NOTES OF THE 22^nd JACoW BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETING

Held prior to the 2019 pre-team meeting
Sunday, 1 December, 2019, 09:00-11:00

Present: Board of Directors: Ivan, Christine, Volker
David and Todd via Skype

Venue: Team Meeting Hotel, Mercure Santos

1. Welcome, Introductions, Overview of Agenda/Objectives of both the Pre-TM and the TM Proper

Ivan welcomes Ivan, Christine and Volker. He regrets Todd was finally unable to attend due to administrative issues at JLAB. He thanks David attending intermittently between tending to Valery, and Todd for setting aside the week to join the meetings via Skype.

2. Approval of the Notes of the Previous Meetings

The Notes meeting 20 have been approved. The Notes of meeting 21 (22 May, Melbourne) need to be circulated for approval.

3. JACoW Sustainability through Continuity

Christine introduces this recurring item. IPAC is the biggest and most complex event in the JACoW calendar, and the only event that potentially uses the full range of SPMS functionality. IPAC presentations each year are key ones for the next event in the series, and for all of the smaller ones. Continuity and sustainability within the IPAC series thus have a huge impact on JACoW and all other events in the calendar. In the same way as the IPAC organizers support JACoW via purchase of software, those responsible for the series (IPACCC) need to recognize that continuity among the "experts" is also essential to allow JACW to continue to achieve its goals via the Team Meetings with the support of the managements of major laboratories.

Losing IPAC experts immediately after a conference (the case for the Scientific Secretaries of IPACs ’17, ’18 and ’19) means JACoW is in danger of losing whole areas of its expertise. We look to the IPAC Scientific Secretariats to take a leading role in the preparation of the TM programmes and to take the responsibility to pass on their experience. Otherwise their training and experience falls always to the same dwindling number of "core" people, who may in the future not necessarily be actively involved in any JACoW conference organization. Having performing tools such as SPMS, or JACoW Indico, is of no use if one does not have people understanding conference organization and scientific programme management to use them and train newcomers.

The Kickoff Session introduced last year aimed to address the issue of JACoW sustainability through continuity. The Kickoff Session pages for last and this year’s Team Meetings show how miserable attendance is for many conferences, underlining either the ignorance of JACoW event organizers of their obligation to respect the boundary condition of continued attendance of editors to enable the continuation through the conference series and to return some of the training they have received to JACoW newcomers, or a simple non respect of this boundary condition, either through lack of proper planning (budget), or lack of understanding of how important it is to JACoW sustainability.

Christine asks for comments on possible actions to improve continuity and sustainability within the collaboration conferences.

Todd remarks on the under representation of Americans and feels JACoW needs to raise its visibility and needs beyond inhouse discussions, via communication with conference and laboratory managements, as well as reinforced communication with OC/SPC/LOC Chairs, as well as the IPACCC.

Volker proposes a warning be formulated to those series repeatedly showing a non-respect of the boundary conditions pertaining to attendance of editors at Team Meetings, repeating that the future events will simply not be published on JACoW if the non-respect persists.

Christine is also concerned that Volker’s role is vulnerable for sustainability through lack of experience within the Collaboration of persons trained in running his scripts. Volker hopes that the future development of Indico will include a certain number of his scripts available as plugins – but the development of this is still unclear.

It is suggested that the default standard letter requesting SPMS instances might be amplified to include mention of the boundary condition that editors, past, current and future in each series contribute to the continuity/sustainability. This discussion will be reported to the Pre-TM for further discussion.

4. Pitstop Licenses

Ivan reports on his contacts with the Italian National Distributor for Pitstop. He requested the possibility of upgrade of our licenses to the latest versions, and he put out the issue that the licenses we have now are registered at CERN. Ivan proposed our current licenses be upgraded, and re-assigned to EPS, with a request for an estimate of cost.

We currently have educational licenses, but ENFOCUS has changed the model whereby 50 licenses were free because of the educational mode. This is no longer possible. License renewal is now payable every year, without the additional 50. The activation procedure has also been changed, and there is no longer the problem of disappearing licenses if not activated correctly.

A quote for 10 licenses for 1 year would cost more or less as in the past, 1.4 kEuros. We now have an old version of Pitstop apart from the trial ones (18 is out, but not 19). EPS is willing to manage the billing on behalf of JACoW.

Ivan feels 10 licenses are sufficient, and some may even be available for some Editors-in-Chief.

