Summary Notes of the Eighteenth Meeting of the JACoW Board of DirectorsJuly 3, 2018 Present: Ivan Andrian, Todd Satogata, Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz, David Button, Volker RW Schaa 1. Approval of Notes of JBoD Meetings 16 and 17The Notes of both meetings are approved without modification, but with some discussion on the following issues. Volker's sustainabilityVolker is confidant GSI will fund his activities until the end of this year (the request has been in since March), with confirmation expected soon. On 20 August he will have a meeting with his immediate hierarchy to establish his future contractual position at GSI from January 2019 with respect to funding his JACoW activities. His current contract covers a 50% salary, with 2-3 days per month at GSI and travel expenses. Replacement Repository ManagerManuela Giabbai from INFN Frascati is considering taking up this responsibility. Her supervisor, Andea Ghigo is willing to allow her to join the collaboration again. She is on vacation now but a response may be forthcoming in a few weeks. In response to some concern on David's part, Chris reassures him that she is perfectly willing to continue as Repository Manager until Sue's replacement can be found and trained, including fielding the inevitable influx of new profiles/accounts and new affiliation requests around IPAC'19 abstract submission, which will be taking place around the time of this year's Team Meeting. Input from David: Abstract submission deadline for IPAC'19 is currently scheduled on Friday, 7 December 2018. Chris asked David to propose to modify this to the Wednesday since this is conducive to authors preparing to propose from the Monday, allowing the Abstract QA to go smoothly between Monday and Friday. And also to allow the Repository Manager to field all eventual problems with new authors, etc. during the week, and not during the week-end which is the result of a Friday deadline. A deadline on the Friday causes effort overload for Abstract QA and verifications of new profiles/accounts/new affiliation requests. JACoW.deVolker still has some work to do on this to shift jacow.de to jacow.org. 2. Broken Links in PAC'95 ProceedingsTodd volunteers to write a perl script to fix this problem. He will also verify no other links are broken. 3. New Requests to Join JACoWWith reference to the request to join JACoW from Victor Vus, Associate Professor in Psychology and Head of International Relations Office at Kyiv Institute f Modern Psychology and Psychotherapy (Ukraine) concerning the International Conference "Mental Health: Global Challenges of XXI Century", the BoD decides this event does not fit in JACoW's scope. Christine will respond to Mr. Vus. Action: Done on 6 July, copied to BoD. On the question of new membership of JACoW, Christine reports on a discussion with Jan Chrin during HB'18 in Daejeon. Jan has been approached by representatives of a Workshop, which fits JACoW's scope of events in the field of accelerator science and technology. They are expressing an interest in joining JACoW, but publishing presentations only, not papers. The Workshop is aware that JACoW currently hosts Proceedings only. The question in broader terms is if JACoW wants to open up to Workshops that do not produce proceedings. From the Workshop's perspective, it is a shame that transparencies from past events are scattered over several Websites. They see a definite advantage of a single common store for talks from the Workshop series. The enquiry is an informal one on a local Workshop level. It will not be propagated further to the guardians of the Workshop Series if JACoW already has a position of not wishing to expand its scope in this way. Jan is also fully aware that if we did opt to open up to this kind of event, we might be opening the floodgates. Volker recalls that when a similar discussion took place a few years ago concerning another Workshop, the BoD had decided against such events publishing on JACoW.org, even though there were justifiable arguments in favour of hosting such events if only to allow them to be grouped in one place, and more easily searchable. In the BoD discussion, it was generally felt that the publication of transparencies alone might be given some consideration, but it would need to be made extremely clear that allowing this kind of publication to be archived on JACoW.org would entail strict respect of JACoW boundary conditions, including the attendance/contribution of the editors at JACoW Team Meetings, IPAC events, etc. Prior to any decision it would also be necessary to give careful consideration to the types of files acceptable, given the eventuality that more and more presentations these days contain hefty animations, videos, etc. Ronny Billen has already expressed his opinion that he is not in favour of undertaking this type of publication as they occupy considerable space, without much added value. Todd also worries that this type of file may cause extra effort for JACoW whereas it would not contribute much to the value of JACoW.org. He would not accept this kind of Workshop publications without being very clear about the above-mentioned boundary conditions and requirements. It is decided to ask Jan to convey the above concerns to his contacts and if they are still interested, to bring the topic to the Pre-TM in December. Action: Chris contacted Jan on 5 July with a copy of the above. He will informally take contact with his colleagues and report back to the Board as soon as he has news. 4. Status of SCOPUS – Maksim's requestVolker recalls the stumbling block to SCOPUS indexation caused by the boundary conditions that require a publications ethics statement. Inquiries with colleagues at DESY and CERN pointed him to different kinds of publication statements which do not fit JACoW's situation. As "publishers" we ensure the author delivers something which is within a given formal description of formatting. We do not for example take responsibility for scientific issues and we do not check whether the material has been published elsewhere. Todd contacted APS, and spoke in particular to Brant Johnson, a Physical Review employee. He forwarded Grant's response to the BoD explaining that Clarivate Analytics is now the official source of Impact Factors. It came to light in connection with IPAC'18 that their procedures translate to a lack of recognition of the IOP Journal of Physics Conference Proceedings as a citeable journal – one of the important factors leading IPAC to adopt the light reviewing procedure and IOP publication. From Todd's perspective there is some progress, but it does not offer too much clarity right now. JACoW should probably ascertain whether IOP conference proceedings are indeed indexed in SCOPUS, and if so, check out the IOP ethics statement to see whether it might be adapted to JACoW.org. Volker would be in favour of producing an ethics statement of some sort for publication on JACoW.org, perhaps based on the IOP one mentioned above, and then at least see whether SCOPUS finds it acceptable, and if not, why not. Action: Volker to think about a possible ethics statement for JACoW.org. Volker to contact Maksim explaining the situation with copy to the BoD. In response to a question from David, Volker responds that while the quality of JACoW references and citations WAS a problem for us some years ago, the improvement in quality in recent years means it is no longer an issue. He feels the next step should be with Reuters, and he will address this when he has all of JACoW conferences in the same state. Some sets need re-processing. At the moment we publish a bibliographic export, which conforms to the template of 2 years ago, but not to the actual one. He intends to update this. Action: Volker. 