User Comments

All of the alternatives listed here suffer, to varying degrees, from the same problem, i.e. while trying to improve credit for people particularly active in analysis they reduce credit for people without whose work the analysis would never be possible (with consequences too obvious to need spelling out). HEP is a collaborative effort, and authorship should reflect that. Any attempt to emphasise individuals will quickly result in funding authorities and institutions giving little or no weight to publications in which you are not the individual emphasised, and hence render all work other than physics analysis a form of career suicide. "Balkanising" collaborations into sub-groups is silly - most technical contributions will span multiple groups.

I believe technical notes in practice would not be commonly referenced by "analysis" publications due to length constraints (eg, PRL). Leads to further difficulty with recignition for non-"analysis" (final ntuple/fitting) tasks

Q2: Physics analysis should not be included among Scientific Note (SN) topics: the data used in analyses comes about through the efforts of the entire collaboration and credit should not be given exclusively to the author(s) of the SN. Of course there would be no problem with SNs dealing with analysis techniques (sPlots, e.g.) Q3: Singling out (and thus effectively crediting) 1-2 "contact people" is unnecessarily limiting: in many cases there are more than 2 physicists contributing to a given analysis, how should the contact people be chosen ? One should rather allow up to 10-20 "contact people" (as in the Q6 proposal)

A change of the authorship rules for BaBar collaboration is unnecessary and would have a negative effect for the collaboration.

As a collaborator that has spent much of my time in the experiment doing service (since it was extremely hard to find anyone to take over any service task) I find it important that individuals who do not have the chance to do much of their own analysis are included in the publications.

The BELLE approach is a good model for a large collaboration. It should be supplemented by a mechanism in the collaboration which en- and dis-courages individuals in order to maintain stability, "justice", and funding.

Many people contribute heavily in the construction and commissioning phases of large experiments, often for many years. Many of these people do not go on to do much analysis. Their contribution needs to be acknowleged in the analysis publications, through authorship, because without their work the analyses would not be possible.

Most scientific collaborations have internal review procedures. These reviewers contribute significantly to the quality of the published analyses and thus should be given the opportunity to sign as authors if authorship was restricted to the members of the consortia.

One proposed personal solution to the authorship problem has been the "selected publications" section on the CV. While this allows a scientist to identify their key contributions for the purposeof a job interview, it does not solve the wider problem of broad recognition of contributions to a field. I support the proposals outlined in this survey and suggest that any of these might be better for scientist than many of the current, bland, alphabetical listing of all active collaborators.

It's hard to judge the Alternate Scheme without knowing the details of it. It's such a radical departure from the existing paradigm, that its effectiveness and fairness will depend strongly on the implementation.

The strict organization in physics research groups may be severely discouraging people from doing innovative analyses not covered by current structure.

The current system is perhaps not as bad as it seems, and provides credit on physics publications for people who are crucial to an experiment but who do not participate directly in analyses. For promotions etc. one claims direct participation with certain publications and the letters of reference either back this up or not. I am not opposed to improvements but I am not too unhappy with the current system.

I agree - current systems will need some rethinking before huge collaborations like LHC expts start publishing. I'm someone who normally spends more time on teaching than either analysis or detector work, so I think I am not too biased here. Who will maintain and operate these large detectors if the rewards/recognition in the form of publications strongly favour analysis work? For each of the experiments I've worked on, many (mostly younger) people have been indispensible in the design, prototyping, improvement, maintenance, software, operations of/for the detector. On any experiment, it is easy to identify a group of such people who essentially spend 80% of their time on detectors and operations - often for several years at a time - this expertise takes a while to build up. And the best ones get sucked further away from analysis. These people are often more critical to the success of the experiment than their counterparts who are spending most of their! time on analyses (there will always be more analysers). Currently the publications parts of the reward structure do not discriminate on whether people are predominantly analysers or detector people. Physics results will always be our primary goal, but both the detector and analysis sides of the team efforts are required to make physics discoveries. The best young talented people will perceive better "rewards" for maximizing time spent doing analysis, and will do anything to avoid getting sucked into the bigger and more challenging tasks in detector/software/operations if they want to get a 'next' job. So I hesitate to have the physics working groups etc as basis for author lists. PS the "analysis groups" scenario is really already the case in accelerator physics and astronomy, were we see relatively very few graduate students and young postdocs working on building/designing/improving/running telescopes and accelerators. I would be sad to see particle physics turn the same way. It would probably have a harmful impact on the next generation of particle physics experiments. We'd likely have a very hard time attracting the best of the young and brightest to HEP if it looks like the reward structure favors those who write and run analysis codes for several years - the smartest young kids want to work with the big accelerators, learn and fiddle with new technologies, and will not view 3 years of analysis work , along with a quick and dirty detector 'service' job in HEP as their most attractive option.

