HFES Presidential Town Hall (September 2022) | Bonus Episode

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to our HFS Presidential Town Hall for September september 2022. No matter if you're joining us live, watching or listening to this recording later, thank you all so much for being here. HFPS has invited me to host today. My name is Nick Rome, and I host a weekly Human Factors Podcast. I'm also joined by the President of HFPS, Chris Reid, and by the President elect, Carolyn Summerk. We're also here from Bill Hori on publications and Rom Michaela on the plan for technical standards. Also special thank you to some of the HFES staff who are helping out behind the scenes. We got a great town hall for you today, especially kind of focused around standards and publications. We'll be addressing some of your comments, questions, and concerns a little bit later. But first, just to level set with everybody on the format, so everyone's up to date here. This town hall is open to everyone, members, nonmembers alike, no matter which category you fall in, we are super happy you are here. We're broadcasting this live across many platforms right now, across the Human Factors Cast channels, as well as the official HF Es channels. You can find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch. If you can't stick around for the entire town hall today, this event will be available to watch on those platforms right after we're done. We'll also be distributing the audio version of this discussion on the Human Factors Cast podcast feed. And one last important note as we're making our way through the conversation today, we ask that no matter where you're watching or listening, leave your questions, comments, concerns in the chat, in the comments section. So that way we may address them towards the end. During a q and a section. We'll see everything on our end, so we'll flag them throughout the discussion. So feel free to ask them at any time. And this is my own personal request to give these guys some tough questions. We tend to give them some really easy ones towards the end there. All right, so I've gone on long enough. I'm going to clean up a little bit, and we're going to pass it over to Carolyn to go through some of the announcements here. Carolyn, over to you. Thank you, Nick. And welcome everyone to our town hall. Thank you so much for tuning in. And let's go ahead and get started. So

there we go. So our agenda today, we're going to kind of catch you up on some things that have been going on, talk a little bit about who we are, and then we are going to feature the chairs of our Publications Committee Division and Standards Division. And just to give you a little bit of context here, each one of these town halls, we've been featuring different components of the HFPS organization. And so now we are at the Publications and Standards Division. So it gives you an opportunity to find out more about these different areas and the committees that are in those divisions and of course, how you might get involved with them. If what they do is of interest to you or you're always welcome to make suggestions about what they should be getting into that you think would be important. So that's the point of the Town Hall, it's bi directional communication. So just as a reminder, HFPS, we try to provide a range of things that members find value in, including the career center. Do not forget that we will have companies at the annual meeting to interview with. So that should be hopefully another draw for folks to come to the annual meeting. Membership. Again, everything we do is to help provide value to our members, both in being a member of the organization and also to help in your profession in terms of informing the world about why professionals like HTPs folks are needed. And that comes through our government relations work, as well as our press release and public relations work that we're doing and all of our other outreach activities which you heard about in our prior town hall. There are opportunities, as I mentioned, for you to get involved in. HFS will say, I just looked at our volunteer application site and I don't see too many things that are listed on there which is not accurate because we certainly need volunteers. So that's one of the things that we're going to be working on is getting those needs, which we really do have up on the volunteer site so people know about them. So we had an election and we have our results. We are going to be welcoming to the executive council susan Katowski as President elect. Julie Gilpin Mcnin is going to be the Secretary treasure elect and one returning and one brand new at large member of the Executive Council, paul Green and Shannon Roberts, respectively. We do have a business meeting during the annual meeting and everyone is welcome to attend that business meeting. So please look for that in your program and come and meet and talk with the Executive Council members at that meeting. So we are going to have a big event at the beginning of our annual meeting, as we always do, except that this is moved from the Tuesday to the Monday evening. We are going to be having a combination of our welcome reception and our awards ceremony on Monday evening. And we have so many wonderful people to recognize at that event. These are the various awards that people either self nominated or nominated someone that they highly respected, thought was appropriate for that award. We have a number of awards and they're all in different sorts of areas, from product design, to recognizing new young investigators, to people who are doing outreach and to best paper awards. So all of those you'll be able to meet and talk with the awardees on Monday evening. And, of course, throughout the week as well. We have a lot of social events at the annual meeting and hope that you will take advantage of those, starting with the opening reception. We also have mentor mentee luncheons, which I'm not sure if those are all filled up yet, but look into those if you have an interest and you're not signed up. The council of affinity groups has networking and individual AG's have networking. There's a