One of the key benefits of IEEE ComSoc membership is to be able to download individual articles or the entire issue of IEEE Communications magazine -ComSoc’s flagship publication.  The magazine was always a good read, but it’s improved greatly in the last year, thanks to Editor in Chief Steve Gorshe.  Steve is a former IEEE Communications Society Director of Magazines and had organized special issues of IEEE Communications magazine in the past.  He has also been editor of several optical networking standards (including SONET and GFP) for ATIS and ITU-T.

While many of IEEE publications have drifted to journals oriented toward academia, IEEE Communications magazine has actually increased articles from industry that highlight new communications technologies.  Practicing engineers and marketing professionals have found those articles of keen interest and value.  We encourage ComSoc members and those with an IEEE Xplore account to browse recent issues of the magazine.

Steve’s goals for IEEE Communications magazine are all progressing very nicely:

1: Establishing proper balance between articles and feature topics targeted at engineers working in industry and those in academia.
2: Continuation of the new history column. edited by long time colleague and ComSoc Strategic Planning Committee Chairman Steve Weinstein.
3: Reducing the time from submission to first decision on standalone (open call) papers.
4: Provide a balanced coverage of both current hot topics, but also emerging topics and less well-known topics that would provide a diverse, broader coverage for the magazine’s readers.
5: Maintain the high quality of the articles through continuing careful peer review of feature topic proposals and all papers. Four of the top five papers from Communications Society publications were from Communications Magazine, according to recent  IEEE Xplore paper download statistics.

Mr. Gorshe writes, “In the past year, there have been a significant number of articles and feature topics from industry, achieving a good balance relative to those from academia.  The balance between hot topics and new topics has also been good.  The popular History Column continues, now edited by Steve Weinstein.  The time from article submission to first decision has been significantly reduced, with more initiatives in the works to further reduce the time.  Download data from IEEE Xplore confirms that the magazine has maintained the high quality of its papers.  My thanks to the hardworking editor team and ComSoc staff.  In the coming year, I am working on better correspondence with authors and implementing several new ComSoc publications initiatives.”    

This author has co-authored standards contributions and worked with Mr. Gorshe at NEC-America and PMC-Sierra.  I have always been impressed with his knowledge, experience and work ethic.  

From 1999-2000, we co-authored several contributions on Virtual Concatenation and mapping Ethernet MAC frames directly to SONET/SDH (that was later to become Generic Framing Procedure or GFP).  In a guest editorial on GFP and Data over SONET/OTN Steve wrote. “The protocol work officially began in American National Standards Insitute (ANSI) working group TlX1.5 in 1999 in response to a contribution from Alan Weissberger.”

IEEE Communications Magazine – May 2002 page 61 

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01000214

Steve’s credentials are impeccable.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and has 29 years of experience in research and development of telecommunications systems and ICs for PMC-Sierra, NEC America, and GTE.  He is also technical editor for multiple ITU-T standards, including G.7041 (Generic Framing Procedure – GFP) and G.Sup43 (Transport of IEEE 10G Base-R in Optical Transport Networks (OTN)), and has received awards for his technical and editorial contributions to the North American ATIS COAST Committee (formerly T1X1/OPTXS) telecom standards committee.  Mr. Gorsche has 32 patents issued or pending, over 24 published papers, and is co-author of a telecommunications textbook and of three additional book chapters.  Steve obtained a PHD while working in industry, which is quite an accomplishment.

Let’s all tip our hats to Steve Gorshe for the excellent job he’s done to improve the quality of IEEE Communications magazine!