In any scheme were the number of authors is limited to a subset of the collaboration, how shall we acknowledge the contribution people (such as Data Quality Group members) who contribute in some way to every analysis?

As with most organization, the success of changes like this will depend on the details of the way things are implemented. But the present authorship system for large collaborations is broken and wasteful, and needs to be changed. In the era of the web, large author lists tied to individual publications can be kept available for those who need to look at them. Otherwise they are ignored, and are even an increasing source of ridicule for our field.

I have been a member of BaBar for 12 years, and SLD for 8 years - have authored 193 papers and 189 conference papers in the last 5 years - written 9 of them, and have reviewed carefully 56.

Funding, career advancement, and recognition within universities, often depend strongly on authorship. It is thus critical to ensure that support physicists (detector, offline, physics tools, etc experts) get sufficient recognition, otherwise it will be hard to persuade anyone to perform this critical role - except a minimum to "pay their dues". Full-time experts are usually the core of detector development. Frequent technical papers are often (correctly) seen as a distraction from development and maintenance of systems that can be too specific to be of interest outside the collaboration. With trustworthy collaborators, the Belle scheme can support any model in an non-contentious way, but still needs guidelines as to what constitutes a reasonable contribution to justify authorship. The Alternative scheme requires support physicists, whose work usually contributes to most groups' analyses, to join an arbitrary analysis working group. There they would be encouraged to concentrate on understanding (and maybe preferentially supporting) that group - rather than acquiring a broad (if less detailed) understanding of the whole collaboration's physics output. Similarly, analysists in one group would have one less incentive to keep abreast of publications in other areas. Perhaps the Alternative scheme could be modified to assign a random subset of papers to support physicists pro-rata with their analysist colleagues. They would be encouraged to give those papers special consideration during the final collaboration-wide review. A similar scheme could be implemented to encourage analysists from different working groups to participate at this stage.

I would suggest that we consider the possibility of permiting large collaborations to form competitive working groups. This would restore some of the checks and redundancy needed for high quality research and give more opportunities for independent innovation.

I haven't read a paper journal of PR, PRD, PL... in years. I read journals online. With electronic publications, there is no longer an incentive to deal with this problem as there is no cost to a large author list. In HEP, we nolonger waste our time fighting over who is a lead author. When a young applicant applies for a job, it is clear from his/her CV and letters when s/he played a leading role in a publication. Usually this can be determined by the authorship of the internal supporting document, but I would not be in favor of "publishing" the internal supprting document as a "Scientific Note". These documents, are relatively unpolished and correctly include intra-collaboration jargon. It would be a waste of time and effort to prepare these documents for a broader audience. As a person who spends much of my available time on analysis, I feel it would be unfair to de-author my colleagues who choose to focus on engineering and operational aspects of an experiment.

Running an experiment even years after commisionng needs a lot of people exspecially for data quality and software development. People who are workign mainly in these areas will not be acknowledge enough in the alternate scheme.

I support the Scientific Notes proposal, but only if these publications do not become a de-facto replacement for traditional publication of the substantive final results of an experiment. They are appropriate for methodology and analysis details, but only as an adjunct to a traditional publication (with a more comprehensive author list).

My favorite authorship option would be the combination of an honour based system ˆ la BELLE within reduced Analysis Working Group.

Q2: Scientific Notes must be refereed like journals, or they have no value beyond "blogs". Q4: It is essential that the "Belle Model" only be applied in a mature experiment. Otherwise, the contributions of those who made the equipment possible are left out by the choice of the wording and message. Q7: Very mixed feelings on the partitioned model. The concern is that the people who make the equipment work on a day-to-day basis ilose movitation to do the dirty work for glory of others.

In BaBar, the BaBar Analysis Documents already play the role of your proposed Scientific Notes. Everyone active in the collaboration knows the authors of a given paper. The problem with limiting authorship is that this would discourage scientific personnel to work on analysis softwares, detector improvements, electronics, etc... Papers could not be published without this critical input.

