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

July 3, 2018

Present: Ivan Andrian, Todd Satogata, Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz, David Button, Volker RW Schaa

1. Approval of Notes of JBoD Meetings 16 and 17

The Notes of both meetings are approved without modification, but with some discussion on the following issues.

Volker's sustainability

Volker is confidant GSI will fund his activities until the end of this year (the request has been in since March), with confirmation expected soon. On 20 August he will have a meeting with his immediate hierarchy to establish his future contractual position at GSI from January 2019 with respect to funding his JACoW activities. His current contract covers a 50% salary, with 2-3 days per month at GSI and travel expenses.

Replacement Repository Manager

Manuela Giabbai from INFN Frascati is considering taking up this responsibility. Her supervisor, Andea Ghigo is willing to allow her to join the collaboration again. She is on vacation now but a response may be forthcoming in a few weeks.

In response to some concern on David's part, Chris reassures him that she is perfectly willing to continue as Repository Manager until Sue's replacement can be found and trained, including fielding the inevitable influx of new profiles/accounts and new affiliation requests around IPAC'19 abstract submission, which will be taking place around the time of this year's Team Meeting.

Input from David: Abstract submission deadline for IPAC'19 is currently scheduled on Friday, 7 December 2018. Chris asked David to propose to modify this to the Wednesday since this is conducive to authors preparing to propose from the Monday, allowing the Abstract QA to go smoothly between Monday and Friday. And also to allow the Repository Manager to field all eventual problems with new authors, etc. during the week, and not during the week-end which is the result of a Friday deadline. A deadline on the Friday causes effort overload for Abstract QA and verifications of new profiles/accounts/new affiliation requests.

JACoW.de

Volker still has some work to do on this to shift jacow.de to jacow.org.

2. Broken Links in PAC'95 Proceedings

Todd volunteers to write a perl script to fix this problem. He will also verify no other links are broken.

3. New Requests to Join JACoW

With reference to the request to join JACoW from Victor Vus, Associate Professor in Psychology and Head of International Relations Office at Kyiv Institute f Modern Psychology and Psychotherapy (Ukraine) concerning the International Conference "Mental Health: Global Challenges of XXI Century", the BoD decides this event does not fit in JACoW's scope. Christine will respond to Mr. Vus.

Action: Done on 6 July, copied to BoD.

On the question of new membership of JACoW, Christine reports on a discussion with Jan Chrin during HB'18 in Daejeon.

Jan has been approached by representatives of a Workshop, which fits JACoW's scope of events in the field of accelerator science and technology. They are expressing an interest in joining JACoW, but publishing presentations only, not papers. The Workshop is aware that JACoW currently hosts Proceedings only. The question in broader terms is if JACoW wants to open up to Workshops that do not produce proceedings.

From the Workshop's perspective, it is a shame that transparencies from past events are scattered over several Websites. They see a definite advantage of a single common store for talks from the Workshop series.

The enquiry is an informal one on a local Workshop level. It will not be propagated further to the guardians of the Workshop Series if JACoW already has a position of not wishing to expand its scope in this way. Jan is also fully aware that if we did opt to open up to this kind of event, we might be opening the floodgates.

Volker recalls that when a similar discussion took place a few years ago concerning another Workshop, the BoD had decided against such events publishing on JACoW.org, even though there were justifiable arguments in favour of hosting such events if only to allow them to be grouped in one place, and more easily searchable.

In the BoD discussion, it was generally felt that the publication of transparencies alone might be given some consideration, but it would need to be made extremely clear that allowing this kind of publication to be archived on JACoW.org would entail strict respect of JACoW boundary conditions, including the attendance/contribution of the editors at JACoW Team Meetings, IPAC events, etc. Prior to any decision it would also be necessary to give careful consideration to the types of files acceptable, given the eventuality that more and more presentations these days contain hefty animations, videos, etc.

Ronny Billen has already expressed his opinion that he is not in favour of undertaking this type of publication as they occupy considerable space, without much added value. Todd also worries that this type of file may cause extra effort for JACoW whereas it would not contribute much to the value of JACoW.org. He would not accept this kind of Workshop publications without being very clear about the above-mentioned boundary conditions and requirements.

It is decided to ask Jan to convey the above concerns to his contacts and if they are still interested, to bring the topic to the Pre-TM in December.