student reception. There's a reception for Early Career Professionals and Practitioners poster with fellows so that you can speak with HFS fellows and ask them a little bit about their career and get to know them a little bit more. We have all kinds of vendors coming, the exhibit hall, so please patronize and come and meet the exhibitors that will be there throughout the week. And of course, our TGS have business meetings and social meetings. That's where you can get involved with the TGS in terms of putting yourself up for nomination when they're holding elections. And there's lots of other activities throughout the week as well. So we really hope we'll be seeing you in Atlanta. So, of course, looking at our events throughout the year, upcoming event with two of them, actually the annual meeting, and that's followed immediately by Ergo X, same location. We also have some upcoming webinars, and you can find all of those listed on the HDS events page. This one coming up is specifically addressing sustainability and hope that you will tune in for that. And yes, as it says, webinars are added regularly to the list, so please check back. Don't not check this until November because we could sneak another one in there on you. So now I think am I turning this over to you, Chris, at this point? Yes, I'll take it from here. Thanks for that intro, Carolyn. And I think I saw a question in the chat while we're at it, about who won the William See Howell Young Investigator Works. So that was Capille Jalil. Martin. So, capille. Congratulations on that. All right, so looking at the slide that Carolyn has up, if you're new to HFPS and you're not an existing member or you're coming back to HFS, I like to throw the slide up here because it really just tells the gist of what we are. So advancing the science of practice for people, designing systems for people. Essentially, many of us come from different backgrounds. We look at social science, biological science, looking at engineering. A lot of crossbreed, looking across all of these different opportunities coming in from different directions. And that just basically shows the diversity of what we represent as a society. And it's really critical to understand these different needs as we solve everyday problems and design systems for people. If we can go to the next slide, please, Carolyn. Now, why that's important? I love to pull this up because this is essentially the circle of life, as I like to call it. So the ecosystem of human factors and Ergonomics in general. So on one side you see academia, on the other side, consulting, government, industry. It's a continuous circle. You essentially have this symbiotic relationship where one is pulling on the other push and pull type relationship. We like to produce goods and services, essentially. These are our people, our processes, our knowledge, tools, solutions, anything that's generated from either side. And when you think about it from the demand perspective, you have things like jobs, resources, access, advocacy, any of those gaps that could be filled from either end. And that's important because we were founded in 1957. That means we've been around for quite a while and we have so many different chapters, organizations, technical groups looking at all that diversity that I mentioned. But it's really important from a continuity perspective that we supply this ecosystem with essentially the critical needs that it needs in order to be sustainable. And so that's why I like to touch on this piece every time we talk, because we're in a bigger universe more than just ourselves. All right, next slide, please.

All right, so this is the last set of updates. This town hall was essentially formed from a transparency perspective. So every quarter we come together and we talk about what we did over the last quarter. So here's some of the stuff that comes to essentially toot our horn about when we're looking at partnerships and advocacy, what we've done over the last quarter. For third quarter 2022, we have some stuff and work with the National Safety Council creating a new Memorandum of understanding. We've been doing outreach with historically black colleges and universities here in the US. So there's a new curriculum and work with the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. While we're in Atlanta, we're reaching out and having meetings with morehouse college spellman and Clark. Atlanta University. All these are part of that outreach for increasing the awareness of human factors and ergonomics as a Stem field. Looking into the COAGs, the affinity groups, the Council affinity groups. There's a new affinity group that just recently came out. It was approved by the COAG, the Council of Affinity groups and the Executive Council. It's the Korean American or Khfs AG group? Affinity group. So welcome on board, Khfs. Then there's the HFPS Council approving the new code of conduct. So that will be making its appearance soon. It basically broadens the code of conduct to include virtual events, whereas before it was set to more in person events. Looking into government relations, public relations. There's been a lot of action on that front. So there's been a comment that the FAA recently opened up and that comment was available for Hops to contribute to it's. Speaking towards seat sizing, in this case, aircraft seat sizing for commercial airliners. So Dr. Michael Ansley recently had an interview with USA Today. An airplane Geeks podcast that Dr. Ansley is coming out of our government relations. He's the chair of our government relations over there. Dr. Michael Wakelan, another of our public policy fellows, looking at an interview that he did with medical product outsourcing and specifically human factors in medical devices and design, usability and medical products. Dr. Wicklin's publication should be coming out next month, and we'll let you know when that appears. Then there's looking at engagement with Congress and federal agencies. HFS is pretty active on government relations front. So the recently released human readiness levels that came out the end of last year is something that we've been basically showcasing