I hope not to have misunderstood the meaning of this proposal, but let me expose my opinion in what follows. It is an unfortunate evolution of particle physics that experiments have grown so much and require nearly thousands of people to operate, but that is the way it is and is dictated by the complexity of the challenges we address. I think that partitioning authorship and the publication domain would split the community in a way that would not help progress of our field. Namely, the "detector oriented" people would recognize themselves in one area and "analysis oriented" ones in the other and probably PH.D. students will be encouraged to choose between the two. I don't think that anyone that is involved in only one of the two area is really doing Physics. Older people have learnt and worked on both area in smaller experiments and have a deep understanding of all the aspects starting from the real-world detector, moving to simulation and finally to data analysis and understanding of the theory and this has been key to obtain the results that the community has enjoyed so far. Referring now to the message we would like to give to bright joung students and Ph.D. and to that purpose rather than suggesting a splitting of the competence and authorship I would suggest to concentrate on the definition of rules that encourage the sharing of competences between detector and analysis people. Cheers, Mario P.S: I hope not to have been too naive in my discussion

The current HEP convention is definitely far from perfect, and I'd be happy for it to change for the better. The devil is in the details, though. A couple of thoughts: * Author lists shouldn't be exclusive; any member of the collaboration should be able to get their name on the author list of any paper if they feel they've contributed significantly. * The number of non-alphabetically-sorted names at the front of the author list should be small but not fixed and probably not artificially limited.

I agree that there is a serious problem in HEP authorship, but this is a really tough one to solve. I don't think that anyone has come up with a satisfactory solution. One concern is that many of the proposed solutions implicitly equate the production of a paper with the actual physics analysis. The mechanisms designed to reduce the number of authors would therefore exclude people who focus on hardware, operations, calibrations, alignment, software, monitoring, etc. from being authors. Without all of these efforts, it would not be possible to produce any papers. It is well known that these tasks, while critical, are not well rewarded in some collaborations. I think that the Belle approach has merits, but I don't know whether it will actually solves the problem. It will reduce the number of authors, but that number will probably still be very large. It seems like a step in the right direction. The approach of listing two contact people might work, but it could lead to a lot of fighting within collaborations if the contact people have to be decided for each analysis. At the university level, I believe that there will be problems if there is no clear way for appointment and promotion committees to determine whether a person was an author on a paper. Thus, if only two people are listed, it could have negative effects on the viability of HEP groups in unversities.

The problem is some guys only working on analyis, wouldn't like do any service work and would n't let other people people involve in his analysis. If alway these guys' name on the top, obviously not fair. If the HEP is running like a big company, and the people who work on the hardware can get salary and position they deserve, I don't object only the principle author's name in the autor list

There is no _good_ solution to attributing credit related to specific analysis results to individuals or small groups of "primary" analysts. Mny people work very hard in design, construction, operations, and software tools whose intellectual contributions to a physics result often outweigh those of the"primary analyst(s). If we focus rewards upon those who contribute only at the last stage of our scientific enterprise, we will undermine the foundation upon which discoveries are built. This should be our foremost consideration in allocating credit for scientific discoveries.

Reg. Q3: I would support a more compact way to list authors. However, this listing should be of an archival nature, and easily found by a reader of a particular journal without recourse to other non-authoritative sources. It seems to me that this requires it to appear in the journal as often as the list changes and a new paper from the collaboration appears. The proposal to list only two contact people above the collaboration name strikes me as developing a "psuedo-authorship" category, and would distort the allocation of responsibility and credit. I agreed that a "collaboration" could reasonably be the author of papers, but if so, contact people should be duly noted (with addresses) in the footnotes.

I think that the division in groups would be most effective for very large groups and with lots of analyses available (eg LHC experiments). In case of smaller experiments and with less measurements possible (eg neutrino experiments) I think that the current way of having all the collaborators signing the paper is the best way to go.

A mixture of Q3 and Q6 proposals would be optimal: keep a reasonable number of explicit authors (2 is too low) and have the other names accessible from an electronic file. The answer to Q5 depends on the way revised author lists would be handled, eg., by the "Shanghai rating"

Partitioning the collaboration for detector/common software tasks and publications from those subgroups is a good idea. On physics analysis, many people are likely to migrate between different analyses for which one should look into ways to avoid overhead which impede these migrations. There still needs to be provision for major discovery papers to include collaborators contributed to building the experiment.

Having everyone sign all papers makes sense where there is a genuine collective responsibility not only for the design and development of the detector and software, but also its maintenance and the ensemble of physics analyses. Where this is not so - and it may be that all LHC experiments fail to fall into this category because of their size and the partition of responsibilities among groups of institutes (and even nations) - then a scheme of partitioned authorship would make a lot of sense.