5. Indico-SPMS Merge ProjectChris reports on her recent visit to CERN and discussions with Pedro Ferreira. While there is some progress on this project to introduce missing SPMS functionality into Indico, she is concerned that she did not obtain any feeling for when the really important missing functionality concerning the editorial modules will be introduced. She understood this is on the to do list for 2019, meaning Indico could not be used for any reasonably sized JACoW conference before around 2021, long after the project finalization. She will provide Ivan with some input for the meeting at CERN in August (unfortunately she is no longer able to attend), which should address the schedule in more detail. She proposes he takes this opportunity to emphasize the necessity for Indico developer(s) to attend the TM in South Africa, and even more importantly to also be an active and productive member of the IPAC'19 team in Melbourne, which would be the first time any Indico people actually attended a large JACoW event, to witness the full spectrum of inter-related activities ranging from processing of papers, poster presentation management, poster session management, feedback with authors, author reception, management of oral presentations (processing them), and how the scripting over Indico is so important to keeping the processing on track. We recall the numerous improvements to SPMS functionality introduced by Matt Arena when he was physically part of the conference teams and when he could observe in situ all of the different inter-related activities which take place during the events. 6. Report on TM'18 OrganizationDavid has little to report. He is currently optimizing on last year's programme and also including a few modifications. In view of the important number of LaTeX papers he is considering scheduling a short talk (Ivan) to ensure editors are aware of the skill sets, and the software required within the teams. He would also like to see Todd providing a demonstration of LaTeX basic editing. David tried to process a paper himself in LaTeX and he found it wasn't as difficult as he expected. He feels some of the fear of the unknown might be overcome with some demystification .... Todd adds that LaTeX is simply "code". There's good code and bad code because it is a programming language. When 50 to 60% of our papers are written clearly and well, almost anybody could fix the simple oversights and problems. The more messy papers could also easily be left to the experts. David's last point concerns the challenge concerning references, citations, DOI's. He will schedule a talk (Jan) to really address the importance of this aspect of publication. He is at the same time consulting with IT people to see how for example titles/authors in SPMS data may be cross-checked with the pdf files. David hopes to have a first draft programme ready by the end of next week. He still has some concern that the usual format is sometimes bewildering for newcomers and he is wondering how to overcome this, perhaps via some one-on-one mentoring prior to the opening of the programme proper. Chris asks whether one could imagine a "conference series oriented" TM opening session, to underline the necessity for conference series to better pass on the experience of past editors to the future ones in a more organized fashion. The larger events, where editors are often identified relatively early on, already have some sort of overlap between Editors. It is more problematic for the smaller events, where editors are often only identified once the "previous" event is already over and where the "current" editor has no experience whatsoever of a JACoW event, sometimes even without a TM experience and with only JACoW.org documentation to work with. Such an conference-driven opening session could be a way for JACoW to really INSIST on the past/current/future editor attendance boundary conditions. Chris feels this kind of mentoring within series would need some careful preparation by contacting each series individually, ensuring proper representation (at least past/current editors), and providing a mini-agenda for each series setting down some basic information such as dates of previous events/no. of participants/no. of contributions, and the specifics that are of use for new editors. One might even imagine a brief presentation of each series – some people may recall that prior to organizing the poster sessions we used to schedule 5 to 10 minute presentations by ALL editors in all series. This might be re-introduced – maintaining of course still the poster session which precedes the reception. The emphasis is really on the need during the opening session to instill some JACoW team spirit within each conference series. If the above notion is felt desirable, then the implementation needs to be addressed, in particular on WHEN/HOW to introduce this opening session, and how it could fit in with the Pre-TM. Action: Chris and David to explore a possible schedule together and make a proposal to the BoD, based on a two-day Pre-TM, and a 3.5 or 4 day TM, at the same time as David proposes his programme at the end of next week. Following a remark that the templates are becoming too complicated, Chris proposes to produce a simple one page document with includes the simplest of the requirements, emphasizing only the most common oversights (figure/table formatting, Fig. vs. Figure, reference formatting, and annex this to the more complete actual template – or the other way round ... The simple one-page template, with the more complete one as an annex .... If there is support for this Jan Chrin should be asked for his opinion. Action: BoD to consider the above and if agreed, Jan Chrin to be consulted for agreement/implementation. Chris mentions the iThemba people are gradually publishing information about local arrangements on JACoW.org. She will contact them this week re dates, and to see whether the website could be complete by late July/early August and begin ensuring coherence between local arrangements and the programme. 7. Request to Adopt Umbrella Federated AuthenticationIvan mentions the European funded CALIPSO and CALIPSOplus Projects related to light sources with the aim of introducing some kind of centralized authentication. The project is developed at PSI, backed by ESRF and CERN. There is a proposal that Umbrella could be adopted by JACoW to authenticate to SPMS. Ivan feels it is doable, but the benefits for JACoW are not so great. Ivan will discuss it with the Indico people. He isn't sure he would invest any effort right now to modify SPMS. 8. AOBDavid has 2 points:
Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz Todd's NotesPresent: Ivan, David, Volker, Todd, Christine
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