Minutes of the STAR Council Meeting on January 11, 2001

T. Hallman, recording

John Harris opened the meeting with a comment that it was very nice to see all the physics being produced, but that it also made it very challenging to organize the latest results (still changing) for the Quark Matter plenary talk.

There was a brief discussion of the agenda, and of the fact that the closed discussion without STAR Management would be after lunch, led by Steve Vigdor. It was agreed this was fine.

A short discussion of the STAR Long Range Plan followed. John Harris spoke briefly on the basic approach, and upon the fact that the group that had developed the plan was chaired by Rene Bellwied. He also mentioned that the Management felt the Council should vote on acceptance of the document at some point.

It was commented that the existing document needed additional text on the STAR spin physics program, and upon the need for higher luminosity. It was stated that Les Bland and Geary Eppley would be approached to help with that. Jack Sandweiss indicated he felt that a key point which should be emphasized in the executive summary was the need to increase the ability to take data faster.

Hans Georg Ritter raised a point about the language in the document regarding the need to replace the TPC in the future. It was commented that the main point in the document was that studies need to be made to see what tracking performance will be required by the machine and the physics in the future and that it should be emphasized that R&D funds will be needed at some point to carry this out. There was a comment that the need for R&D should also be emphasized in the executive summary.

There was a comment by Mike LeVine, that he and Matthias Messer felt the discussion of how we increase the data rate should be revised, and that they would propose different wording for that.

The discussion moved on to the Graduate Student Thesis Policy Report.

There was a discussion that the definition of what is counted as community service by students was not clear (particularly as it relates to what a student might do for his/her thesis). There was also discussion that students in Europe have a limited time to get their degree, and that specific times or percentages required for community service should be removed from the document. In the end, it was felt that the enforcement of this policy was really a matter for the Institutional Representatives, and that this policy would give the Spokesman and the Council leverage but not a proscription in cases where it was felt the policy was not being respected.

A vote was taken, and the policy was unanimously accepted. A list of students and their projects will be put on the web. Students will be asked to check the list and verify its accuracy.

A discussion of our procedures and policies regarding papers ensued.

There was a comment by Mike LeVine that in general the process for papers seemed to be working well, but that we should never compress the STAR discussion of a draft paper to less than 2 weeks.

John Harris commented that the official BNL policy regarding the release of papers had changed; now collaborations only need to make the title and the abstract of the paper available to the BNL Management and the community 1 week before submmitting it for publication--not the paper itself. There was consenus in the discussion that STAR felt there was value added in continuing to make the paper itself available to the public one week prior to submission, and that STAR would continue to follow that policy.

John Harris reviewed the general time frame for papers; after being reviewed and approved by the Godfather committee, papers will be reviewed within STAR for a period of 2 weeks. Then in principle, they are released to the general community for comment for a period of one week prior to submission. BNL management and the other experiments are notified at that time, and during this 1 week period a talk on the paper is given at BNL. There was a comment that an additional step should be taken: that before release to the general community, the paper should go back to the godfather committee to insure all issues identified in the 2 week period have been adequately addressed. This has been the case in practice for both papers that have been submitted for publication by STAR.

The discussion turned to authorship rules; John Harris indicated he was very pleased with the response of the Council members in reviewing the list of people eligible for authorship from the institutions, and that people were taking this seriously.

There was a discussion of whether the "one year of service prior to authorship eligibility" requirement was too restrictive both in one special case, and in general for post docs.

It was not clear from the documents in hand, whether this was indeed a real STAR requirement or just the sense of the Collaboration. A number of people felt they had seen this in email, and it was indeed a requirement. The conclusion of the discussion was that the documents should be reviewed to determine precisely what the present policy is. Also that if the requirement is 1 year, this should be reviewed to see if this is too restrictive, especially for post docs, who may only be at one institution for 2 years. It was stated that this review should be performed very quickly in the interest of post docs presently on STAR who stand to miss out on a fairly large number of papers right away. It was stated a committee would be appointed to review this.

There was a specific question regarding eligibility of some people from Nantes and IReS. Specifically, a question was raised concerning whether engineers should be authors on papers. It was commented that in the U.S. we have not done that, certainly for scientific papers. There was concern however that in Europe the convention might be different. John Harris indicated he would discuss this with the concerned parties.John Harris said he would talk to those institutional reps off-line and come to a conclusion.

There was a discussion concerning authorlists on publications and how things should be handled when someone leaves STAR, but is still listed as an author for a period of 1 year, according to STAR authorship policies.

It was concluded that the institution which the person was at when the STAR work was done would be the institution "of record" listed on the paper; it was concluded further that it was logistically not possible to put everyone's present address in this or similar instances, and that we would not attempt to do this.

Next, there was a brief report on the work of the Talks Committee by Jack Sandweiss, followed by a discussion of how this has been going.

One comment was that a significant problem had been that Council Members had not been energetic enough in giving input to the Committee on who should be considered to give talks. Two suggestions to improve this situation were to solicit input from the physics working group convenors, and to create a standing, dynamic list of people in STAR who should be considered to give talks. There was a comment that the mechanics of how this worked were not clear; Jack Sandweiss commented that a message was sent to the Collaboration, but that he would revise it incorporating any possible changes, and send it again.