The survey does not appear to be an unbiased approach to the question, but rather betrays a certain agenda which even goes beyond the issue of authorship in at least one case (Q7).

I strongly disapprove with the suggestions in Q7 and Q8 because the integrity and cohesion of even a very large collaboration is far more important for its scientific output than other considerations. Any implementation of the type suggested in these questions would generate a huge risk that the collaboration is left in tatters after a few years of data taking and that physics research groups will fight rather than collaborate. We need to learn how to manage the operation of the detectors and the analysis of the LHC data and any changes to standard practice as in the Tevatron experiments should be worked out within the collaborations and not from without.

As long as physics analysis is the main criterion for appointments and promotions it will always be hard to reward effort on detector operations and core software. The current general authorship of all papers doesn't help because no one actually uses it to judge candidates. Instead candidates are asked to nominate papers that are their own work. Conference talks are also used as a guide, so the allocation of these has become vey competitive and controversial. A scheme which reduces authorship of physics papers to those immediately involved in the analysis is long overdue.

I would be strongly against to the idea of listing selected several author names, which in my view will cause huge confusion and unnecessary political battles for sure. The authorship should be fair both to those who contributed in detector construction and maintenance and also to those who contributes in actual physics analysis. The ones who do only physics analysis cannot complain to the fact that a lot of other names will enter to the publication who do not contribute to the actual analysis efforts.(because the data were recorded by the detector, and there were many valuable efforts in making that detector!)

I feel that the proposed "alternate scheme" (Q7 and Q8) moves too far away from the idea that all data and all results belong to the whole collaboration. Especially the idea that "scientists responsible for technical tasks" should be required to join a physics working group in order to be an author is strange - without their expertise and dedication in building, commissioning, calibrating and maintaining the detector there would be no data to analyse in the first place. This contribution to the whole collaboration would be strongly devaluated, which could even lead to a shortage of manpower for these core tasks.

I think that under the "sign-up" model of authorship, the correlation between authors and papers might reflect personality as much as extent of contribution to the paper. I imagine that some people will sign up for all papers; others will be very selective and only sign up for those for which they made a significant contribution. Therefore, I do not think that voluntary signup for authorship necessarily solves any issues that might exist with the current (non-Belle) policies.

I do not understand which PROBLEM we want to solve. Everybody in our field knows very well what the list of authors means when there is a large numbe of participants. Everybody who contributes to an experiment "owns" the data....By discriminating people respect to signatures would produce "distorsions' in the way people, expecially crucial people, participate to the experiment. This is way worse than anything we would try to correct! As for non alphabetical authorship, in the past I have been first author of at least 2 VERY important papers, getting ZERO recognition (but also, not pushing for it!).

Regarding the alternate scheme, fragmenting a collaboration is a bad idea at any level. Regarding the survey as a whole, I think you are missing the point to some degree: the purpose of collaborative authorship is to credit those who are spending time in activities other than data analysis, not to give further credit to those who actually write a given paper (which appears to be the main thrust of the survey). While I support the idea of getting rid of the ridiculously long author list associated with every paper, this should not be achieved by removing collaborators from the list. My personal experience applying for faculty positions was that non-HEP academics (1) do not consider "scientific notes" to be publications, (2) do not understand why I only claim primary-authorship on a very small number of papers and (3) have no idea how I can claim primary authorship on a paper on which I am listed as the 120th author, yet not claim any sort of authorship on a different paper in which I am listed as the 120th author. My "solution" was to list on my CV only the few primary-author papers which I have, plus the large number of internal notes, then argue that these are a more accurate reflection of my activities. Hence, my faculty job, grant applications and recent tenure application rests entirely on the strength of unpublished works.

I do not see any major problems with the existing system. It is pointless printing the full author list for each publication. The collaboration name only should be listed as the author, with a purely electronic list of individual names available for reference.

