New class of publications that will recognize individual contributions in future experiments

The career advancement of experimental high-energy physicists at universities and research institutes has become harder in the last 10 years due to the large number of authors appearing on each publication within the field. This large number of authors makes it harder to evaluate the individual contribution when comparing with other fields in science.

Collaborations associated with forthcoming LHC experiments are typically several times larger than existing experiments. Thus, if no action is taken, the problem of recognizing individual contributions to experiments will become even more acute.

It is understood that the LHC experiments presently expect that all scientific results using data from these experiments will be published in the name of the full collaboration that is running the experiment.

This new recommendation attempts to address the above issues, while providing a way for fair recognition to the individuals. It is intended to provide a concrete procedure for the period before data taking and outlines the way to be followed thereafter.

1. The editors of scientific journals have been contacted to establish a new class of publications under the name “scientific notes”. These notes will contain results of analyses, detector development and improvements, detector and physics simulations, software, algorithms and data handling. The results presented in these notes will be part of the official results of the experiment and should be quoted, whenever relevant, in official communications or publications of the full collaboration. It is intended that such notes should describe a unique result or methodology as accepted by the collaboration and be of interest to a wider scientific community. It is intended that these notes should be of sufficiently high quality that they count as valid publications, credited to the named authors.

In this spirit, the following requirements are proposed:

• they will be published in the name of the direct authors of the work;
• they will need to be approved and submitted by the collaboration spokesperson;
• they will have to pass a review procedure that will not only involve members of the experiment but also external reviewers;
• they will be part of the public domain. Most preferably, they should also appear in the electronic media.

2. Publications of the full collaboration will normally include the name of the collaboration and the list of participating institutions with a secure reference to the electronic media and in print to the author list (for printed journals, a full author list should appear periodically). This will eliminate the need of printing many pages of names in each publication, while giving recognition to the institutes involved.

3. Publications of the full collaborations and conference presentations given in the name of the collaborations will refer, as far as possible, to the published scientific notes. This will make the publications easier to read and will give the proper credit to the scientific notes (which contain the names of the direct contributors).

4. Publications of the full collaboration are deemed to include:

• articles from the full collaboration in refereed journals;
• proposals and reports submitted to official bodies in the name of the collaboration;
• articles from a very large subgroup (like a subsystem) of the collaboration in official journals.