sPHENIX EMCal discussion

[Martin Purschke <purschke AT bnl.gov>]

Hi Megan,

I'm sorry that this will rain on your parade here, but (I think Craig
should chime in as well) you are entering a long-standing minefield by
submitting proceedings, called conference record in IEEE parlance. Let
me first say that a) I won't submit one, and b) for the smaller but
similar IEEE Real-Time conferences where I'm the current committee
chair, we won't even offer the option to submit such a conference
record, in order not to trick people into inadvertently entering said
minefield. AFAIK, no one else is submitting a CR; Bob Azmoun is going
for a full TNS publication with his submission, which is the real thing.

The issue is that even by submitting a "light" conference record as you
intend to do, you may nevertheless burn this topic for subsequent
IEEE-journal publication, such as the follow-up paper to the submitted
test beam paper. The ominous key sentence is (in
http://www.nss-mic.org/2017/Publications.asp)

"The Conference Record (CR) [...] also will be submitted to IEEE Xplore
for publication."

The long and short of it is that by entering *anything* into the larger
IEEE Xplore universe, any subsequent submission will be held to this
standard:

"Under these guidelines, NPSS republication policy is that any
manuscript submitted to a journal must contain at least 50% more
substantive content than that which appears in its [parent] conference
record paper."

In other words, when we submit the 2017 test beam paper, you need to
meet this requirement, which is really much harder than it seems. To
begin with, you will later trigger an automatic plagiarism alert, and
it's irrelevant that it's "self-plagiarism" - just the first sentences
in the abstract, as well as the standard description of the sPHENIX
apparatus, can never again be used like that. For ATLAS and CMS, where
authors are encouraged not to deviate too much from the agreed-upon and
polished description of their experiment, papers have been returned for
that. I mean, how many substantially different variations of the fact
that we are a RHIC experiment, have calorimetry, and have 2\pi coverage
can you write down?

And we will have to convince a future Associate Editor that our new TNS
paper meets the 50% rule. It can be argued that this CR already details
all the high points from 2017 (the resolution and linearity
figures/numbers), creating an unnecessary but very real hurdle for the
full TNS paper to be accepted later.

Please, talk to Craig for a second opinion before Friday. IMHO, there is
nothing to be gained from submitting the CR. It cannot be cited, it
doesn't count as a publication, but it can still poison the well.

My 5cts,

        Martin


On 11/15/17 15:14, Megan Connors wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I posted a draft of the proceedings for my IEEE talk to today's HCal
> agenda (link below). The deadline for submission is already this Friday
> November 17! Sorry for the late posting and thanks for your quick feedback.
> 
> https://indico.bnl.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=3873
> 
> Best,
> -Megan
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> sPHENIX-EMCal-l AT lists.bnl.gov
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> 


-- 
Martin L. Purschke, Ph.D.        ;   purschke AT bnl.gov
                                 ;   http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/~purschke
                                 ;
Brookhaven National Laboratory   ;   phone: +1-631-344-5244
Physics Department Bldg 510 C    ;   fax:   +1-631-344-3253
Upton, NY 11973-5000             ;   skype: mpurschke
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