and engaging with members of Congress and agencies. On the last piece, I'll touch on our additional improvements. We're continuously working the inner workings of HFS to make it more valuable and easier for members to engage with. So there's some membership category changes that are coming up on the new horizon for 2023. So stand by to hear for those when they do come out. And then currently, we are interviewing some UX firms to help with our digital ecosystem, such as our website. So that's some of the inner workings showing some background work of what's happening in HFS. Carolyn, if you don't mind moving to the next slide, please. All right. And this is our master plan, the strategic roadmap. Some of you may be familiar with this. Every quarter, some of these dots get filled in and change colors. If you see some of those red circles that are around, those are newly changed, updated dots going from maybe in work to complete it or not started to in work. Essentially, this moves across my timeline as president, going from fourth quarter, where we were in 2021, to where I transitioned over to Carolyn next month in fourth quarter, 2022. So a lot of these deliverables are looking across membership, programming, advocacy, diversity, equity, inclusion, the committees themselves, the inner working parts of HRPS, as well as the operations. So lots of things to do, lots of things done. So thank you to our volunteers and our staff for continuously progressing HFPS forward. All right, so now let's get into the meat of today's discussion. Next slide, please. So here is a look at the Executive Council and the divisions that Carolyn had mentioned. So we have today's scientific publications as well as standards. So Rob and Bill will be here to represent. We can go to the next slide. It zooms into their territory. Specifically, you can see how the publications are essentially broken down. We have our major flagship Human Factors journal that's out there, as well as our other journals, ergonomics and Design, the Health Care Journal, which is our newest journal, human Factors Prize and Jcdam. And then we're looking over at the standards. You'll hear more from Rob on this. But we're integrated with both national and international standards. HFDs produces some standards. I mentioned the HRLS that is a recent standard that's recently come out. So with all of that, let me stop talking. Nick, turn it back over to you and you take it from here, sir. All right. Thanks, Chris. Well, I think the first order of business, we'll bring out Bill to talk about some of the publications. So, Bill, welcome to the stage. We'll clean up a little bit. Thank you, Chris. So, Bill, let's just start at the top here. What is the Publication Division and what does it do? Yeah, no worries. So the Publication Division, it's sort of a collection of different entities. On one hand, you have the journal editors, which is really the main thrust of what the Publication Division is all about. But you also have the Scientific Publications Committee, which is a smaller group that kind of has a few responsibilities, which I'll get into in a moment, but not represented on the figure, but also as an integral part of it is the HFS staff as well. So we're all kind of working together in this division. Now, the Executive Council is really the final authority on things publication related, so they really have final oversight over what HFS is doing from a publication standpoint. But the division, in addition to kind of carrying out the business of producing journals and things like that, we provide input to the Executive Council as well. So we look at the offerings, the journal offerings. So, like, what's in our portfolio? Do we have a good balance of journals? Is it meeting the needs of the Society and Human factors practitioners in general? We also are responsible for assessing the health of the journals too, so looking at the metrics, making sure that we're meeting objectives, really growing the journals in ways that we want to, and just making sure that they continue to meet the needs of the leadership as well. As part of that, I think one of the more important responsibilities that falls on the Scientific Publications Committee, which is that smaller group, they is really in the recommendations for Editors in Chief for the journals. And so as part of our process as new editors fulfill their terms and they're no longer up for renewal, the Scientific Publications Committee will solicit candidates for those posts, will interview, and then we make recommendations to the Executive Council on that front. And so really, it's sort of an ecosystem to kind of borrow Christmas way of characterizing HF. Yes, on the whole. But yeah, we have our own little ecosystem within the Publications Division as well. One of the other things that we do as a division and Scientific Publications Committee in particular, we also try to liaise between the publishers as well, so Sage or elsevier we're trying to kind of facilitate the dynamics between those entities, the journals as well as the Executive Council. So you can see it's kind of a whole mixed bag of things publication related, but there's a lot of activities at any given point. But yeah, there's a lot of different moving parts, but I'm happy to get into some of those with some of the questions. Yeah, well, it sounds like you guys have got a lot going on recently. Would you want to get into some of the stuff that the division has been getting into recently? Yeah, sure. So if you kind of look back at the last year or so, maybe a little bit beyond that, many of you have probably noticed that we do have a new journal as part of our offering. So we have the Human Factors in Healthcare journal, which is really a reflection of kind of a need that has identified in recent history. Just really trying to kind of promote this important dimension. It's a growing area. We have a conference that's associated with that topic as well. And so it's really a passion project that was put forward by Tony Andre and Farzan Sasan Gohar, who I think is in the audience here and really kind of put that together and it really made a