Summary Notes of the Twelveth Meeting of the JACoW Board of Directors

February 9, 2016

Present: Volker RW Schaa, Ivan Andrian, John Poole, Raphael Mueller, Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz
Guest: Charlie Horak
Absent: Todd Satogata, Yongbin Leng

1. Notes of last meeting

Approved without modification.

Miscellaneous 1

Volker reports that CERN will host JACoW’s DOIs. Several minor issues need attention, including what goes into the DOIs. He is confident he will have his JPSP scripts updated to handle DOIs by the end of this month.

2. Status of JACoW Templates

Ivan reports that Jan has put a lot of effort into the new templates. The Word versions for PC are final except for some minor bugs. Todd will produce the Macintosh versions. Volker and Ivan expect to finalize the LaTeX and OpenDocument versions in the coming week or so.

Volker will update the JACoW.org pages related to citations to reflect what now is well explained in the templates.

Following a question from Christine concerning the Guidelines on Preparation and Upload of contributions to the IPAC'16 proceedings, it is decided to keep these to a minimum and convey the important message that there are NEW TEMPLATES, and a lot of new information concerning the formatting of references and citations. While there are slight differences in the templates, relative to the different platforms/software, these are minor so need little explanation. Links from the conference website to JACoW.org site should be included for all other important hints and help.

Christine will send the draft texts for publication at the conference website to the BoD for approval prior to publication.

Miscellaneous 2

Ivan reports that he has been contacted by Giovanni Bisoffi concerning the creation of a Working Group within the EPS Accelerator Group to discuss refereeing of IPAC conference proceedings. Christine asks Ivan to circulate the text of the mail to better understand the objectives. This issue might be raised during the Stakeholders Meeting in Busan and the BoD should have had some opportunity to consider the aim of the WG and any possible future request to the JACoW Collaboration.

3. 2016 Team Meeting

The deadline for voting on bids to host TM’16 is tomorrow, 10 January. It is decided Christine will send a reminder.

Once the venue is decided, David Button will be contacted to discuss the organization of the programme.

4. Issues raised during TM'15

4.1 JACoW Website Review

Charlie has added a Tutorials Section, with all of the presentations from 2015 TM. She has invested some effort to ensure that such useful documentation is easily available for new editors.

4.2 Upgrade of Acrobat and PitStop licenses

The versions of Acrobat and PitStop we have are becoming old and need to be upgraded. Both Adobe and Enfocus offer, in parallel with the previous “permanent licenses” model, a new rental plan for their products, monthly-based.

Upgrading all the permanent Acrobat licenses we have will result in a cost JACoW cannot afford with the normal IPAC support.

So, in view of this foreseen increase in cost, the rental of licenses directly by conferences, instead of purchase via IPAC, was the option preferred at TM’15.

Following discussion, it is decided that future JACoW conferences will rent (or purchase, at their discretion) their own Adobe Acrobat software. PitStop licenses will still be maintained by JACoW, renewing the usual yearly maintenance (around 1.050 EUR per year for 49 licenses). For technical reasons, conferences will continue to use PitStop in Trial mode during the conferences, but the Editor-in-Chief will need to ensure he/she has the necessary software for the whole editing period.

Some licenses will be needed for the JACoW “permanent” officials. It is decided that 5 permanent Acrobat licenses will still be provided by JACoW.

Thus, the maintenance of PitStop, together with the upgrade of the 5 Acrobat Licenses above, will continue. Volker will manage this job and send the invoices each year to the “current” IPAC LOC Chair.
Christine will write to Won Namkung (IPAC’16 OC Chair) to explain this decision and its implications, with copy to the Chairs of the coming IPACs so they can include it in their budgets. She will include this issue on the Agenda of this year’s IPACCC in Busan.

Charlie will ensure that the new policy is clearly explained in JACoW.org documentation. Acrobat 9 will still be available, though TM’15 was in favour of moving towards Acrobat DC.

5. Continuity within the BoD

End 2017, the mandates of the JACoW Chair, Deputy and Coordinator will end simultaneously. Ivan has been considering how to manage this so the three mandates could be staggered, with for example one or more persons stepping down prior to the end of their mandates, and standing for re-election.

In principle both Ivan and Todd could stand for a second mandate. Christine stood for election because there were no other candidates. If there are candidates in 2017, she will not stand again.

Raphael, however, is willing to step down and run to be re-elected during this year’s TM: this will enhance the present situation overall the whole BoD.
So, at the present time no need for further actions is felt.

The topic will be discussed at the next BoD meeting when Todd will be present.

6. AOB

Raphael volunteered to go through the outcomes of the past TM, collect all the conclusions and needed actions, then check the statuses of all the related jobs inside the TM.