Summary Notes of the Fourth Meeting of the JACoW Board of Directors
7 August, 2013
Present: Ivan Andrian, Matt Arena, Jan Chrin, Cathy Eyberger (audio), Todd Satogata, Christine
Petit-Jean-Genaz (after point 3 below), John Poole, Volker Schaa
Absent: Yongbin Leng
1. Approval of JBoDM#3 Summary Notes
Minor changes have been requested in order to improve readability and fix some typos.
About the 'proposal to maintain a list of non-JACoW events, Todd Satogata will investigate and try to arrange such a list for the JBoD, which will decide if its publication will be useful or not.
Removal of the Accommodation Module: immediate removal of links to this module from the main menu of the SPMS has been decided.
With these comments the Notes were agreed.
2. Status of the JACoW collaboration: new requests to join JACoW, fail to publish etc.
The Workshop for Accelerator Operations and the Accelerator Reliability Workshop look interested in JACoW but are concerned about not respecting the JACoW rules in terms of number of papers in the proceedings. They simply don't have much material apart from publishable posters and slides.
Jan proposed to create a new area on the JACoW website to publish such material, different form the existing "proceedings".
John commented that there have been suggestions in the past for the inclusion of defunct publications, like 'Accelerators'. It is believed that CERN has digitized versions of Accelerators which could be published in the same area.
A technical feasibility needs to be investigated. Ronny Billen will be asked (by whom?) to see if this is easily doable.
3. Prioritization of SPMS enhancements
At the present time there are three major feature requests:
Matt stated that the first feature request is almost done but it needs testing. Ivan suggested applying it to a coming conference (FEL2013) if no feedback is produced in the coming days.
Volker offered to have a deeper look and test it.
After a brief discussion, some open issues have been discovered, like:
- do we allow multiple file upload for the same contribution ("only" with different programme codes)?
It could be needed if the two programme codes are of different types (Oral/Poster), to allow transparencies upload. But the paper should be one only.
- editor assignment: should we assign all the multiple codes of the same contribution to the same editor?
Ivan proposed not to limit the functionality too much right now. We should start quite open and then see how this is used, then eventually limit this feature.
Matt stated that he'll develop this feture further before applying it to a real conference, to at least include the issues above.
Decisions about future feature request
From now on the JBoD will decide the priority and order of any further SPMS feature requests. Decisions will be taken via email by simple majority.
(Christine joined the videoconference before the start of the discussion on this point)
After a brief discussion on what has happened, it has been decided to follow the decisions taken at last year's Team Meeting.
In brief, when proceedings of a conference are published, data repatriation will be performed by Matt, but the email queues will not be stopped. The SPMS instance will still be available, no implicit shutdown is foreseen.
5. Follow up from last Stakeholders' meeting: actions, ideas etc.
5.1 Stakeholders involvement
The list of stakeholders now has been completed and inserted in the repository.
Notes of the second Stakeholers' meeting have been published on the JACoW website and stakeholders have been notified by email.
(Due to other meetings, Matt left the videoconference at this point)
Following an idea circulated at the second Stakeholders' meeting and a discussion among Christine, Ivan and Gianluidi Arduini, a process on new templates has been initiated. The goal, as described in the document linked above, is to accept the scientific part of the paper via uploaded files from the author, and build the metadata (wrappers, i.e. title, authors' list, abstract, references) from the data in the SPMS. This could be done by linking the SPMS and the upload/download scripts with new intermediate scripts that can create the wrappers in PDF format.
This process will be further discussed at the next JACoW Team Meeting, together with any possible issues with new software (MS Office 365, MS Office 2013 in primis).
Volker proposed to remove any reference in the templates to other papers presented at the same conference as "These proceedings" (see the last reference in current templates). Such a reference is rather meaningless when references are extracted to be compiled in other sites or publications (InSpire, for example).
Cathy will make these changes, also introducing a brief explanation in the templates' text of why it should be like this.
Cathy also noted that the present templates for MS Word are for versions 2003 and 2010 for Windows, and 2008 for Mac OS X. Since there's also a MS Office 2011 for Mac, this software should be investigated, together with compatibility of current templates with it. Todd will follow up on this and report to the next Team Meeting.
5.3 Indico and JACoW
Volker presented Roland Garoby's request for a decision on a stronger Indico-SPMS interaction. The plan is to create an Indico instance solely for JACoW events on the CERN infrastructure. This will require some development. The first feature request is for Indico to be able to authenticate against the JACoW repository, getting the profile data of the authenticated person from it after authorization. This feature request has been accepted.
Ivan shared his experience during the first Indico Workshop, in particular a discussion with Thomas Baron about the possibility, in the future, for conferences to use Indico as the "conference database" with features closer to those of the SPMS than are available right now. Ivan suggested that the JBoD could write a document describing current SPMS features and specifications, to be used by Indico's team for future development.
The JBoD thought that such a task could be too demanding at present, while the official documentation should cover most of what is proposed to be written in such a document; Ivan's idea was then declined.
John proposed to have a presentation at the next Team Meeting by the Indico developers and LINAC14 organisers (as possible users of this new feature). The idea for this presentation is for them to present what they would like to have from this Indico-SPMS integration for their conference, followed by a discussion about the present status and what could be developed.
Actions:
- develop the new Authentication API (Matt);
- report the decisions to the Indico staff (Ivan) and to Roland Garoby (Volker);
- invite the Indico and LINAC14 teams to the Team Meeting for the cited oral presentation (John & Cathy).
4. Feedback about the new website and ideas for improvement
John brought a request from Ronny Billen about better coordination among the parties involved in proceedings publication now that the new site at Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste is in operation.
It is now necessary to notify Stefano Deiuri so that links to these proceedings can be added and search engine scripts can be updated. Previously this operation could be done by him alone. Ivan reported on a new feature developed by Stefano, an "admin panel" that can be used to update the website even remotely.
Stefano will instruct Ronny and John about the use of this tool.
John and Cathy reported that some input is needed by Matt and Ivan about the programme for the developers' pre-team meeting.
The dates of the Meeting are now fixed, it will start on Sunday, December 8. Some confirmations from Joe Chew are needed to finalize the meeting's arrangements. Cathy will contact Joe and report to the JBoD.
An email to announce the meeting to the Team will be sent out by Christine in due course.
The website for this Team Meeting has already been prepared by Stefano Deiuri but its content needs to be updated. John, Cathy and Jana, who already have access to the Wiki in editing mode, will follow up on this.
8. Other possible business
No other businesses are proposed. The meeting is then ended.