The Board agrees to Ivan’s proposal. He will contact the Italian Distributor and also EPS to get it under way.<ref name="ftn1">IPACCC needs to be informed of this. JACoW accounts should also be reviewed. IPACCC contributed several thousand Euros a couple of years ago for an Upgrade, which did not take place?</ref>

5. Status of JACoW in SCOPUS

SCOPUS has published SOME JACoW events, but not all, probably because some conferences had contacts with Scopus and managed to get them in (COOL, ICALEPCS, DIPAC (no longer exists), and LINAC.

When Volker contacted SCOPUS the three reasons given for NOT appearing in SCOPUS were given as follows:

1. JACoW is not a series (no ISSN),
2. JACoW does not have an ethical statement,
3. JACoW conference papers do not have the data re. paper received/accepted/published.

On 1) above, to obtain an ISSN it is necessary to contact the ISSN registration office (international office in Paris) and fill out the forms for the conferences. It is also possible to apply for an international ISSN if you are a registered entity (JACOW is not). JACoW might get permission from the Swiss ISSN office since JACoW papers are published on JACoW.org/Switzerland.

On 2), Volker has drafted a possible ethical statement, used already in connection with IBIC’19 ([https://ibic2019.vrws.de/html/prod_ethics.html]) for comments/approval.

On 3), since last year Volker has been entering the data re. paper received/accepted/published on each papers via his scripts.

These were the 3 missing requirements for officially going into SCOPUS, and for which we now appear to be finding solutions.

Following discussion, it is decided to ask Volker to contact the Swiss Office in January to request ISSNs for all series. While he agrees in principle, he feels he can only do this when he has a showcase for scrutiny (ICALEPCS’17 and ’19, linac’18 and ’16).

Ivan suggests a Working Group on SCOPUS be created. It is agreed it should be composed of Volker, Todd and Jan. Following discussion of this issue at the next BoD, the three persons concerned should be contacted to formalize the creation of the Working Group.

6. JACoW-Indico Merge Project

As the JACoW-Indico Merge Project comes to the end of its three-year development (end 2019), the discussion centres around how JACoW understands the progress with respect to the specification, and how JACoW sees Indico in JACoW in the coming years, with no further financial support from the CERN Accelerator Dept.

As anticipated, the project has accumulated delays. A year ago at TM’18 it was expected that version 2.3 including the paper editing module would be ready for testing at FEL’19 in Hamburg in August and that all other features would be implemented end 2019.

Unfortunately, this was not the case, though Natalia Juszka, the Indico team member who has took over the project from the person originally hired for the job (and whose contract ended in September 2019) joined the editorial team in Hamburg for hands on editorial training to get in depth experience of the requirements.

In mid-September, following the meeting in Hamburg,Ivan and Ronny met with the Indico team at CERN to discuss the status.

During that meeting the CERN Indico team undertook to complete the project and implement all outstanding features by end January/early February.

Following the implementation of Indico/JACoW with the essential features, “normal” Indico support, i.e. without urgency, will continue. We will not be able to request new features as in the past with SPMS, and some “plug-ins” will need to be developed by JACoW. The Indico team will of course follow developments closely and continue collaborating, but for the time being they have no resources.

Ronny will approach the Accelerator Management at CERN to see whether any further support might be possible.

Ivan identified a couple of conferences to use the new tool in parallel with SPMS: Linac’20 to test the module on a subset of papers (to be discussed with Robert Apsimon, Linac’20 Editor-in-Chief), and FEL’21 (Ivan will be Editor-in-Chief) to be organized completely in Indico. Ivan also proposes IPAC’23 (Ivan will again be Editor-in-Chief) might be the first major event to use Indico for all of the organization.

The new module in Indico will be accessible by JACoW developers to implement functionality specific to JACoW conferences, for example replicating some of Volker’s scripts.

7. Management of the SPMS Central Repository and the JACoW Wiki

It is currently expected that the JACoW/SPMS Central Repository will remain the backbone of the new Indico tool until some replacement system can be decided. For a year and a half, since Sue Waller retired, Christine has acted as Manager but it is time to pursue her replacement more urgently.

The following proposals emerged during the discussion:

Maggie Loeres was proposed to take on the responsibility of Website Content Manager, and Todd proposed Evelyn to undertake the Repository Manager tasks^*.

* During the TM Christine approached Maggie who agreed to take on the job of Wiki Content Manager and she worked with Charlie to understand the job. Todd said he would approach Evelyn and let Christine know when she could contact her formally.

Notes taken by Christine