What is in a page charge?

ACCORDING to the Electron Devices Society (EDS) policy, all manuscripts submitted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices and IEEE Electron Device Letters must be accompanied with a page-charge statement. This statement reflects the author´s intentions of honoring the page charge if the submission is accepted for publication. The purpose of imposing the page charge is to partially offset the cost of publishing. For instance, in 2007 alone, we published 4800 pages in the Transactions and Letters at a cost of $650 000. IEEE does not require authors to pay for their papers to be published. Also, EDS is among the few entities within IEEE that refrain from practices such as mandatory charges for overlength articles and publication queue preferences based on payment of page charges. Going forward, we would like to continue to do the same. It is our philosophy that each published manuscript should be of the right length in relation to its technical impact. The technical impact is arrived at through the peer-review process. We have had considerable success using this process over the last 15 years and have seen a healthy trend toward the elimination of verbose sections from published material and consequent improvement in overall quality, which are independent of the author´s ability to pay.