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Open Questions and Discussion

Contact: Todd Satogata (Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility)

This is open discussion time for us to review any open items that we have not discussed so far. We have a few items submitted for discussion that were mailed to David and me from Ning Zhao, who could not attend:

• Co-Author Sequencing
• Checking of References
• JACoW Template Use

Co-Author Sequencing

• Many authors would like the list of authors in SPMS to match the list of authors on the paper.
  • Is there a way to support this in SPMS? It would make checking the title and author list a lot easier too.
• Editors should not change the order of authors in papers.
  • Ning expressed some concerns from authors that had encounters with editors who changed the order of authors in a paper during editing.

Checking of References

• Detailed checking of references by non-native English speaking (particularly Asian) editors takes a long time.
• This seems to lead to greater inefficiency in editing for Asian conferences that have many local editors.
• Is there a way to redistribute work or speed up checking of references without arduous typing and manual labor?

JACoW Template Use

• Ning expressed concern that the JACoW template update for a new conference is not advertised aggressively enough to be used by enough authors.
  • "Some authors don't read the paper preparation guidelines carefully and still use the past template to write their paper"
• Suggestions:
  • Include a document highlighting differences for template updates (Jan just covered this! Thanks, Jan!)
  • Release this hint on JACoW website and add the link to the top of the email of paper preparation instructions.

Summary notes from the discussion

• Author list order
  • Volker notes that it is difficult to impossible to get the proceedings to look right with an author-provided order of authors in the proceedings.
  • This was discussed at least once before (c. 2004) and decided to adopt our present appraoch then.
  • We will very likely not change the current practice.
• Checking of references
  • There was good discussion about checking references. Some editors want the references to be looked up and checked during editing; others feel that is too much work and not an efficient use of time.
  • Todd noted that editors in chief should inform everyone in their editing room of the "pickiness level" at the start of editing, and be as consistent as possible through the production of the proceedings thereafter.
  • Jan suggested that editors mail authors 4-6 weeks before papers are due with links to information about reference styles, templates, etc. This is part of our core of user education.
  • There is no clear consensus about whether we should have editors check references online or not.
• JACoW template use
  • Template use was mostly covered by Jan in the preceding talk.
  • The suggestion to have a change log for templates that is accessible to authors is supported.
  • Volker noted that conference websites should not link to their own copies of the templates, but to the template page on jacow.org so authors always get the latest templates.