Message: Lorenzo's Comments (improved format) Not Logged In (login)
 Next-in-Thread Next-in-Thread
 Next-in-Forum Next-in-Forum

None Lorenzo's Comments (improved format) 

Forum: C11 Authorship
Date: 03 Jun, 2005
From: Vera Luth <Vera Luth>

Message from Lorenzo,
Ciao
Vera

PS Please send your comments and/or let me know where and when I can reach you by phone!


-----Original Message-----
From: Lorenzo FOA [mailto:foa@cern.ch]
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2005 2:07 AM
To: Luth, Vera G.
Subject: Re: Draft of Write-up

Dear Vera,

I have taken some days to see if with time I could digest your proposal of 10f signatures for each physicist on the basis of consortia interested in 10 different physics subjects. I must tell you that I remain very skeptical and strongly support the arguments brought by Max in his long and interesting mail.

I start from the point of view of a person working since 5 or 8 years in CMS with the perspective of starting to produce physics results from 2008.
I also assume that each physicist, from the start up of data taking, will share his/her work in two parts: a continuous work of maintenance, calibration, recovery of dead channels, software improvements and so on on one side, and the participation to a physics analysis study group on the other. Clearly each person will report to two bosses, the group leader for the M&O activity and the responsible of the chosen physics group, on the other.
This is relevant because this person will have collected a deep knowledge on some particular aspect of the detector, be it hardware or software.
Most of this work and expertise has not been chosen by him/her but by the group leaders according to the financial and technical capabilities of their institution. The consequence is that he/she will choose the physics working group in which his experience and knowledge can be of strongest help. Our physicist has accepted all this under the assumption that he/she will participate to the whole experiment.
Immagine a brilliant student who works in the tracker and therefore participates in the working group on b, tau physics where he/she can take best advantage of a specific competence on secondary vertices.

How should he/she feel when the study group on Higgs physics discovers the Higgs boson through the decay into two photons and cannot participate to the discovery? What I want to say with this exemple is that it is largely too late to force each physicist into a 10f the physics results of the experiment at this late stage of the life of the collaboration..
I fear that such a decision would give origin to a real revolution and to a disgragation of the collaboration through a nasty competition among detector people, analysis groups and individuals inside the groups. I can easily imagine that the collaboration would split into fighting gropus of people, refusing a common vision and a common effort, contrary to what happens now, each community making sacrifices in order to help others when they encounter serious difficulties.

For me the only mechanism to convince a person not to sign a paper is his/her judgement of not beind enough involved in and aware of the content of the paper.
In this direction I can imagine to proceed further, for instance we could ask the supervisors of PhD students and post-docs to interrogate the students and suggest to sign or not a paper according to his/her capability of defending its content.
In conclusion I cannot imagine a short-cut decision changing the commonly accepted rules. I can see the evolution of the meaning of a signature which requires a more and more active role of each member of the collaboration. The minimum result is an increased responsibility of people who sign and a much better capability of defending the physics result.
But it is even possible that such a procedure, if taken really seriously by supervisors, group leaders and Collaboration management, could bring with time towards the ratio 1 to 10 without distroying the collaboration spirit.
Sorry for this long mail but the subject deserves a really big attention and I conside mine only a contribution to move to a deeper understanding

Ciao Lorenzo

Inline Depth:
 1 1
 All All
Outline Depth:
 1 1
 2 2
 All All
Add message: (add)

1 None: working group on authorship   (Gregor Herten - 18 Jun, 2005)
 Add Message Add Message
to: "Lorenzo's Comments (improved format)"

 Subscribe Subscribe

This site runs SLAC HyperNews version 1.11-slac-91, derived from the original HyperNews


[ SLACsite Home | SLACsite discussions | Search | Feedback ]