lot of sense from our perspective. We're very pleased that that's off the ground and running and doing quite well so far. Some of the other things that we've been doing, we've recently brought on board the newest editor in chief of the Human Factors Journal. I'm Rob Bradwin from the University of Wisconsin. He took away over from Pat Delusia at the turn of the year. This year again doing a great job, a lot of responsibility with that journal since there's so much activity and submissions to that journal. So we really respect the work that he's been doing there. We also renewed Jan Martin's term as editor in chief of Jcdam, so we're really happy that he decided to stick around for a second term. He's doing a great job with that journal as well. Some of the things that the scientific publication committee is working on these days really trying to really kind of refine our metrics and how we look at the journals, what sorts of things we're looking at. Impact factor is just one piece of the puzzle. We're also very much interested in various aspects of the production queue, the time to decision, submission rates, things like that. But of course nowadays with new alt metrics and things like that, we're also trying to figure out what makes sense to really look at when we get into the journals. We're also trying to facilitate a better way of reporting some of that. So we're really trying to get to a point where we can kind of have like a dashboard assessment for some of the journals, mostly in service of the executive council, but possibly for other purposes as well. And last of all, as we approach the annual meeting, we're really gearing up to bring on board the incoming division chair. I'll be ending my second term here in a matter of weeks and so it's been a great ride, have learned a whole lot, but It's time to pass the reins over to someone else. And so that's just kind of a snapshot of some of the things that have been going on recently end up coming. Yeah. So how can people get involved if they Want to help out with the Journal or apply to the Journal or anything like that? Yeah, so volunteerism, as with all of the different committees and divisions within HFS, it's such an important element. So when it comes to publications, it really could fall on kind of different sides of the Coin. So, on one hand, if people are interested in becoming active in the division through the Scientific Publications Committee, we do have a vacancy open. Rob Radwan actually, as he stepped up to assume the role of Editor in Chief, he vacated a spot on the Scientific Publications Committee, probably in and around the Annual Meeting, or maybe sometime kind of trailing behind that. We'll probably be working with our Volunteer Coordinator to try to get the word out that there are spots. So people that are interested can certainly make their interest known. And the new Chair, as well as some of the other committee members, will probably go through a process to bring that person on board. The other one, which is probably, certainly an area of greater need, I should say, is really getting involved with the journals themselves. And so this can come at many different levels, certainly, as reviewers is probably the one that comes to mind. Most of all, when you talk to the editors, there's a great need, a great burden involved in reviewing submissions for the journals. And so if you're not already a reviewer for the journals, definitely make your interest known to the Editor In Chief and get involved. If you are already a reviewer and you haven't done one in a while, get back in the game. There's a whole lot of time and energy that we need. Last year, we had actually done some assessments, really how much time is necessary to produce some of the journals that are really our livestream in some senses. And we're talking on the order. When you consider from the Editor in Chief on down. Through the Associate Editors. Through the reviewers. When you look at all of the submissions and the time it takes to process each one HFS staff. We're talking on the order of 20,000 to 25,000 hours of volunteer time to really get to really be able to produce all of the issues that comprise HF journal. And then the other journals are also part of that process too. So really getting involved, I can't say it enough, we really look for your support out there.

Yeah. Well, thank you, Bill. We're going to hear from you a little bit later, I think, during the Q and A. There's a lot of really great questions that are popping up here, and I'll remind everybody if you are listening, watching, please drop your questions in the comments. I promise we'll get to as many of them as we can in that section. But now let's head over and talk to Rom about standards. And that interesting topic. I love standards. In fact, we actually just aired an episode on the podcast about how the metaverse would need standards. I'm curious, let's talk about technical standards. What is your role overall as the Technical Standards Division chair? Thank you, Nick. I'm a non voting Executive Council member, so I'm the representative and advocate of the technical standards that our professional society gets involved in the field of human factors in economics. So if you go back to early 819 80s as a professional society, HFCs has participated in developing national standards and we have worked to establish the US position for international standards. And this particular division consists of variety of chairpersons, and I'm basically a facilitator get the reports from these chairs and I'm answerable to the Executive Council or the President of Human Factors in Economic Society. I'm a new kid on the block. That is, I took over this role from Dr. Bob Fox, who's retired from General Motors in 2021. But I have been involved in the technical standards work for more than a decade. Great, well, let's talk a little bit about standards in HFES. What are the standards that come under HFES, and do you have any sort of committees that handle those standards? Thank you, Nick. That's a great question. Actually, through American National Standards Institute. ANC HFPS is involved in the