Page 6 - Summer 2008

THE PRESIDENT’S PERSPECTIVE
Irecently heard a quote by Adlai Stevenson: “In America, anyone can become president. That’s one of the risks you take.” Such risks pay off. A hallmark of the ASA has always been its many opportunities for members to become directly involved in the operation of the Society— from member of the Student Council, to commit- tee member or chair, to Society officer. A former Technical Committee chair once remarked to me that in no other major society could he imagine someone as young as he holding a similar position. The success of the ASA owes everything to the vol- untary service provided by our members to advance the mission and maintain the excellence of our Society.
I want to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of our outgoing President, Gilles Daigle. As Past President Bill Yost wrote in the first of these President’s Perspectives, “Perhaps one of the more important responsibilities of the President is to not mess things up.” The vision, energy, and organizational abilities of Gilles have left the ASA in such a healthy state as to make “messing things up” close to impossible (I hope). The four Task Forces appointed by Gilles to implement recommendations made by the Vision 2010 Committee, described previously in Acoustics Today (July 2006), continue to move forward toward achieving those goals.
One of the goals is to continue to foster and to hold joint international meetings. Many of us attended the recent ASA meeting in Paris, France, an especially visible (and enjoyable!) example of international outreach. This meeting was organized jointly with the European Acoustics Association (EAA) and the French Acoustical Society (SFA), and it was the largest gathering of acousticians in history. The meeting was a huge success, due in large part to the tireless efforts of our ASA staff in New York, and Past Presidents Bill Yost and Bill Hartmann, in cooperation with their counterparts in the EAA and SFA. The next meeting of the ASA outside the U.S. will be held in Cancun, Mexico in fall 2010. This will be the second Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics co-organized by the ASA.
It is always a pleasure (and a relief) for the incoming President to report that the Society continues to be in strong financial shape. Our most recent audit reports that ASA’s segre- gated reserves are between two and three times our operating expenses. This ratio is high by comparison with other member societies of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), and it pro- vides us with a significant comfort zone for the near term. But for the long term we must continue to explore opportunities that will allow us to adjust for the trend toward open access to peer- reviewed journal articles.
An immediate challenge presented by open access that directly impacts a substantial percentage of authors who publish in JASA and JASA-EL is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. This policy, now in effect, mandates that upon acceptance for publication all peer-reviewed journal articles that arise from NIH funds be submitted to NIH’s digital archive in
order to be made accessible to the public within one year of publication. Upwards of 20% of all peer-reviewed articles published by the ASA may be subject to this mandate. ASA is working closely with AIP on this matter to minimize any inconvenience for affected authors, and it will continue to be proactive in addressing future challenges associated with open access to Society publications.
The Society also continues to enhance and expand its electronic publication program and electronic archives. Acoustics Today magazine archives were added to the ASA Digital Library in July, and JASA archives will soon be available on DVD. ASA’s new on-line publication
Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA), still in its first year, continues to grow under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Allan Pierce. The purpose of POMA is to provide an open access forum where attendees at ASA meetings, or meetings cosponsored by the ASA, can easily and rapidly publish papers they presented at these meetings.
An exciting new initiative is being explored by the Educational Outreach Task Force. Vice President Victor Sparrow, along with Task Force co-chairs Peggy Nelson and James Sabatier, invited the senior director of education services for the Optical Society of America (OSA) to make a presenta- tion to the ASA officers and managers last spring. The OSA has been highly successful in educational outreach with their web sites, hands-on demonstration kits, and instructional DVDs for middle and high school students. In combination with the innovative activities already underway through the Committee on Education in Acoustics, the ASA could create a strong pres- ence of acoustics in secondary school science curricula by hav- ing an education officer on staff who is dedicated to such activ- ities, and to the marketing and fundraising needed to support these activities. Financial and administrative issues connected with this proposed initiative are currently under discussion by the Executive Council.
An important new development is that both the Executive Council of the ASA and the Board of Trustees of the Acoustical Society Foundation (ASF) have voted to approve a Plan of Merger that has been under discussion for some time. The purpose of the merger is to better coordinate the objectives of the two organiza- tions and to provide a larger pool of funds for support of ASA activities and programs. The final step in this process is a vote on ratification by the Society membership at the ASA meeting in Miami. A public notice of this upcoming vote, and further expla- nation, will be published in the September issue of JASA by Executive Director Charles Schmid.
This article touches on only a few of the many initiatives currently underway in our Society. I look forward to helping the Society move forward with these and other initiatives during the coming year, and welcome the input of ASA membership. Please send any comments or suggestions to me at presi- dent@aip.org.
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