Summary Notes of the Eleventh Meeting of the JACoW Board of Directors

October 9, 2015

Present: Todd Satogata, Volker RW Schaa, Ivan Andrian, John Poole, Raphael Mueller, Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz
Absent: Yongbin Leng

1) Approval of previous meeting notes

The previous JBoD meeting notes are discussed, in particular the actions that were decided and any possible further action needed.
The outcome of the discussion is here reported point by point:

2) item 3 - Status of post-2014 TM activities/projects / Update Website to ease finding TM presentations
Action: Ivan to invite Charlie Horak to the next JBoDM

2) item 4.1 - Create a policy on publishing posters/talks as guidance for future editors / Talks being found by the search engine on JACoW.org

In the past the JACoW search engine gave only papers as results, now slides, if present, are part of the search domain (and results). Part of the JACoW directors think that slides are not always of scientific value and should not be searched, thanks to the fact that they can be found directly from every conference specific proceedings pages. The others feel that having slides searched and offered to the user can help anyway, in particular if the paper is missing. Since the majority was of this opinion, it has been decided to leave them searchable. However, this implies that talks, if present, must be in PDF format and of decent quality.

This brings to the need of having specifications for this possible processing job published on the website as well. The minimum requirements should be having the PDF hidden fields filled in with consistent data, all fonts embedded and a decent dimension for files. If the quality is not reached, any additional file should not be searchable. We should investigate with Ronny if this is technically feasible with the configuration of the CERN search engine.

Action: Todd will follow the modifications to the text on the website according to this decision.

2) item 4.2 - Create a policy on publishing posters/talks as guidance for future editors / Publication of poster presentations, and their being found

It is decided to have posters searchable as for the slides in item 4.1

2) item 5 - Connect JACoW profiles with ORCID

No real action performed up to now, Volker will follow on this in the near future.

2) item 6 - Add gender to the SPMS profile

In addition to what was decided, the values for the 'gender' field in SPMS should be Male and Female, with the possibility for the user to leave that field blank (NULL in the database).

Up to this point of the meeting Christine was absent. She joins now

2) item 7 - Substitutes in the e-mail utility

Raphael asks Christine more details about this feature request. Christine clarifies the need of having a standard set of fields for substitution throughout all the SPMS screens that permit to send customized emails to people.

2) item 18 - Investigate if new SPMS instances are properly propagated from central repository

The decided action had to name associated. Ivan will follow on that.

2) item 9/10/11 - Templates

These will be followed up at the Team Meeting with and by Jan Chrin.

2) item 12 - Advice for Editors on the policy for handling post-conference requests from authors for changes to conference Proceedings

It is agreed that in case of any heavy modifications of papers that will imply changes to critical items like number of pages, list of authors etc., the BoD must be contacted and a decision taken whether to accept the requests or not.

Action: John will finish the proposed policy and update the website accordingly.

2) item 14 - Upgrade of Acrobat/Pitstop

No reactions from CERN after Volker asked about the possibility to buy licenses through them at their rates. Will wait some more time, than decide by the end of the year how and where to buy the new licenses.

With the above clarifications the notes of the previous JBoD meeting are approved and can be published.

2) Any action still needed and current JACoW activities

There are no major issues left over to be discussed here. Anything else will be followed up at the next Team Meeting.

3) News from Indico-SPMS convergence project

Ivan reports what was agreed in the past weeks with the Indico team at CERN, through Thomas Baron.

A document analysing in further details the various work packages of this project is being started and will be expanded in the coming weeks by Thomas, Todd and Ivan during some virtual meetings. The basic idea is to have the document finalized during the pre-TM, so that it could be submitted to the appropriate CERN management to request the resources needed for the Indico team.

Thomas will be present at the TM from Monday morning to carry on with this job.

4) Next JACoW TM

Christine reports on the preparation of the coming TM. This was somehow slowed down by the August closing up of the TM host laboratory (INFN LNL) and Ivan's two weeks absence.

Now the programme and the organisation are fixed. There seem to be some issues with low numbers in participation by team members. It is seen that most of the participants are well known names, very few new faces if any. Hence, we are wondering if a TM very much focused on training is the right model these days.

It could be reshaped to transform some parallel training sessions into sessions for working groups dedicated to JACoW activities or projects. This should be taken into consideration for the 2016 TM.

Ivan proposes to have a working group during this TM to develop new ideas for a different TM model. This group should have a heterogeneous composition of long-time JACoW team members and newbies. The same group of people, or part of it, could then carry on the preparation of the 2016 TM according to the proposed model.

Action: Christine and Ivan will follow on this during the TM

5) AOB

DOI IDs

Volker reports that CERN has agreed in sponsoring these IDs at no cost to JACoW. A real agreement will be put in place soon and Volker will coordinate with Matt to allow these IDs to be used in the SPMS.

However there is an issue on the definition of JACoW in order to use DOIs. Since JACoW is not a legal entity to be assigned these DOIs, some action could be needed. Can JACoW be compared to a journal? If so, do we need to change the name or charter?

Christine suggests a past proposal about JACoW joining EPS so to be a "real" journal like PRST-AB. The other directors would prefer to avoid these changes if any other solution could be found out.

Action: Volker will investigate more with CERN

Definition of co-opted members and their "renewal"

John proposes a formal procedure to renew the 'mandate' of co-opted members of the Team, as well as how to accept/invite new people or remove others from the list.

Christine explain the process used up to now, i.e. she adds people to this list when it is obviously needed. However, since an unofficial "associated" list exists in order just to keep people updated of JACoW activities, it is felt that the co-opted one should be better managed. That said, John's proposal is discussed and approved.

Action: John will take care of the exact wording according to this decision and make the necessary modifications to the website pages.

Issues with conference dedicated fileserver

It has been seen that when a conference wants to use a dedicated, local, fileserver the probability that something goes wrong is too high. Possibly because of erroneous setup or trivial mistakes, the results could have a big impact JACoW business, delaying the job of prceedings production and resulting in a lot of additional work for some key Team Members.

Volker proposes to make the use of an official JACoW fileserver mandatory for all conferences to avoid any possible problem.

However, this could result in other problems where issues about firewalls and particular country-related obligations take place.

Hence, it is decided not to have a real obligation: instead, JACoW will strongly recommend the use of one of the official fileservers.

The idea of having every new SPMS instance already configured for a working official fileserver (the choice of which based on the region where the conference will take place) looks like a good way of reducing any possible point of failure in configuration by the editor in chief.

This idea should be taken into reality shortly and it will be discussed at the pre-TM this year.