International Organization for Standardization. ISO So ISO Technical Committee we call PC 159, which is specific to ergonomics. That's where a lot of the HFS is involved heavily. And this particular technical committee of Ergonomics has four subcommittees. And of course, these subcommittees have various work groups. So the first committee is on general economics principles. Chair is peregrine from a boy. And we have another subcommittee on anthropometry and Biomechanics shared by Dr. Bob Fox from General Motors. And we have a third subcommittee called Economics of Human System Interaction. I'm sharing that particular subcommittee. And of course, we have the last one, Ergonomics of the Physical Environment, Ambita Maguire from Dell. With respect to ISO, we have four subcommittees, and C is the US administrator to this particular committee. And so the technical adversity group members, we review and debate the merits of this particular standards and prepare for the US voting position. So that is again, ISO. Obviously, as of now, we are working on the ANC HFPS 100, which is called Human Factors Engineering of Computer Workstations, again shared by Amrita from Dell. And the co chair is Scott Openshaw from Intuitive Surgical. And we have another one, which we finished. I'm glad Dr. Judy sees in the audience as well. That is CHF Es 400, just published on human readiness levels in 2021. And of course, we have the ASTM F 48 basically this is with respect to standards on exoskeletons and exosuits, again shared by obviously Chris Reid and Deviation from Clemson University. And the last one is we do have a representation at the Department of Defense through Steve Maryman from Boeing. He's retired from Boeing, but he's still very active in the Department of Defense human Factors and Economics technical Group. So these are the committees ideal. There's a lot of acronyms you throughout. There ISO ASTM ANSI Right. Can you go over a little bit about what the differences are between these different groups of standards? Yeah, the ISO, which is I think it started in 47, it says Independent Nongovernmental Organization for Standardization. It has around more than 165 national standard body. That is, the countries represent the members or the countries not the individual members per se. And they have around more than 22, 50, I think I believe technical committees. So what ISO does is that it develops, it brings the expertise and develops the voluntary and consensus based and market relevant standards. Okay? If there is no need, then they don't develop it. So if there is a need for it, only ISO starts developing a standard. So again, why are we developing the standards? It's making sure that all the characteristics and the performance of these products are consistent so that people use the same definitions of the terms. If you're talking about meta horse, any product which you have the same consistency, same reliability and obviously safety. So that is ISO and ANSI. That is the US. The American National Standards Institute. I think I believe it's around established 1918. Again, it's a private nonprofit organization. And again, ANC does not write standards. We need to emphasize that. Okay? And ANC is a founding member of the ISO and plays an active role in its governments. And of course, Ansee coordinates the US standards with international standards so that if you're developing some American products can be used worldwide, that's one way. And also ANC accredits the standards that are developed by representative other standard organization such as ASTM. So the ASTM, if you go back to I think it's maybe older than ISO and ANSI, ASTM is basically American Society for Testing and Materials. I believe it started in the 1880s and until 2001, it was just known as ASTM. Now it's now classified as ASTM international. Okay? And basically same thing, it develops and publishes voluntary consensus technical standards for materials, products, or the systems and services. Okay. And this standards are developed under a World Trade organization. You have this agreement called Technical Barriers to Trade. So basically it has essentially those principles are embedded in the ASTM. For example, if you're looking at a foot protection for the shoes, you see an ASTM standard. So just as an example. So essentially those are the three main standards. Of course, each country has its own standard. As I was saying, ANSI as American. You have the British standards. You. Have German standards. You have Japanese standards like that much information? No, it's great you brought up that example of the shoe and how that is sort of just one, I guess, small thing that you can do. But thinking about sort of standards in general, can you give an example of why they're important and kind of what they can do to influence society just in general? Okay, good question. Because it's standard is basically a document. It provides requirements, specifications and the guidelines that can be used consistently so that the materials you're looking at, the products or the processes and the services are fit for their purpose. You're looking at the safety, consistency, everything. And what you're doing is you're using standardization as a tool to create a level playing field that benefits everyone. So I'll give you a few examples where HFPS involved. Classic one is the ANC HFPS 100, which was started in 1988. The standard for human factors engineering of Visual Display terminal workstations. Now that was groundbreaking for HFES. And then they updated in 2007. Now as speaking, or as we speak, Amreka from Dell and Scott, they are working diligently on updating this particular ANC HFE S 100. And now it's classified as rather it's called as a Human Factors Engineering of Computer Workstations. So I think their target date is next year. So the whole standard and CHFA standard is going to come out on the computer workstations. You're looking at the input devices, what should be the mouse like, what should be the monitor like the specs sit to stand workstations. So those are the ones which you look into in that. And the other one I think even Chris mentioned, and I'm glad