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Jacques' note
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Some comments on the interim report draft after discussing with Vera on May 22, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------- The document is well written and adequately addresses the charge to the working group. The outcome of the working group has to be advisory. A new game starts with the LHC collaborations which have to themselves organise the conditions of their fate. The publishers needs are not the compelling fact. It may well be that publications will become 'electronic-only' in a rather short future. The compelling fact is to try to address the readability and accountability of the author list with respect to the actual work presented in a given paper. The author list should also reflect the ground experimental work which allow the analyses to be done. Even if comparable with other fields, Experimental HEP entails many specific activities. In particular, we conceive, plan, construct, commission, operate upgrade (etc) our experimental setups. All these activities have to be recognized during the whole duration of an experiment. To give an example of a new authorship scheme, I outline below a simple scenario. This is just an example. Let's model the timeline of a big collaboration with 3 phases (construction, commissionning, data taking) and use 2 dates Tc (catharsis) and GTO' as follows: - TC is the time (which occurs during commissionning or when the 1st conspicuous physics results are made public) when a collaboration unites and becomes a human entity. - GTO' (somewhat akin to the astronomers' GTO) is the time during which those who built the experiment will sign the analysis papers no matter what they do in analysis, for their work to be recognized. One should try to relate END_GTO'-Tc to the time it took to build the experiment. After GTO', two goals could drive the authorship of analysis papers. a) emphasize the actual analysts names b) keep the collaboration internal strength To match these goals, one could imagine to split THE author list in 3 parts i) the analysis team (the order does not need to be alphabetic). typicall less than 10 people, including the analysis team, and those who were most active in the scientidfic review of the paper. ii) the operations team. i.e. those who are dedicated to the operations of the experimental setup [1] in alphabetical order. iii) The remainder of the whole collaboration, again in alphabetical order. [1] Incidentally, why not have the accelerator physicists back on the experiments author lists? There are now very few experiments/accelerator and the success of the experiments seems much more tied to the accelerator performance than at a certain epoch. Now some remarks about the alternative schemes proposed in the document. - I am not convinced by the idea to split collaborations, the 'consortium' idea. To me, the cons are more important than the pros: PROS: - P1 This idea recognises the fact that big collaborations are new kind of labs where many experiments are simultaneously performed. I find that this is the best way to present our experiments to our colleagues from other parts in physics. - P2 This leads to smaller structures where the actual groups of coworkers on the projects are not swamped. CONS: - C1 This idea may well imply that the collaborations will lose the internal solidarity that make it a human entity. - C2 The opportunities for young people to develop transversally and become eligible to high profile management positions. I am also against a partial author list for a collaboration like the present BELLE scheme, because - the honor system varies from culture to culture - deserving people doing 'technical' work will practice selfcensorship. - Rather strict membership rules need to be enforced by the collaborations. Finally, about the questionnaire to be handed to the collaboraqtions spokessperson for them to poll the colalboration members. I would rather have less questions. Have them as mutually exclusive as feasible, avoid to have generic questions tied to BELLE's practice. I would offer only 5 choices per question. Maybe it would be wise to check the style of the questions with a professionnal psycho or sociologist that routinely do polls. Congratulations for the big efforts developped to arrive at the draft. Jacques |
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