Action: Chris contacted Jan on 5 July with a copy of the above. He will informally take contact with his colleagues and report back to the Board as soon as he has news.

4. Status of SCOPUS – Maksim's request

Volker recalls the stumbling block to SCOPUS indexation caused by the boundary conditions that require a publications ethics statement. Inquiries with colleagues at DESY and CERN pointed him to different kinds of publication statements which do not fit JACoW's situation. As "publishers" we ensure the author delivers something which is within a given formal description of formatting. We do not for example take responsibility for scientific issues and we do not check whether the material has been published elsewhere.

Todd contacted APS, and spoke in particular to Brant Johnson, a Physical Review employee. He forwarded Grant's response to the BoD explaining that Clarivate Analytics is now the official source of Impact Factors. It came to light in connection with IPAC'18 that their procedures translate to a lack of recognition of the IOP Journal of Physics Conference Proceedings as a citeable journal – one of the important factors leading IPAC to adopt the light reviewing procedure and IOP publication.

From Todd's perspective there is some progress, but it does not offer too much clarity right now. JACoW should probably ascertain whether IOP conference proceedings are indeed indexed in SCOPUS, and if so, check out the IOP ethics statement to see whether it might be adapted to JACoW.org.

Volker would be in favour of producing an ethics statement of some sort for publication on JACoW.org, perhaps based on the IOP one mentioned above, and then at least see whether SCOPUS finds it acceptable, and if not, why not.

Action: Volker to think about a possible ethics statement for JACoW.org. Volker to contact Maksim explaining the situation with copy to the BoD.

In response to a question from David, Volker responds that while the quality of JACoW references and citations WAS a problem for us some years ago, the improvement in quality in recent years means it is no longer an issue. He feels the next step should be with Reuters, and he will address this when he has all of JACoW conferences in the same state. Some sets need re-processing. At the moment we publish a bibliographic export, which conforms to the template of 2 years ago, but not to the actual one. He intends to update this.

Action: Volker.

5. Indico-SPMS Merge Project

Chris reports on her recent visit to CERN and discussions with Pedro Ferreira.

While there is some progress on this project to introduce missing SPMS functionality into Indico, she is concerned that she did not obtain any feeling for when the really important missing functionality concerning the editorial modules will be introduced. She understood this is on the to do list for 2019, meaning Indico could not be used for any reasonably sized JACoW conference before around 2021, long after the project finalization.

She will provide Ivan with some input for the meeting at CERN in August (unfortunately she is no longer able to attend), which should address the schedule in more detail. She proposes he takes this opportunity to emphasize the necessity for Indico developer(s) to attend the TM in South Africa, and even more importantly to also be an active and productive member of the IPAC'19 team in Melbourne, which would be the first time any Indico people actually attended a large JACoW event, to witness the full spectrum of inter-related activities ranging from processing of papers, poster presentation management, poster session management, feedback with authors, author reception, management of oral presentations (processing them), and how the scripting over Indico is so important to keeping the processing on track.

We recall the numerous improvements to SPMS functionality introduced by Matt Arena when he was physically part of the conference teams and when he could observe in situ all of the different inter-related activities which take place during the events.

6. Report on TM'18 Organization

David has little to report. He is currently optimizing on last year's programme and also including a few modifications.

In view of the important number of LaTeX papers he is considering scheduling a short talk (Ivan) to ensure editors are aware of the skill sets, and the software required within the teams.

He would also like to see Todd providing a demonstration of LaTeX basic editing. David tried to process a paper himself in LaTeX and he found it wasn't as difficult as he expected. He feels some of the fear of the unknown might be overcome with some demystification .... Todd adds that LaTeX is simply "code". There's good code and bad code because it is a programming language. When 50 to 60% of our papers are written clearly and well, almost anybody could fix the simple oversights and problems. The more messy papers could also easily be left to the experts.

David's last point concerns the challenge concerning references, citations, DOI's. He will schedule a talk (Jan) to really address the importance of this aspect of publication. He is at the same time consulting with IT people to see how for example titles/authors in SPMS data may be cross-checked with the pdf files.

David hopes to have a first draft programme ready by the end of next week. He still has some concern that the usual format is sometimes bewildering for newcomers and he is wondering how to overcome this, perhaps via some one-on-one mentoring prior to the opening of the programme proper.