Judy is also there, that last year we called it, we developed this and Chfps 400, it's called Human Readiness Level Scale in the system development process. So if you're looking at this, we know that there is a TRL which is called Technology Readiness Level. It basically focuses on technical maturity of the technology maturity. But whereas this particular HR, it emphasizes the readiness of developing the technology for human use and safety. So that's the beauty of this. I mean, I come in Judy's group because it took almost a year, but developed this and now it's standard. It's applicable to any type of technology you're looking at under development of military, government, federal agencies, industry and academia. What you're doing is we want the standard ensures that human readiness is satisfactory addressed through a system design and development. What you're trying to do is reducing the human error operational systems and of course, promote effective and overall human system performance. And the last one is, again with respect to HFS is I think what Chris Reed and Debia Sean Watson are working on the exoskeletons. Nowadays people are everywhere. What you see is exoskeletons, exos. So we need to have a proper standard when we are using this EXO standard. So I'm sure chris can answer this better than me. But that's one of the things HFS is also actively looking into. So again, there are a lot of standards where HFS is involved. Yeah, standards sometimes can get a bad rap from the public. And I'm a super nerd about standards. I love standards. How can members get involved with these standards? I would like to go back to my student days when I was doing my doctoral work. My part of my dissertation was on whole body vibration. At that time. I used ISO standards to develop how to calibrate the instruments, how to get the direct measurements. There is a process, you can't just buy whatever you want and just measure it. So there is a standard. So I have to follow. So that's how I got interested in how best we can link the research to standards. That's how I started and then a part of the Human factors. I looked at the public comments. There was a time, Dr. Bob Fox, even Dr. Tom Albin, they were looking at public comments for certain documents. So that's how I got involved. And simple point is that if you have expertise, any area, it doesn't matter you're from academia, industry, or the government or the non government, please get involved. Send a note to these committees and get involved. Of course, if you have to be a vote, it takes a while before you become a voting member. And one important thing is we do have strict deadlines. You can't just join for the sake of joining and don't contribute. We are strict deadlines because what happens is we report you ANC and ANC reports to ISO. For example, end of this month, we have one standard which on the document we are working on and already voting is already and I have to send ballots to Ansee. Again, we have strict deadlines with respect to that. And one important thing I want to mention is that especially for the people, especially the students or the people who wanted to get involved, dr. Paul Green from Unity of Michigan has a YouTube videos on the importance of standards, how best you can get involved in the standards. Again, a wonderful website Paul has developed and also I think Paul has a task force on standards which where they wanted to get to universities and make the students, especially the research based students, aware of these things. Because typically a lot of practitioners use these standards to develop their work. But I think one of the good ways to do is that making students to think about these regulations or the guidelines or the standards when you're working on your research. So there are various ways we can get involved in the standards. So you're more than welcome to, I mean, anyone who is interested, please send me a note. I can connect the dots. Yeah, well, thank you, Robin, I really appreciate it. I think we're going to bring back the rest of our panel here and start the Q and A portion of this town hall. So we had some really great questions from the chat here. I'm going to go in, I guess, order in which they were asked here. There were a lot of questions here about the journals, so I'm going to go with this first one here, this one's by Sarah on YouTube. I've been inundated with reviewing requests over the last three years. Are there any plans to make reviewing more sustainable or to pay reviewers bill? I'm going to pass this one over to you. That's a great question Sarah, and I guess you're probably being inundated because you're actually responsive and doing a good job of those reviews and that's usually a hallmark of people that get frequent requests. But I think this is an issue that all of the editors in chief are contending with. Really trying to kind of keep their base viewers healthy and active, expanding it where it's appropriate to do so and really try to keep reviewers more engaged. I mean, the prospects of paying reviewers is probably a difficult avenue to kind of navigate. I think they're trying to explore other things and this is really by publication. Each editor in chief has their own strategies that they're trying to implement. Some of them are shared across publication, others are unique to a journal but really trying to find ways of either making reviewing more attractive either through recognition or other types of perks, whether it's access to the journal or something like that for an extended period of time and so on. I think really, I don't think there's a panacea for this issue and it's something that we're going to continue to tackle over time. Just really trying to make sure that we have a good core body of reviewers available to us because really in some respects the reviewers are the gatekeepers as well as the editors for the scientific knowledge that gets propagated through the journals. And so we really need to make sure that that's kind of a critical and well thought out core for us. So I kind of dodged the question a little bit, but it's on our minds and we're really trying to think