This "problem" is a very old one, and there will always be some who feel that omitting their colleagues from a paper that they wrote will, somehow, enhance their own reputation, or chance of getting a "better job". The bottom line is, however, that omitting their colleagues, thanks to most of whom the experiment got far enough for their publication anyway, does nothing but omit their colleagues. When it comes to public dissemination of a piece of work, published or otherwise, it is almost always apparent who did it. When it comes to getting a better job, it is always made clear what the candidate did for the collaboration. Though I do see why the present "all-collaboration" authorship policy is imperfect, I think that trying to "mend" something of this complexity will do irrevocable harm to the community. When you introduce into a large collaboration a tier structure in the merits of membership in the way proposed, you introduce an unhealthy atmosphere into the sensibilities of its participants. This is certainly destructive to the solidity of the collaboration. Overall, apart from a possible advantage to publishers, I see no compelling reason for change. I oppose any but the mildest of changes. One other comment: You do not seem to discuss the policy that exists in most large collaborations by which individuals or groups of individuals can, and sometimes do, opt out of authorship. ...Brian Meadows

Q2: I'm not sure whether the 'creation' of a new type of publication is necessary. E.g. NIM or CPC are journals to publish algorithms, analysis strategies or detector developments. Collaborations should focus on proper cross-referencing instead of restricting themselves to publish only in selected journals. Q3: The idea of having the principle authors separated from the collaboration is good, but why restrict to two?! Q4: I like the idea of breaking the automatism to be an author by active sign-up. However, it does not help to identify or credit the principle author. At the end of the day, I would favor any model which separates principle authors, i.e. the persons peforming the analysis and writing the paper, from the bulk of the collaboration. I write this since I find it hard to make this point with the choices of answers to the questions provided. Often, my approval/disapproval is motivated by parts of the questions or their respective formulation. Thanks, niels.meyer@slac.stanford.edu

The phrasing of the questions reveals a preset agenda by the survey writer and makes responding difficult.

In reality I only mention the fact that I have hundreds of publications as a joke, nothing more. In my CV I always put only thoses papers that I worked on directly, since I don't want to look like a fool if anyone asks me something about a particular paper, which I had no chance even to read even though I'm still an "author".

Many of these authorship schemes emphasize the final phase of the experiment, namely the analysis, and can neglect the very important and significant contributions by many, admittedly not most, of the collaboration in preparing and conducting the experiment.

Note that according to new APS ethics guidlines not having read a paper on which you are an author is NOT a legitimate defence. I feel authors should have to ask to be authors and other methods such as requiering authors to read the paper should be imposed to reduce the fraction of collaboration memembers that sign up below Belle's current 50%. Separate publishications on tools and software is the approriate way to acknowledge these invaluable contributions. And if they are willing to read the paper tool developers should feel free to sign as authors on papers that heavily rely on their work.

We need to be very careful about acknowledging past efforts in current papers. The above suggestion seems to try to split up the collaboration in very ad-hoc and inflexible ways. Working groups are of course important, but people overlap with different groups, and there is a dynamic change in groups that must be encouraged. The suggestion is a recipe for continual argument, and will generate alienation and factional infighting. It is a very bad suggestion. Management must also be recognised (in way the Belle does not) as an important continuing contribution.

I agree that the traditional way of handling authorship is less and less effective: the contribution from a single person to a given published work may be very indirect, and this makes more difficult to assess the merit of each, in particularly for young researchers. Notice that this problem was already present at the previous generation of experiments (e.g.: LEP and Tevatron collider experiment). In my opinion, this problem will be facilitated with a proper policy for presentation at conferences etc., and seminars. The option of Scientific Notes, with limited number of authors, may be worth testing. The collaborations would have to establish ways to guarantee quality and proper authorship. The partition in subgroups modeled on specific analysis has various drawbacks. Limiting the participation to very few groups, goes against the possibility to perticipate freely to the activity of the collaboration; while it is clear that in today's large experiment anyone will be able to follow a limited number or working group, it seems to me very bad to limit it according to predefined rules. Also, the scheme mentioned in the proposal above seems to be driven by "specific analyses". I could imagine that being lead by "specific techniques" (being them analysis, or reconstruction, or detector techniques) may be often more meaningful, despite it might be less effective in reducing the number of authors.

We need a way to maintain people doing dirty work for which they will not get any credits (calibration, alignment, noise hunting, data quality,...) I see the danger that giving too much credit to people doing physics analysis might discourage people doing a good service job. These people might restrict their service work to an absolute minimum. This would of course lead to negative implications for the physics outcome. Finally: If it takes 2000 physicists to find the Higgs, then these 2000 people should be on the paper. Why do you want to promote people who just did a couple of root plots?

Authorship procedures should give at least as much credit to the cooks as to the dessert eaters.

In all this how we consider 5 years spent in building testing and commissioning a detector? While building and commissioning a detector other acquired skills and tool for analysis creating a gap that is difficult to fullfill from those heavily involved in hardware. I think that this problem with authorship is raised basically from software guys sitting in an office that don't understand that if they something to analyse is just because somebody like me built the detector!

