After two years of Past-Presidency I have somewhat unexpectedly moved back into the President’s seat. While this could be seen as a backwards career move, I actually feel grateful and challenged to be given the opportunity to continue Markus Rupp’s work (as well as some of my own work) as President. Over the past years we have launched several new projects, and it will be rewarding to further develop and grow these projects. I will be counting on Markus as Past-President as well as the new EURASIP Board of Directors to assist me in this venture.
In the new Board of Directors, Ana Perez-Neira, Fulvio Gini and Abdelhak Zoubir will continue as Local Liaison Coordinator, Awards Chairman and Workshops/Conferences Coordinator, respectively. I welcome our newly elected BoD Members Maria Paula Queluz, Aggelos Pikrakis and Jean-Luc Dugelay. Paula will be our Secretary-Treasurer, Aggelos will be our Web Services Coordinator and Jean-Luc will be our Publications Coordinator. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the BoD members currently retiring from the Board, Beatrice Pesquet-Popescu and Bulent Sankur. We will certainly miss their contributions and friendship, although I am sure they will continue to support and advise the Association as newly elected `Working Members’. In addition Beatrice will serve as General Co-Chair for EUSIPCO 2012 in Bucharest, and Bulent will chair the first EURASIP PhD Award Committee.
I am writing this message right after returning from a EUSIPICO-2012 site visit in Bucharest, where EUSIPCO will be hosted in the must see spectacular Parliament Palace. We are absolutely confident that the Bucharest conference will attract as many submissions and participants as our previous conferences, especially this year’s EUSIPCO in Mediterranean Barcelona. The BoD is currently in the process of selecting a similarly attractive site for EUSIPCO-2013, and at the same time invites everyone to submit bids for EUSIPCO-2014.
Also during the BoD Meetings in Bucharest, the important transfer was finalized of our seven open access journals from Hindawi Publishing Corporation to Springer, where the journals will be integrated into the new open access publishing division “Springer Open” (www.springeropen.com). Springer, currently the second largest scholarly publisher worldwide, acquired BioMed Central in 2008, which is the oldest and largest open access publisher, and recently launched “Springer Open” with the aim of expanding its open access publishing program and moving into areas beyond the life sciences. Springer has a strong commitment to developing its open access publishing program, and given its experience and resources we are fully confident it will do an excellent job in publishing and growing our journals. As some may remember, the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, currently are largest open access journal, was originally (and remarkably) a Springer toll access journal (under its old title “Applied Signal Processing“), acquired by Hindawi Publishing Corporation in 2001, and later converted into an open access journal. Launching the other six journals with Hindawi and converting them into open access journals has been a particularly interesting and rewarding operation for EURASIP. We currently publish over 700 papers per year in our open access programme, and four of the open access journals are now (or will soon be) covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). I personally wish to thank Dr. Ahmed Hindawi, co-founder and CEO of Hindawi Publishing Corporation, for ten years of successful and enriching cooperation. I have thoroughly enjoyed our many discussions, as well as his wisdom and friendship. I do hope our paths will cross again.
Finally, and as always, I would like to encourage everyone again to support our Association, by submitting papers to our journals and conferences, by performing editorial work or assisting in reviewing papers, by organizing conferences and workshops, and by writing to us and expressing ideas and suggestions. The Association will certainly benefit greatly from your comments and feedback.
Marc Moonen
President