about ways of kind of keeping it going along the lines with journals. There's another one here, privacy settings won't let me see the name. How do you apply to write for the journal? But I think almost every journal it's submission based. And so in terms of looking at the different journals, what sorts of content they are after, whether it's original research, articles, reviews, etc. Each one sort of has a different variety of things that they are looking for. And then of course, through the instructions for authors, there should be all of the information needed to kind of figure out how to submit something. And really when it's first kind of brought into the system, the Editor in Chief or possibly one of the senior or associate editors, we'll really be the ones in charge of triaging that articles are really assessing whether that's an appropriate fit for the journal, and if so, it will probably find its way to reviewers and through the process. If not, they'll probably be kicked back out with some feedback about the fit or really kind of underscoring what the journal is looking for in terms of submission. So hopefully that answers the question there. Nick yeah, and along the lines of sort of applying and I should have asked this after the first one, but with respect to reviewing, how does one sort of make it evident that they are available to review for a journal? Yeah, I think for Zan had noted this in the chat as well. But yeah, some of the websites do have places where you can kind of register yourself in the database in the system for the journal. But the one that's probably a bit more traditional is just email the Editor in Chief or one of the associate or senior editors. Make yourself known with a bit of information about what sorts of areas you're comfortable reviewing in. And then by virtue of being in the system. It's really kind of a snowball effect if you're in there and you can be found by editors and you start to get reviews and develop sort of some credentials or reputation for being a reliable reviewer. You're probably going to get more over time and again. We really encourage people that are new to the process to kind of get their feet wet and learn the process and hopefully contribute over the long term. And I just wanted to add a little bit on that and this kind of a combined Sarah's question and Nancy, as an Associate Editor, what I see is only but I do see how many requests or active reviews a person has at a given point in time. And so if I see that somebody's got already reviewing something, I'll just go, oh, nuts, let me find somebody else, because I don't want to have somebody have several manuscripts that they're reviewing at one time. And so I can see gosh, if somebody's been asked to review twelve manuscripts lately, like, oh, okay, I got to look for somebody else. But I don't know what all the other requests that people get from other journals, because usually we're reviewing for multiple journals. That's just a limitation that we live with. So it doesn't look like you've reviewed for human Factors in a while. I may send a request, but certainly if people are too busy, it's absolutely fine to say, no, I can't do that right now. We always love for people to make a recommendation of somebody else to review. That's very helpful because otherwise, you know, what I'm doing is I'm looking at papers that are relevant, so I'm looking for somebody else who has written something that's relevant to this particular manuscript in order to find people to review. So if you write in a particular area, your name is going to pop up probably, and then that's how you sort of get found. Unless, as Bill said, you actually contact the editor and then say, this is what I'm interested in, or contact an associate editor and say, I'd like to review for Human Factors, and these are the kind of papers that I can view. Okay, I'm going to jump in here with kind of a three for. I'm going to combine a couple of these questions here with respect to the journals. Recently, the Biden administration mandated that all publicly funded research to become available at no cost to the tax paying public here in the States, at least. How will this impact the HFCs journals going forward? That's combined with the question of is there a plan to make the journals completely open access?

Yes. First, I'll say the short answer is I don't know, but let me meander for a few minutes to kind of give a bit more substance. First of all, the new journal, Human Factors in Healthcare is completely open access. And that was really by design, that was part of the original vision for the journal. And so that's one thing as it relates to our other publications. I think when you look at the world of publishing, it's really such an evolving

area. And so I think it's kind of hard to pinpoint what is the ramification is going to be. Obviously, from a reader's perspective or consumer of research, open access is really the be all, end all, being able to kind of click on something to access it. But there's a lot of other considerations we need to look into when making decisions about the other journals that haven't been established as fully open access. So, yeah, the Biden administration news or announcement recently, we're going to have to see how that evolves. And so we've been in contact with the folks at stage. They're really going to be kind of seeing how that's really implemented. And so really, the devil's in the detail will want to kind of understand how that might look from their end and how it will fit into that mold as a society that's producing the content. On the other side of the coin, when it comes just to the broader question of open access, more generally, we need to think about things like how does that impact our current contract with Sage? In this case, how would more of an open access model kind of affect the underlying financials as well as some of the accessibility, things like that. And at the same time, we're also mindful of the burden. Where does the cost burden fall? Does it fall on the people submitting? Because we also want to be mindful to the people that are submitting to journals, whether they're