Notes from the second Stakeholders Meeting @ IPAC13

May 16, 2013

Agenda

• Welcome: Christine Petit-Jean Genaz, on leave from CERN, JACoW Coordinator
• Report on the Work of the Board of Directors : Ivan Andrian, Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste, JACoW Deputy Chair
• Chairman's Report : Volker Schaa, GSI, JACoW Chair
• Questions from the Floor

Notes from discussion

• Vladimir Litvinenko: We know that people (authors) are not updating their profile to stay in contact with conference announcements. Shall we go back sending announcements to everybody in the JACoW Repository?
  • Christine: There are just under 30,000 profiles in the Central Repository. Approximately half have accounts. There are 15 conference series. Sending announcements to all profile owners to all 15 conference series is unrealistic. Furthermore, under the JACoW privacy policy, announcements of conferences are normally sent only once, to those people with accounts who have indicated they wish to be informed effectively to avoid overloading people with information in which they are not interested. It is the responsibility of individuals to ensure their JACoW profiles and preferences are kept up to date, and all profile/account holders are invited periodically to do so.
• Caterina Biscari: first of all thanks for all the work JACoW is doing for our community. I must also say that Christine received the 2013 EPS Gero Thomas Prize for contributions to the community, underlining the close ties between JACoW and EPS.
  The European Physics Society is willing to provide a backup mirror site for JACoW publications also, not only providing links from the EPS website to the JACoW one. This will improve the probability to always have JACoW proceedings available to anybody.
• Oliver Bruening: LINAC2014 is considering using InDiCo instead of the SPMS, one reason is the possibility to immediately provide the posters, the talks etc. to the delegates at the conference. This will improve the discussion on scientific matters during the conference.
  Feature request (Real-Time Pre-press): make an option in the SPMS where the submitting author authorizes JACoW to immediately make available the submitted file (regardless of the type, be it a presentation, the poster, whatever). The SPMS will give back a URL to be, for example, presented on the poster in the form of a QR-code by the author.
  • Ivan & Christine: it is doable, however please remember that the decision to behave like this is not JACoW's, it's a per-conference policy to be discussed in the appropriate governing bodies (SPC etc.). We are able to provide the tools.
• Paolo Pierini: the issue with poor syntax in Reference is very important, and its importance is improving these years because many countries (like Italy) are now relying on published/referenced papers to evaluate the impact factor of the scientific contribution, both for the single author and for the institutes. It needs to be improved.
  • Volker: the quality of the references is actually up to the author. We shall provide better information, instructions and examples to better educate authors. We've been talking about the impact factor, and we should improve.
• Vladimir Litvinenko: Proposal - accept references outside the page limitation. For example, if for a conference a poster contribution can have up to three pages, that will mean three pages for the content only. Then there could be one or more pages of references only.
  This way the author won't try to shorten references any more to stay in the limits, and the overall result will be better quality in references.
  • Ivan & Christine: actually this is again a per-conference policy, JACoW is not stating any policy for page limitations. However, we take note of this idea and will propose to the next conference organizers for discussion.
• Julien Bergoz: from the reader's point of view, quite different from the writer's, I think that a possible solution to improve quality of the references with more details could be to have a sort of "database" of references to refer to, together with a link to the original (referenced) paper. It will ease the research job a lot.
  • It's a great idea, however it's rather impossible to be able to reference any paper anywhere
• Ralph Assmann: sometime it's even not easy to know how to correctly refer to a JACoW paper.
  Feature request: have a search engine on the JACoW website to look for a paper, then a button that gives out the correct text and format for the reference to that paper. It should be easily doable with the SPMS.

As a side note from Vladimir's proposal of references outside page limitation: years ago, inside JACoW, a proposal has been advanced concerning the acceptance of papers having only the "core" content, i.e. without title, authors list, abstract and references. These missing pieces could be provided automatically from the SPMS exporting the data and creating a "wrapper" in the final PDFs.
This would free the author of the need of putting the data in the manuscript, resulting in more space for the scientific content. Of course, this would need development to add the interface to enter the missing data in the SPMS (the references).