About the JACoW Collaboration

JACoW is based on an international collaboration for the electronic publication of accelerator conference proceedings. Organization, membership conditions, and requirements are set out in the charter.

JACoW operates with an official team that does the bulk of the work and a board of directors that guides and manages the collaboration and reports to the stakeholders at the annual stakeholders meeting.

The following diagram shows the people who have an interest in JACOW--the stakeholders--and that they comprise all of the members of the collaboration and the users of JACoW. The collaboration is composed of representatives of member conferences, the team, and the board of directors. The key actors are described in the subsequent sections.

Institute Representatives

The primary stakeholders in JACoW are those institutes that provide resources for the collaboration. These institutes are invited to nominate representatives who will be their JACoW liaison. As primary stakeholders, they receive relevant information from the collaboration and are invited to the annual stakeholders meeting. The institute representatives are listed on the Members and Roles page elsewhere on this website.

Conference Representatives

Member conferences nominate representatives for a rolling set of three conferences: previous, current, and future. The change-over point occurs once the current conference has taken place.

The Team

The team is composed of persons responsible for carrying out the work of the collaboration. The team consists of editors who produce proceedings and a core group of members of the accelerator community who, though not necessarily involved in a particular conference, provide valuable skills to the collaboration such as web hosting, programming, content management, information technology, experience in proceedings production, conference management, and many other skills. Such people can serve on the JACoW board of directors and/or be co-opted to the team.

Co-opted Team Membership is reviewed at least once per year by the Board of Directors ahead of the annual Team Meeting to ensure that the appropriate voting rights are attributed (only team members, co-opted members and the Board of Directors can vote in JACoW’s elections).

From the outset of the JACoW collaboration, it was recognized that to reach high standards in the field of electronic publication editors of conference proceedings need training. It was decided to create a team composed of the previous, current, and future editors of each series and to offer them the following:

• Hands-on training in paper processing by joining the editorial team during large conferences (IPAC, NaPAC, etc.).
• At annual JACoW team meetings, guidance in electronic publication techniques: choice of software, etc., as well as use of a scripts package for publication of proceedings on JACoW.

The list of JACoW officers and outlines of their roles are as follows:

Chair

The chair heads the collaboration, chairing the team and stakeholders meetings and ensuring that the appropriate meetings are organised. The chair is responsible for the follow-up of actions and decisions. The chair also ensures that the software licenses and domain names are maintained.

Deputy Chair

The deputy chair (or chairs) assists the chair in the execution of his or her duties and replaces the chair if he or she is unable to fulfill a JACoW obligation.

Coordinator

The coordinator maintains contact with the member conferences through the scientific chairs, or their representatives, and maintains the active list as the series evolve (current becomes past, etc.). Similarly, the coordinator maintains the list of institute representatives. The coordinator also organises the team meetings with support from the local venue and the respective regional representative(s); this involves negotiation with the host institute and organisation of the social programme.

Repository Manager

The repository manager is responsible for the quality and maintenance of the JACoW central repository of user profiles and institutes.

Webmasters

Webmasters are responsible for maintenance and support of JACoW (with assistance from other resources in host institutes, such as Oracle support and IT infrastructure support). The webmaster for the proceedings site (currently hosted at CERN) is responsible for verifying that submitted proceedings meet the JACoW requirements for publication.

Board of Directors

The board of directors is the managing body that monitors operation of the collaboration and is the deciding authority concerning operations and development/changes to the collaboration and its activities. List of currently serving Board members.

The board establishes the policies and work programme for the collaboration and monitors progress and verifies that actions have been carried out. It also approves and manages collaboration membership (conference series) and when necessary applies sanctions for non-compliance with JACoW requirements by a conference series.

The JACoW chair presides at board meetings and brings matters from the team to the attention of the board. The deputy chair(s) assumes the role of chair when the chair is unavailable.

Certain JACoW officers are automatically members of the board -- the chair, deputy chair(s), and Coordinator. These JACoW officers, together with the other members of the BoD, are elected for fixed terms defined in the Charter (currently three years).
In addition, the board may invite other officers, such as the Repository Manager, to serve on the board for a defined period which, in principle, doesn't have to correspond to the duration of their mandate in the team.

The three-year terms are arranged such that at least one board member finishes his mandate each year, in order to guarantee continuity with the election of new members.