Epic-cc-membership-committee-l mailing list

["Anselm Vossen, Ph.D." <anselm.vossen AT duke.edu>]

Dear Committee,

Thanks for distributing this draft.

My main comment, that I already voiced in a IB meeting a while back, is with 
respect of the 0.2 FTE in service work required per member in good standing.
I am a member of a collaboration that uses a similar standard and have been a 
member of many that have not.
I think this is a terrible idea.
It discourages participation and punishes institutions for involving their 
graduate students and postdocs in diverse projects. I also think it dis 
proportionally falls on universities as opposed to national labs, since 
university faculty usually have many other commitments. It is no coincidence 
that in my experience smaller institutions fail to climb this threshold.
It also leads to an audit culture that I dislike very much since one has to 
verify that the claimed service work indeed amounts to 0.2 FTE.
I think it is a good idea to ask for service work, I feel that a fixed FTE 
amount is completely unnecessary. In practice it doesn't matter if people are 
on papers that they did not contribute much too other than data taking 
shifts. It is clear to everyone in the field that papers on which you are not 
a PA do not really count. Also, technical contributions are encouraged by 
separate technical papers and a institution already has to justify their 
involvement in front of the funding agencies.

At the very minimum, I would scale the FTE requirement with the fractional 
FTE committed to epic in that year. That way a student or PD can concentrate 
on some other urgent project for a stretch of time and then come back. 
I can only speak for my group, but we are involved in several experiments and 
R&D projects. The policy as you formulate here would be completely unworkable 
for us, in particular in the time where there is no data taking and no major 
support by funding agencies. Till there is epic data and funding agency 
support, there is no other way for us then to engage our group on other 
experiments as well. 
 Your proposed policy would force us to withdraw most of our group from epic.
 I do not see how that helps anyone since my students still do valuable work 
and I would argue do not unduly profit.

Best regards,

Anselm