Call for Information: Publication Policy and General Codes of Conduct for Consortia and Mission Teams

By Randall Smith

Credit: NASA

The AAS “Ethics Process” task force is pulling together some ‘best practice’ documents for consortia and mission teams in regards to Publication Policy and general Codes of Conduct.

In some cases - e.g. Codes of Conduct - there are a number of good examples out there, especially from the Physics world. However, Publication Policies are an area that each group seems to address as ad-hoc; while there are some examples from Physics (e.g. the CERN LHC teams have very detailed policies), those don’t necessarily work for astronomers. The topics that we would expect might be in a publication policy (which might be called a code of conduct, ‘rules of the road’, or a memorandum of understanding) might include:

• The approval process for a paper to be published (or for a project to be started) based on data from the project.
• What is the process for someone to be appointed lead for a specific topic?
• If the data are proprietary, who has access?
• Do all post-docs and grad students of a team member have access?
• What about after post-graduation or post-docs who move on?
• Can relevant outside researchers be involved in specific one-off projects?
• Who is expected to be listed as co-authors, and in what order?
• The decision and approval process for conference talks/presentations
• Rules regarding talking to the press or public
• Enforcement mechanisms for all of the above
• Who decides what a violation is
• What penalties exist?
• Have these mechanisms ever been invoked?

Of particular interest in all cases is anything the team has changed in these agreements because it didn’t work well or areas/topics that worked better than expected. We would also be interested in any personal stories of how well various processes have worked, for either good or bad. These will remain anonymous unless the submitter wishes to be public. The AAS Ethics Task Force, however, has no ability to address complaints, we are merely an advisory body.

The output of this will be a proposed set of ’skeleton’ documents that new teams could use as a starting point. The task force is hoping to have some output ready in time for the January 2021 AAS meeting, where it could be presented to the AAS Strategic Assembly for review.

Submissions can be treated as confidential if desired (although we will need permission from the team lead to use them), and credit will be given to everyone who helps. Table 1 shows the missions/projects compiled thus far; although the observatory/satellite category is well represented, individual instruments and projects are less so, and additional input would be especially welcome there. The coordinator of this effort, Randall Smith, does primarily satellite-based work so there is a bias towards those missions; more ground-based examples would be welcomed.

Table 1: Missions/Projects that have contributed publication policies.

Observatories	Satellites	Instruments	Projects
ACT	COBE	CERN/ATLAS	HST/CLASH
CTA	Hinode	SXG/eRosita	ESO (generally)
LIGO	Hitomi/XRISM	SPP/SWEAP
Vera C. Rubin Telescope (LSST)	IXPE
SDSS	NuSTAR
SKA	SphereX
SPT	TESS

Please send any information to Randall Smith (rsmith at cfa.harvard.edu) with a subject line starting “Publication Policy Project.” Suggestions for other components of a complete publication policy are also welcome, even if they do not come from an existing mission/project.