Chris asks whether one could imagine a "conference series oriented" TM opening session, to underline the necessity for conference series to better pass on the experience of past editors to the future ones in a more organized fashion.

The larger events, where editors are often identified relatively early on, already have some sort of overlap between Editors. It is more problematic for the smaller events, where editors are often only identified once the "previous" event is already over and where the "current" editor has no experience whatsoever of a JACoW event, sometimes even without a TM experience and with only JACoW.org documentation to work with.

Such an conference-driven opening session could be a way for JACoW to really INSIST on the past/current/future editor attendance boundary conditions. Chris feels this kind of mentoring within series would need some careful preparation by contacting each series individually, ensuring proper representation (at least past/current editors), and providing a mini-agenda for each series setting down some basic information such as dates of previous events/no. of participants/no. of contributions, and the specifics that are of use for new editors.

One might even imagine a brief presentation of each series – some people may recall that prior to organizing the poster sessions we used to schedule 5 to 10 minute presentations by ALL editors in all series. This might be re-introduced – maintaining of course still the poster session which precedes the reception. The emphasis is really on the need during the opening session to instill some JACoW team spirit within each conference series.

If the above notion is felt desirable, then the implementation needs to be addressed, in particular on WHEN/HOW to introduce this opening session, and how it could fit in with the Pre-TM.

Action: Chris and David to explore a possible schedule together and make a proposal to the BoD, based on a two-day Pre-TM, and a 3.5 or 4 day TM, at the same time as David proposes his programme at the end of next week.

Following a remark that the templates are becoming too complicated, Chris proposes to produce a simple one page document with includes the simplest of the requirements, emphasizing only the most common oversights (figure/table formatting, Fig. vs. Figure, reference formatting, and annex this to the more complete actual template – or the other way round ... The simple one-page template, with the more complete one as an annex .... If there is support for this Jan Chrin should be asked for his opinion.

Action: BoD to consider the above and if agreed, Jan Chrin to be consulted for agreement/implementation.

Chris mentions the iThemba people are gradually publishing information about local arrangements on JACoW.org. She will contact them this week re dates, and to see whether the website could be complete by late July/early August and begin ensuring coherence between local arrangements and the programme.

7. Request to Adopt Umbrella Federated Authentication

Ivan mentions the European funded CALIPSO and CALIPSOplus Projects related to light sources with the aim of introducing some kind of centralized authentication. The project is developed at PSI, backed by ESRF and CERN. There is a proposal that Umbrella could be adopted by JACoW to authenticate to SPMS.

Ivan feels it is doable, but the benefits for JACoW are not so great. Ivan will discuss it with the Indico people. He isn't sure he would invest any effort right now to modify SPMS.

8. AOB

David has 2 points:

  1. If he can find some IT effort he will attempt to interest some of his people to explore developing a search engine to produce reference data more easily for pasting into the lists of references.
  2. How to get data (titles/authors) in and out of SPMS and cross-checking against the pdf files of the papers (mentioned also above).

Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz

Todd's Notes

Present: Ivan, David, Volker, Todd, Christine

  • Ivan will be on the water most of July and some of August, and will be intermittently on email.
  • Chris in Portugal to July 1, July 10-15 in UK, July 15-25 back in Portugal.
  1. approval of JBoDM#16 and JBoDM#17 minutes (Todd)
    1. Discussion of last May 2 minutes paragraph. Volker: Fellow at TM/IPAC, someone had indicated interest in bibtex template but were not sure if he volunteered or not. Volker has someone who could and would do it, but she would require a fee (was 180E for JACoW-style help). If people use IEEE style properly, it differs from JACoW citation. IEEEtran bibliography style doesn't come out with correctly formatted items, even worse with DOIs. Volker: More people are using BibLaTeX. Todd is concerned about author confusion and inefficiency. David notes that more and more authors are using LaTeX, so this seems worth the investment.
    2. Approved JBoDM#17 without modification
    3. Chris: Discussion of Volker's status from Mei and GSI folks Volker: While on travel home from Korea, appt with Mei for Aug 20. Volker will follow up; contract ending this month, no idea whether they will extend it this year. Mei's secretary mentioned that they only feel responsible for extension from 1 Jan 2019, which leaves Volker in limbo for 5 months. GSI are presently covering Volker travel budget and half salary, 2-3 days/mo at GSI for other work, and for conferences cover more than 50% of Volker time. Contract ran last year to this year with some small gap as well, Extension request in since 1 Mar. The donut hole Aug 1-end of year may result in Volker missing TM. Volker's boss told him that he should apply for travel to ICAP end Oct, because he's pretty sure extension to end of 2018 will come. Not sure re Linac, other late year conferences.
    4. Ivan: Repository manager INFN Frascati potential; Ivan is waiting to hear back from Manuela. Ivan will follow up; Chris is doing the job in the meantime. Another burst for IPAC'19 at TM. Industry burst earlier. Get person to TM. IPAC'19 abstract deadline 7 Dec currently. Chris suggests shifting to 5 Dec for abstract QA.
    5. Approved JBoDM#17 without modification; Volker remarks to point 7, jacow.de has been forwarded to jacow.org since some weeks. Works for Todd. DOIs should forward. Volker will double-check existing DOIs.
  2. Follow up on previous decisions (broken links in proceedings, ...) (Todd)
    1. See notes, Todd will work on XML generation for PAC'95
    2. Survey broken links to see that nothing else is broken (PDF click throughs)
  3. New requests to join (Ivan)
    1. Ivan forwarded email to group. Request for JBoD. Decline mental health email from Jun 26 "request for membership" from Ivan. Consider future of the "business of publication" for JACoW; do we have any interest in growing outside of the accelerator community?
    2. Chris/Volker had discussion with Jan about workshop publishing only transparencies at IPAC'18. Rang bell with ICFA meetings including FLS. A reluctance of authors to publish papers, or even transparencies. Yong-Ho/ICFA agrees to publish on JACoW, mainly interested in papers, rather than transparencies. (Zhentang Zhao will become next ICFA BD chair.) Jan suggested another workshop for transparencies. Volker discussed 5-6 years ago for WAO publication (only transparencies). Recalled that we also had discussed publication of symposia transparencies since they have historical value for the community. Of course, those who publish should also contribute to JACoW through TM participation. Audio on EPAC'04, ICALEPCS'17. How can we accommodate audio if others are interested in this? Something that is larger than individual conference, as JAcoW needs resources to provide this support. Everything additional is extra work. Volker: Problem with ICALEPCS is that they put all video on a YouTube channel, which is an external link that violates CERN policy; Volker talked with Ronny about publishing URL that could be cut/pasted for YouTubes. David: Compressed embedded video in PDFs is probably not too problematic. Take note for TM as a possible working group, can also always just say no to requesting workshops or conferences.
    3. Volker worries about WAO and conferences that are important for the community. Todd mentions that they might be resource sinks if we adopt them. Perhaps transparencies are not too much load. Todd will talk with some WAO organizers and follow up. Chris also notes that we should investigate more the resources and constraints for publishing video etc.
    4. Volker mentions biggest single PDF published on JACoW is 1.2GB, with several at 600-800 Mb.
  4. Status of SCOPUS (Maksim's request) (Volker)
    1. Issue is that border condition is that we should have ethics statement.
    2. Other ethics statements do not really fit our purpose. We are the publishers, but material responsibility lies with the authors##- we do not check publication.
    3. Todd forwards contact from Brant Johnson at APS regarding IOP publication and possible use of their ethics statement from light peer review indexing, but note that light peer review papers go through different quality controls (e.g. checks for previous publication) that other JACoW papers do not, so IOP ethics statement may not be sufficient. Debbie Brodbar at APS may also send Todd more information on this.
    4. Maksim had tried to get SCOPUS/Elsevier to index, but they refused and escalated to Volker.