HFCs members or otherwise. It's a difficult thing to kind of come to the table and say, yeah, well, if you want to submit to a journal, you'll need to pony up X amount of dollars, particularly in circumstances where they might not have budgeted that in a grant or some funding opportunity. So there's a whole mixed bag of things that are going to go into this. Again, I'm not sure exactly where we're going to end up. That's the I don't know part of the answer. But you can be sure that there's a lot of discussions going on within HFCs, but also with our publishing partners as well. So we'll kind of see. Thanks Bill, I've hammered on you enough about the journals. I'm going to go back to Rom here and ask a couple of questions about standards because I think there's some really good ones here in the chat especially. So Barry Kirby, my cohost on peoplefactor's cash, he says standards should be less drive. We need to look at the usability of them. Is there any sort of consideration when sort of developing these standards and making them in a way that makes them easy to read for the people who are ultimately going to be using them? Oh my God, that's a great point. Actually, unfortunately, if you are trying to summarize a lot of literature, lot of evidence into some of these so called technical documents, obviously you see a lot of dryness in it and I think definitely you need a bit of education. I think that's one of the reasons where I think awareness and how best we can translate that into an easy way of interpreting the things will be helpful. Again, when I started going back to my own doctor, I had tough time to understand the vibration standards. I ended up asking quite a few people I went to even, because the way you measure certain terminology, certain technology. So I completely agree with Barry. It is definitely we need to more dumb it down per se, but if you are trying to make a standard document in a very simplistic it's still a tough again, I don't think I can answer this question, but it's definitely a tough task and I think definitely usability. The more user friendly the document is, the more you can apply. So I completely agree with Nick. I'll add on to what Ram is saying. Yeah, it's unfortunately dry turkey. We don't have that much gravy that you can add into it. Standards is tough. But I'm thinking on the publication side, some of the lessons learned from over there. We have these essentially literature reviews for publications. Could we potentially do these essentially summaries of all these standards that are chunk together for similar topics? So obviously Rob mentioned about me working on Excel skeleton standards. We tend to group them in subcommittees, but there's no kind of literature review available for that. That kind of puts it into maybe an executive summary version that goes across the different standards and touches lightly on them. And if you're, of course, interested, you can dive in deeper, but it's just a different way to take it for information transfer. Well, hey, we're at the hour, so if anyone on the panel needs to go, please do so now. Want to thank everybody for being on today. If we do have time, I have just a couple more questions that I'd like to get to. Just one more. Is that okay if we do one more question, and this one's a standard question too. What is some of the most obscure or niche topics that you could get involved in standards with? Like, what is the weirdest, most obscure thing that you could make a standard for? Name it, you can do it. But you need to have a market need for it. So, for example, the Google lenses or Sits Sandbox station and maybe for your Halloween you're talking about Nick, right? Some of those lights, the LEDs, the specs for that. So, I mean, I think any of the latest if you're looking at any technology or you don't even have for just a helmet charge on the toys, some of the standards. Yeah, I think any you name it, I think there are some standards. Each country has its own standards, too. But the classic one I really like, the one is now with the seats for the plane and the flight. Oh, my goodness. That's going to be very interesting. With respect to you're trying to design, you have limited space. You're looking at so many variables, so it's not going to be an easy task. Yeah. Thank you for entertaining my curiosity. Well, that's it for today, everyone. We sincerely hope that everyone watching and listening has enjoyed this town hall discussion today. If you like this, come and join us in Atlanta in two weeks for the annual meeting. We'll also invite you to join us for the next time we do a quarterly town hall. Take a look out, but be on the lookout for that. As a reminder, there's a link to a survey in the description of this episode, so you can let us know how we did today, what you might want to hear from us about in the future. Thank our distinguished panel, everyone else on the HFS side of the house, for making this happen. You can always find the latest from HFPS, hfbs.org encourage you to join the HFBs LinkedIn group, or take a look at those HFPS bulletins in your email. Keep up with some of the society news. As for me, I've been your moderator, Nick Rome. You can find me weekly on Human Factors cast our podcast where we talk about all the latest news from around the human factors world. Also find me on social media at Nick Rome. Thanks again for tuning into this town hall. For those of you who haven't been on the show before, I like to end our show with it depends because in Human Factors, it always depends. Like a lot of our answers today, right? So I'll count us down from three and one. We'll say it depends. Ready? Three, two, one. It's a pin. Human Factors Cast brings you the best in Human Factors news, interviews, conference coverage, and overall fun conversations into each and every episode we produce. But we can't do it without you. The human factors. Cast network is 100% listener supported. All the funds that go into running the show come from our listeners. Our patrons are our priority, and we want to ensure we're giving back to you for supporting us. 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