Dear colleagues,
I will not be able to participate at the phone conference this friday.
I had to change my travel plans and will be travelling from DESY at the
time of the phone meeting. I am sorry for that.
Therefore I want to transmit my opinion to you by email.
I have discussed the authorship problematic with several colleagues
inside and outside particle physics.
More and more I come to the conclusion that a report by IUPAP C11 in the
PRESENT form is not advantageous for our field.
It could and will be used against us by other fields of science.
My main reasons of critics are:
1) the report should be written such that people
outside particle physics understand the special situation
and requirements of this field.
The title (... authorship in large scientific collaborations ...
suggests a much wide audience than particle physics).
A working group report of IUPAP C11 will certainly attract a wider
audience.
2) The report is too defensive. It is suggested that the fault
is on the side of particle physics only and particle physics should
change -
in contrast we should stress the extraordinary achievments of
particle physics,
that this is only possible in large collaborations and that the
procedure
of authorship adopted in particle physics has been an important
part of the successful international collaborations.
We should see particle physics rather as a model for other fields in
science.
Universities must change their procedures how to evaluate scientists.
3) The analysis of the authorship problem in HEP is correct (I hear the same
arguments all the time from my colleagues at the university and try
to argue
against them), but no real solution is presented in the report.
The proposal might reduce the authorlist of Atlas from 1500 to
300 or 200, but it does not solve any problem mentioned in the report.
It will still not be possible
to give appropriate credit to individuals nor identify the most
knowledgeable nor
lead to reasonable citation records.
We simply have to accept that what ever we propose there will be more than
100 authors on HEP publications and the four points of critics which are
given in the
introduction will always be valid.
Therefore my proposal:
The report should have 2 main parts:
1) addressed towards people outside particle physics with the following
topics:
- explanation, why particle physics need large collaborations
- detectors cannot be build by industry (in contrast to astronomiy,
space science)
- a large number of scientist have contributed and must get credit as
authors
- particle physics has been very successful, a large part of this
success is related to international collaboration and the adopted
procedure of publication
(which avoids permanent conflicts and fights inside collaborations).
[A colleagues from medicine explained to me that for instance the
progress in cancer
research could be much faster, if scientists would organize
themselves in a similar
way as in partice physics. The main obstacle in medicine is indeed
the authorship
procedure (emphasis solely on impact factors). This leads to a
fierce competition
and the fear a collaborator might steel experimental techniques or
ideas. This prevents a
real and close collaboration between the experts]
- particle physics could be a model for large collaborations in other
field.
- universities and science organizations must modify the traditional
procedures how
to evaluate the scientific qualities of a person and must adopt
them to new developments
in research. Other factors beyond publications must be considered:
scientific notes, technical notes,
conference talks, leadership positions in collaborations (working
group leader etc).
2) addressed towards HEP collaborations
- this could be similar to the present report, but much shorter.
- we should give 2 general recommendations to large HEP collaborations
1) find ways to limit the author list (for most publications) to
100 to 200 names.
2) find ways to make sure that individuals get proper credit.
Each collaboration should find there own way how to achieve that.
Here we should state (in short)
some specific recommendations as given in the report:
- an eligible author must contribute a large fractions of his
research time on the experiment
- active declaration that a person wants to be author (like Belle;
by the way: the procedure which
is explained for Belle sounds very innovative for particle
physicists, but a person outside
of HEP must be shocked to see that one only needs to click on a
web page to be an author.
It should be stressed much more that the main requirement is to
be an eligible author.
It should be clearly stated what eligible author means! )
- main contributors of papers should get the chance to publish
their methods and details
of their work in technical notes, scientific notes (with few
authors).
(This part should be stressed much more in the report, this is
the procedure
adopted by the LHC experiments.
It should not only appear in "current practise" but also in the
recommendations).
These notes should be referenced in collaboration papers.
- Mayor talks during large collaboration meetings (presenting new
results which lead to papers)
should be given a greated wheight (appear on the collaboration
Web page after the publication)
such that a Ph.D. student or PostDoc can list them in his/her CV.
- in the paper a primary author (or the spokes person) should be
mentioned for contacts.
- primary authors should/could appear first, before the alphabetic
listing of names.
- another option is that the collaborations asks the principal
authors to create a web page
for every publication. There, all the contributions (technical
notes, collaborations talks,
Ph.D. theses, etc) related to the paper are collected and can be
found and consulted
easily by outside people.
- in order to limit the number of authors to about 200 the
collaborations could decide to
put general authors (e.g. detector builders, physicists working
on data analysis not related to the
paper) on every fifth paper, for example, or establish
consortia for various analysis topics.
In summary, I feel that we need both parts. This gives a more balanced
assessment of the
problem of authorship in large collaborations.
Colleagues in other fields (and departments heads, university
presidents) have to understand that
particle physics is different (for good reasons). They need to change too.
We have to present arguments to help our
HEP colleagues at universities in their constant fight to get new
positions for particle
physics. And we in particle physics have to make
an effort to improve the authorship situation to a "reasonable" level.
More than "reasonable"
is not realistic
.
with best regards
Gregor Herten
--
Prof. Gregor Herten, Physikalisches Institut, Universität Freiburg,
Hermann-Herder-Str.3, D-79104 Freiburg, Tel. +49-761-203 5757
Fax. +49-761-203 5938, http://hep.uni-freiburg.de
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and there is no indentation. 