A question was raised as to whether institutional priorities for receiving talks should be set in advance. John Harris commented from the publication policies, that it was one of the tasks of the Spokesman to insure "an equitable distribution of talks to institutions and people..." It was commented and agreed that when we look retrospectively over a given period of time, qualitatively there should be equity in the selection of speakers from various institutions.

There was an additional comment that it might be better if, for example, in the case of meetings like Quark Matter, every abstract and speaker suggestion were passed on by the Talks Committee to the Spokesman and possibly to the organizing committee. Jack Sandweiss commented that this was really the main task of the Talks Committee--to review the candidate talks and speakers, and make a recommendation to the Spokesperson on what should be submitted.

Peter Jones asked how invited talks were to be handled. It was stated that people invited to give talks should notify the Spokesman, and he would determine whether it was appropriate to refer this to the Talks Committee or to simply tell the invitee to proceed. Contributed talks were noted to be outside the purview of the Talks Committee. The Committee should be made aware of them so they can be 'logged' but they would not get involved in consideration of contributed talks.

A question was raised whether the Talks Committee would be concerned e.g. for talks submitted to CHEP. The response was that technical talks would proceed through a sub-system leader or project leader, and were not within the purview of the Talks Committee.

A status update on the Photon Multiplicity Detector followed. The proposed addition has been approved by STAR, and John Harris is awaiting an updated technical proposal before writing to Tom Kirk officially requesting permission for this upgrade to be added to STAR.

A discussion followed in consideration of the Indian Groups joining STAR. It was commented the Indian team had six collaborating institutions, and the question arose of how they should be represented on the Council. The sense of the discussion was that each institution should have 1 seat, and that the voting members would be whoever was in attendance at the Council meetings filling those seats (i.e., votes would not be counted for Institutional reps who were absent). Because one of the institutions only appears to have 1 person, it may be that there will be only 5 new seats for the Indian institutions. John commented that he had committed some travel support for the Indian team during a two year period when installation and commissioning of the PMD will take place. This is at the level of $40k/year. After that, requests from Indian collaborators will compete like requests from elsewhere in the Collaboration. A question was also raised concerning whether there was an issue with Bikash Sinha being the overal team leader for the Indians since he is a theorist. John indicated he would speak to Sinha about this issue at Quark Matter.

The question was raised whether there were any junior member issues. The answer was that no issues had been identified. It was commented that the authorship requirements clearly affect junior members. The junior Council members commented that they were happy about the representation of junior members at Quark Matter.

Peter Jones asked about the status of the move to 1005. Tim Hallman commented that for the moment the move was on hold; we will stay in 902, and try to improve services there. John Harris and Tim Hallman will work towards an ultimate goal of finding a solution with everyone in the same location.

There was a presentation by Barbara Erazmus of the status of the SSD, including recommendations from a top level review of the project by a committee commissioned by in2p3. It was found that all of the technical hurdles have been passed, and the electronics are ready to go into full production. It was stated by the in2p3 committee that it was essential the remaining funds be found quickly to complete the project to avoid a stoppage in the production part way through. The shortfall at present is about 3 million french francs ($400k). It was commented by John Harris that it would not be possible to address this problem with FY01 capital equipment funds from BNL as there are things necessary for the next run which have a high priority.

There was a brief discussion of an initiative under Matthias Messer commissioned to develop a next generation integrated tracking software for STAR. Claude Pruneau from Wayne State is leading this effort. John Harris indicated he is concerned that the manpower on this effort is very sub-critical, and that he would appreciate it if Council members would encourage those who might have an interest to get involved.

There was a comment by John Harris that Spencer Klein has stepped down as the Working Group Convenor for peripheral collisions. Janet Seger will take on those responsibilities. It was commented that John understood from Hans Georg, that LBNL would continue to support this effort. It was commented further that this group expects to get a lot of data in the coming year. They could really use additional manpower, and anyone who is interested is encouraged to get involved.

There was a comment from Mike LeVine that it would be useful during the next run for senior level management to stand shifts, to underscore the value of this kind of effort to the general Collaboration membership. It was noted that Senior Management had been present in the control room much of the time. The value of standing shifts to underscore the value of shiftwork was recognized. There was further discussion that in the coming run, several of the detector systems (e.g. SVT, FTPC) would probably still be using detector experts heavily, and that the plan to have 2 detector operators on each shift might be overkill.

John Harris commented that he felt it was useful to have Collaboration meetings like this one relatively infrequently, with more single focus analysis meetings interspersed in between. It was discussed that the next Collaboration meeting would be in the summer, and that the date would be decided by March 1.

A proposal was made by Barbara Erazmus to hold a collaboration meeting in Nantes at Ecole des Mines in proximity to QM2002. The sense of the Council was that there was great interest in doing this, and that we should make a firm decision not later than the next Collaboration meeting.

Meeting adjourned.