Speaker: Bob Hanisch (Space Telescope Science Institute)

Panel Discussion: Current Thinking Panel

Electronic Preprints in Astronomy

• Who am I? Astronomer/technical manager in charge of calibration and data analysis software development and science computing support at ST ScI, the institution responsible for operating the Hubble Space Telescope. Also chair of AAS Working Group on Astronomical Software and co-author of AASTeX macro package.
• The American Astronomical Society is networked and highly computer literate.
  • AASTeX
  • Meeting abstracts now essentially 100% electronic submissions (using simple LATeX template)
  • Astrophysical Journal: Letters going on-line in the next two years
  • Astronomers use distributed databases extensively: e.g., Astrophysics Data System, AstroWeb Consortium
• Astronomers value peer review. Some 85% of papers (perhaps more) submitted to our journals are published, but 85% of submitted papers are revised substantially as a result of the peer review process.
• Definition of "preprint" is not agreed upon.
  • Non-peer reviewed paper in private circulation to friendly reviewers
  • Non-peer reviewed paper in public circulation
  • Peer-reviewed paper accepted for publication but not yet in print
  • Conference proceedings papers, invited talks, etc.
• In astronomical community, one reason for prominence of preprints is name recognition, both for authors and for their institutions.
• Why am I here? I organized workshop on electronic preprints in astronomy two weeks ago in conjunction with Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) conference in Baltimore.

• Attended by ~70 people (astronomers and astronomical software developers, networking experts, librarians, representatives of professional societies, publishers, journal editors)
• Objectives
  • Review and understand existing electronic preprint services
  • Review policy and legal issues (financial impact on journals, copyright, editorial policies)
  • Examine technical capabilities and challenges (information retrieval and delivery, revision control and security, tracking, disposition of unpublished papers; figures, images)
  • Understand requirements/needs of users: scientist, author, librarian
  • Develop initial plan for implementation of astronomy-wide electronic preprint distribution and indexing system
• Workshop concluded with presentation of strawman proposal and panel discussion

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  A Modest Proposal
• Objective: Faster dissemination of quality research papers
• Method:
  • Adopt standards of astronomical community: AASTeX, HTML, WWW, Mosaic, encapsulated Postscript, full Postscript, FITS (thereby maximizing re-use of the same source material)
  • Establish network of institutionally-based preprint servers; each responsible for quality of preprints it provides
  • Develop master preprint server that indexes all preprints in all known servers and provides links to them. Question: resources?
  • Track preprints through to publication, and provide (semi) permanent pointer to published paper. Papers that remain unpublished for more than one year [two years?] are dropped from the server.
  • Revisions permitted only from principal author -- authentication service required?
  • Simple framework for establishing servers needs to be provided to small organizations, and/or common facility needs to be provided for open submissions
  • Proceed cautiously, watching for impact on existing journals
  Metrics:
  • Compare with existing preprint indexing services for completeness
  • Monitor usage
  • Institutional cost savings, if any
  • Number of preprints that never make it into refereed publication
  • Rate of re-use of preprint source materials for final publication