    5. Volker got refusal from SCOPUS since they say that they do not index single events, but only conference series; clearly they do not understand that we do publish series. Volker hopes to meet the Elsevier contact in Oct.
    6. In principle we should have someting on our website so we can iterate as an ethics statement.
    7. Volker wants to work on getting conferences into the same state, such as bibliographic exports/DOIs, etc. We do bib template export in a way that conforms to a 2y old standard, but Volker wants to update to the latest.
    8. Volker will reply to Maksim and CC: JBoD.
  5. Indico-SPMS merge project news (Christine)
    1. Chris went to CERN last week, spent few hours with Pedro. Walked Chris through basically what already existed on Indico. Finding it hard to see where the development is, e.g. main/sub classifications still not there. At least Pedro seems to understand better the purpose of main/subs. Have some nice features, but Chris does not find Indico intuitive. Have done a lot to improve scheduling. No fine-grained access page by page though, so less flexible than SPMS. David notes that there will probably always be a difficulty in balance between flexibility and structure. Chris notes that there is not much done on editorial module so it is hard to project; Indico put no effort here before.
    2. Meeting end of August will miss Christine, but Ivan still on schedule and Christine will join via videoconference. Ivan will spend a few days with them.
    3. David hopes that there will also be Indico representation at TM. Chris also hopes that someone from Indico should be at IPAC'19 to see how the editorial office actually works. Or perhaps they could get involved earlier and have someone at Linac'18.
  6. Report from TM2018 Working Group (David)
    1. David has adjusted from last year's linear program. David has to start getting more time to work on JACoW, but promotion going through hopefully.
    2. Chris notes that the TM agenda never changes *too* much; there are certain base requirements and objectives.
    3. David notes that LaTeX is picking up more steam, so trying to support this more. Todd has started documenting script use for processing papers.
    4. Ideally if brand new people can arrive a day early, buddy them up to fill in some gaps since they might be getting underwater too quickly. Similar to IPAC or other conference tutorial sessions? Perhaps we can pair up people with mentors even before the conference and have informal email exchanges ramping up to Team Meeting.
    5. Proposing to have similar conference series folks to buddy up. Chris suggests that we make this an obligation, more structurally planned. Chris can go through list of conferences and editors to outline structure and teamwork. Could be done as a kickoff event at the TM on the first eve.
    6. Chris: Two reflections on more LaTeX papers (48% LaTeX to 51% Word). Should this be in a parallel session? Can one imagine that LaTeX editors process papers then hand to another editor for finishing?
    7. Discussion of LaTeX training: we can triage good/bad LaTeX papers where basic editors can escalate to the experts. This is probably the most efficient process. Many LaTeX papers can also be trivially fixed in the PDF, and so require little to no changes in the LaTeX source.
    8. David: Also want to train people on citations and references (Jan). Empathize with authors that the JACoW citation documentation is too much. Can we reduce citations to heuristics, or basic one-pager? Todd thinks that citation formatting/efficiency is a bigger processing bottleneck for us than LaTeX vs Word.
    9. Volker notes that Michaela got message from Garrett that the water levels are okay and that the TM should be in Capetown, so she need not keep DESY as a backup plan for TM'18.
    10. Chris will contact I-THEMBA folks (Garrett) to update page with target for public availability by end of July, or possibly mid-August. David will also work to coordinate program.
    11. Capetown dam water levels http://www.capetown.gov.za/Family%20and%20home/residential-utility-services/residential-water-and-sanitation-services/this-weeks-dam-levels
  7. Request to adopt Umbrella federated authentication (Calypso European OpenID)
    1. Ivan: Trying to spread centralized login through projects and facilities in Europe, developed by PSI but backed by CERN, ESRF, etc. Some proposal that Umbrella could be adopted by JACoW to authenticate to SPMS. https://umbrellaid.org and http://www.calipsoplus.eu
    2. Ivan thinks Umbrella is in development in accelerator field. Could be integrated with SPMS, have similar portal at Elettra so do-able, but there are not many benefits with considerable effort for JACoW.
    3. Just wanted to bring topic to board, and could discuss with Indico developers. We should probably not put effort into external authentication for SPMS as it currently stands.
    4. Indico and Calipso development at CERN may not know each other since CERN is so big, but there may be some opportunity here.
  8. AOB
    1. David: Work at IPAC'18 on page with citation examples. Talk to Matt or data mine JACoW site to produce JACoW citation generator. Perhaps launch for IPAC'19? Give a prize for "best citations"?
    2. David: Info out of word documents with python scripting? Automate other checking processing, formatting rule heuristics? Integrate into file upload process?
    3. Todd: Editing/processing script working group? We should stay converged between efforts on Mac/Windows platforms and LaTeX/Word targets.