldwide.

The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION is a quarterly publication with distribution in excess of 3000 copies per issue. It is directed to practicing engineers and scientists, technical project and program managers, and writers and editors who have a significant interest in or responsibility for the communication of technical information. This TRANSACTIONS is indexed and abstracted worldwide.

DURING 1976 the IEEE Group on Professional Communication took stock of its members and redefined its goals as 1) helping engineers improve their communication skills and 2) informing them of new ideas and methods in communication.

LT^ lA U • id £fSs E~jb ett5 Jl eFs EfT Bis l£r information interaction car.mean many things to different people, from on-line interaction with a computer terminal to direct human-to-human communication.The theme, "information Interaction," ;s people-oriented, it is especially fitting for the 1976 fyjid-year fvleeting, since the tradition of fvlid-Year Meetings is to provide a comfortable informal setting where people-to-people interaction is promoted and ideas are interchanged free!y=Previous mssiings have deail with the lheu : ;~->, IGO'S, and techniques for information handling.We want to concentrate on people and information.What do people really do with information once modern technology has provided it?How are people's decision-making processes affected?How do people cleaJ with nonfidelity or "noise" in information to which they are exposed?What are the educational aspects?To what extent do people deny themselves access to needed information because of misconceptions?Papers are solicited for the iv/'o Mid-Year Meeting on the following general topics.The questions are to stimu-0^-* thsv ar Q not exhaustive.© People-to-People interaction < "»v» do people transfer Information amuny one anuiher?Is the "gatekeeper" concept valid?How can person-to-person communication be enhanced? ® User-information System interactionWhat impact has on-line searching had on users?Will the user pay the costs? © Education as an information interaction Process tAre current educational techniques yeiiiny iiic iob done?How can information science contribute to education?What implications does research in education 1.

Whatever its limitations, and they were considerable, the conference represented here certainly succeeded in its main objective which was to unite, for three days of both formal and informal discussion, people who share a common interest in scientific journals but who are ordinarily separated by differences in their professional or business points of view.

The current journal publication system has four immediate participants: researcher-writers, publishers, libraries, and readers. In response to technological developments which facilitate copying, publishers have increased their demands for additional revenue from libraries. The logic of the publishes' arguments threatens the very existence of institutions which purchase items with the intention of providing them to more than one reader. Society at large does have some interest in the spread of scientific principles and technological information, and the current thrust of the publishers broadens the concept of the ownership of ideas, since publishers entitled to a new payment for each reader may have the right to price large segments (e.g. students, docturs caring for the inteligent, etc.) of an interested public out of the market. In addition, increased restriction on the flow of scientific and technical information may have a significant impact on the advance of science and technology itself.

Typesetting of journals by computer still is more expensive today than typewriter composition. Economics favors the computer only if multiple use can be made of the material after it has been captured in machine-readable form. Such is the case with the material that is keyboarded into the bibliographic database of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The records in tins database are produced directly from the manuscripts submitted by authors and are then used over and over again: to photocompose a part of the article in the primary journal itself, to photocompose pages for an “advance abstracts” publication, to photocompose selected abstracts needed by The Energy Research and Development Administration's (ERDA's) Nuclear Science Abstracts and to provide ERDA with a corresponding tape which eventually goes to the International Nuclear Information System in Vienna, to produce a monthly tape for information centers offering selective dissemination of information (SDI) and other services, to produce multiple entries in the new quarterly Current Physics Index which covers all the physics journals published by AIP, to produce multiple entries in the annual subject and author indexes in each journal, and to produce cumulative 5 to 20-year journal indexes. The multiple-use concept cannot be used to justify computer typesetting of the full text of journal articles. We will specify the conditions that must be met before full-text computer composition can become competitive with other methods, and discuss some of the advantages of such a system.

TONY CAWKELL horn in Hcnham, Essex, England, educated at Stowe, and served in communi cations in the Royal Navy through out the war.He founded Cawkeli Research & Electronics Ltd., in 1947, designing and manufactur ing instruments for non-destruc tive testing, acoustical measure-_ .*"r_ ment* 5 medico!electronic*, picturestorage and transmission etc., including the world's first high speed storage oscilloscope.

In this issue of PC TRANSACTIONS we have included, along with the new items, a number of reprints from previous issues.

document were highly correlated with frequencies from the remaining parts of the document, particu larly in technical writing. For this reason, the trigram frequencies were gathered from the document being analyzed even though this nearly doubled the running time of the program.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the co-authors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under the primary entry in the Author Index.

be described as "the way you write," rather than as "proper words in proper places" or "the dress of thoughts," then their thesis is that your style should be such that the reader will do with your report, or because of your report, what you would have him do.Their comments on style and their own easy familiar way with words combine to make Technical Writing a good example as well as a collection of precepts.details are given adequate recognition.Some of the Suggestions for Writing are comprehensive and some specific; some of the Sentences for Revision involve simple matters, others present challenges.Worthy of note is the excellent treat ment, in all Sections, of the structural and logical aspects of planning a tech

The writer of a technical paper looks at his subject from all angles before he starts to write. He asks himself a lot of questions; samples are suggested here. The answers to these help to keep him on course while he does the preliminary and final writing. As he does this work he is careful not to change direction and not to swamp his reader with unneeded data. The creator of Sherlock Holmes has at least two comments on these faults.

A model is proposed of the scientific journal as a specialized communication medium embedded in a highly unstructured communication process, its characteristics are found in its specialized process for continuously sampling, filtering, and converting the flow of ideas into a stable and visible form. Its the immediate (and long range) readership, and the purpose of the journal, which may range from current event reporting to archival, from theory to application, from tutorial to dialectic, and the like. A wide variety of both old and innovative techniques are presented which may be useful in making improvements, and especially in establishing and maintaining a shared view of function with both contributors and readers. Not only the editorial and content sections of the journal but also supplementary means, such as instructions to authors, are discussed.

The conference represented by this Record was remarkable in at least two respects. It brought together editors and publishers from engineering and the engineering-related sciences on one hand, and those from the biological and social sciences on the other. It also joined in discussion the editors and publishers on one hand, and the users — librarians and information scientists — on the other. The informal exchanges alone resulting from these unusual encounters was enough to justify the conference for many of those who attended.

When an issue is running late, it is often the Senior Editor who helps with checking or editing of manuscripts or proofreading galleys. She is responsible for the final check and release of all page proofs and covers to the printer.