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Dear Vera, Authorship Committee members!

Unfoirtunately I will not be able to attend meeting this Friday. 
Please, find my comments based on Vera's draft and comments from Committee 
members.

General Comments:

1. As Max pointed out HEP is in general in trouble: it is shrinking both 
in terms of funding, manpower and number of Labs/accelerators. The most 
recent news from DoE is proposal to cancell PEP II and Tevatron as early 
as 2006 - nothing to be proud about.

2. HEP Authroship "issue" is result of the above ("tip of the iceberg"), 
rather then authorship rules are creating crysis. Authorship attacked as 
stand alone issue might not imporve HEP support or make progess of science 
more successful.

3. From our discussions it is clear there are two options to handle large 
author lists:
a) convince everybody (publishers, colleagues from other fields) this is 
the way HEP works;
b) find ways to reduce lists.

4. Reducing list to 200 authors is not fully resolving 
issue, as in most cases only "a few" individuals are deeply involved in 
all aspects of final analysis. Remember "final", because there is another 
iceberg under a few lines in the physics paper which helped to make these 
results available.

5. HEP projects becoming larger and larger, while getting less and less 
efficient. On my fixed target experiment in late 80's we published 10 
papers per year for 10 of us, now 20 papers per year for 600 people on the 
D0 experiment considered as a great success and all that is happening with 
absolute number of HEP positions (which is proporitonal to 
funding/salaries) shrinking.

6. There was a very good comment by Daniel about acceleraotr teams not 
been part of the HEP collaboration papers. That was not always the case - 
in early days Enrico Fermi did run accelerator(s) for his studies. 
Should HEP move in the direction of SLOAN collaboration (see one of my 
talks earlier this year) when group of professionals is designing and 
running the detector with "professors" analyzing results? It might sounds 
a little strange, but technically might be less expensive and 
more efficient then current attemps by large HEP 
collaborations. By the way original idea of CDF (Collider Detector 
Facility, not single experiment) by Leon Ledereman is close to what 
is described above.

7. Full author list on publication is practically the only place where 
Collaboration is presented at a whole. This clearly unites the 
Collaboration and we should not underestimate this fact. At D0 we are 
trying to keep different physics groups together while they are 
trying to separate themselves:
a) waste of resources by doing "the same job" of data handling/analysis 
many times;
b) creates un-healthy internal competition inside collaboration;
c) creates complication for uniform support of the detector performance, 
trigger bandwidth sharing, etc.

Specific comments:

1. We should start not from negative comments of the existing practice, 
rather clearly state that current HEP practice is a clear succes, but 
might require some minor adjustments in the future.

2. Make text of the report shorter. Remove technicalities like journals 
problems of publishing "long lists" - this is technical problem and with 
Web and other technical resources should be resolved by the publishers, 
not HEP.

3. Major concern (as Max pointed out) is lack of knowlage by some authors 
about main results of the paper. All authors most probably did very 
serious contributions (like designing/building detectors, or operating 
them), still knowlage of basics is important. I consider all other 
comments (like whom to contact to find details about publication) as 
technical - there is contact author(s) for each paper - and there is Web 
as well.

4. I would be very carefull with recommending specific proposals, like 
deviding collaboration into "sub-groups". We should consider including 
such proposals only after questionare is in and we know "physics 
distributions".

5. I've sent Vera edited version of the questions. I was trying to make 
them as un-biased as possible. If you state before the questions that 
"current practice of author list in HEP is bad" and then ask question "Do 
you think current HEP author practive is bad?" - you might expect answer. 
Let's try to formulate questions without potentially biasing 
opinions. And as Daniel mentioned everybody understands what we are 
talking about. We also have to ask one question per topic and I 
prefer to have all questions on a single page.

In summary:

1. We have to rememebr that APS and other bodies organized similar working 
groups in the past. The most recent one was chaired by Paul Grannis in 
late 90's. The only common ground all of them were able to find is to 
support existing rules. I think we should attempt "soft landing" 
(China model) vs "hard landing" (Soviet Union collapse) by making 
small steps at a time. One practical step we can do is to recommend 
adoption of Belle practice with every author "signing the paper" (let's 
not call it "clicking") - this might address the most important issue of 
authors been familiar with the paper. And let's try to concentrate on the 
part of the iceberg which is currently under water - otherwise all discussions 
about authorship might become irrelevant.

Cheers, Dmitri.