sPHENIX HCal discussion

[Craig Woody <woody AT bnl.gov>]

Hi Megan,
   What Martin says is correct, in that one has to be careful in what one submits to the Conference Record that it doesn't prevent submitting some of the same information to a later publication in TNS. I think we talked about this at several of our EMCAL and HCAL meetings and decided that we would be aware of this but still submit a paper to the Conference Record in order to have at least a conference proceedings publication for the new HCAL results, and some preliminary results on the EMCAL for the large eta prototype. However, it's not true that the Conference Record proceedings cannot be cited. It appears in Xplore in exactly the same way as a TNS paper and is given an ISBN number and DOI number like any other publication, and is completely searchable on the web. The only difference is that it is listed as a Conference Proceedings, which, like many other conference proceedings, do not get the same level of peer review as some other publications. As an aside, even this is not always true, as some conference proceedings received exactly the same peer review as a TNS paper and appear as a special issue of TNS, but this conference is not one of them. Nevertheless, it is a citable reference and can generally be listed in one's publication list under conference proceedings as opposed to peer reviewed publications, which are generally listed separately anyway.
   As far as the the actual paper goes, I read through it and I think it looks fine. In fact, I think it's just what we want to submit in order to later satisfy the 50% different content and self plagiarism rule that Martin mentioned. The 50% rule is an NPSS publication policy (actually more of a guideline...) that was implemented to get around the requirement that IEEE imposed that there cannot be two publications in Xplore with substantially the same content, and it's really up to the Senior Editor (and ultimately the Editor in Chief) to decide whether this criteria is met. I think what is in the paper now will easily allow this to be satisfied with a future publication of our 2018 test beam results. First of all, you nicely summarize the 2016 test beam results which are presumably going to appear soon in TNS, which you would not want to do in the new TNS publication (you would simply cite the reference). Next, you give the EMCAL results for the measurements at the center of a block, but don't give the results for the entire detector because we don't want to show the poor results when we expect the new results from the 2018 test to be much better. Lastly, you show the HCAL and combined EMCA+HCAL results, which are fine as they are, and is really the main point of having the conference record publication in the first place. However, these results will also change with the 2018 test since the Inner HCAL will be different and the EMCAL will also be different. All of this should certainly satisfy the 50% requirement, not to mention the fact that the final TNS paper will presumably be much longer and will include more Monte Carlo results and analysis (similar to our 2016 paper).
     So, I think this paper will be fine to submit to the Conference Record and shouldn't prevent our submitting a more complete paper with the final test beam results at a later time. I view these results and this paper as simply an intermediate step between our 2016 test of the eta=0 prototypes and the final results we hope to have on our large eta prototypes. We will of course have to mention the conference proceedings paper when we submit the new TNS paper and explain the differences, but I don't think that will be a problem. Unfortunately, we now have to jump through all these hoops to get these kinds of papers published, which wasn't true a number if years ago. Actually, NPSS was one of the IEEE Societies that argued against this policy for a long time, but we eventually lost the battle at IEEE. Nevertheless, the editors are very sympathetic to the fact that both the conference proceedings and the full journal publications do have value, but are actually there to serve different purposes.

Cheers,
Craig

 

On 11/15/2017 10:30 PM, Megan Connors wrote:

Hi Martin,

We had discussed at previous calorimeter meetings the publication plans and decided that I would submit proceedings since we will not submit a publication on the 2017 beam test results alone. Instead we want to publish the results from the 2018 prototype which will include improved 2D projective blocks and therefore a hopefully improved energy resolution when the beam position requirement is relaxed. Although we are not writing a 2017 test beam paper we wanted the results publicly documented and therefore planned to submit these proceedings.

However, I was a bit surprised by your statement that it cannot be cited?

I'd also like to know if you worry about a future publication of the 2018 test beam results meeting the 50% rule?

Thanks for raising this issue but I'm curious to see if others such as Craig have comments on this as well.

Best,

-Megan

On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 10:07 PM, Martin Purschke <purschke AT bnl.gov> wrote:
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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Martin L. Purschke, Ph.D.        ;   purschke AT bnl.gov
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