Interesting survey. I fear that papers with 2000 or more authors could be more a damage than an advantage in a curriculum. Anyway not signing such papers could be even more meaningless.

While it is of course a waste of paper and ink to type 2000 names for a 2-page article, specifying only 2-20 selected names is very inadequate. Firstly, it will lead to an unhealthy competition for a place in the "restricted list", and secondly, very important contributors could get inadvertedly omitted.

what is asked in Q2 is already the current practice, do not understand what is meant by "a new class"

The funding is of most importance, if not crucial, and the participation of the different groups depend on this. Countries with poorer resources may need a bigger support or a better, although honest, justification durring funds appliances. If some points are interesting, it is also important to fight for the maintenance of such a worldwide collaboration and to check for the negative impact that such decisions may bring in the future. The comparison commonly arrives between HEP and other fields. The authorhip policy should be, foremost, uniform within the experimental HEP field with, maybe, the 'participation' of the different funding agencies, but without loosing our independence.

It is a very difficult task to assign properly the authorship. I like te alternate scheme but people from small institutions or frequently changing institution (usually the younger...) may suffuer fromt his mechanism

On Q3: I would support this approach only if the list of authors (beyond the two names of contact persons) is restricted, by one of the methods you suggested, to actual contributors. Otherwise, listing two contact names and including all Collaboration members (approach Q1) in the file, is tantamount to having these two contact persons be the only two recognized authors. On Q6: one major difficulty I see here is how to arbitrate disagreements between candidate authors (who insist to appear in the list of 20), and the judgment of the Collaboration on whether the contribution of a specific individual was sufficient to warrant ‘high-level authorship’. I also think it is essential to list those 20 names separately, but alphabetically within the group of 20, to avoid endless bickering about the order. Conflicts of either kind could lead to bitter disputes and debilitating political games. I had to deal with such a problem once in Babar, when arbitrating whether a specific individual deserved to appear as a knowldgeable contact person in the Publications database. On Q7, Q8: The problems of the traditional approach (Q1) can easily recur here, albeit on a smaller scale. To prevent this, I think it is important to enforce a Belle-like system, whereby no member of the Consortium is an author unless explicitly requesting (and justifying) it.

In my mind, a lot of taks performed in a HEP experiment are very unteresting for individuals but very crutial for the whole collaboration. The people in charge of these common tasks deserve a large aknowledgment of the community which is done at the moment through the collaboration wide author list. To my mind, the alternatives that you suggested do not seem to fulfill that requirement and would result in a crisis to find people getting involved in these common tasks. As an example, think at the large number of people who implement databases solutions for LHC experiments : their work is basicaly to implement for the collaboration external solutions that will make data access and data analysis possible. It is a hard job with no real "breakthrough" in knowledge but it is a major task to be performed by each experiment. During data taking the maintenance of all these functionnality will require some experts do do that almost full time. Their work will inpact in a major way the whole physics results but i think that these people will be disfavoured by any of our new proposals. On one hand, in HEP, as we sign many papers we get a large institutional freedom which is something very important to have new ideas or new concepts to appear, new pluridisciplanary approaches, to have projects with long time constants... I really think it is a very important situation for our community. On the other hand, I don't think that our community organisation is a reason that would explain that somebody's work is not recognised. This recognition is done through the confidence our collaborations put of individuals to manage such or such aspect of the hardware, computing, analysis, coordination,... For me, a solution could be to have peer review in each collaboration (A collaboration board + external reviewers) on its members contributions. Those publications should then be published in an intercollaboration new online journal, a kind of extension of HEP-PH with more technical aspects concerning analysis methods, technical system descriptions, description of new technical solutions developped in the collaboration, etc. These notes should not be restricted to analysis contributions.

ATLAS started to discuss issues of authorship almost two years ago. Before communicating any "spectrum of opinions" to the outside it would be better to push ahead with the internal discussion, elaborate a "majority position" and communicate this position without hiding any major "dissenting opinions". I don't very much belief into an approach standardised across the entire particle physics community. Collaborations have, and should have, a culture of their own.

There are many gray areas, in which a collaboration member does a very small amount of work on a project and gets listed in perpetuity as an author. Some collaboration members in such situations will insist on authorship, while others won't. I see the standard, all-inclusive author list as the most fair and consistent. When it comes time to make publication lists for job-seeking and promotion, it should fall on the applicant to identify those publications to which he or she contributed the most.

I think the current authorship model, while flawed, may well be less flawed than any of the proposals cited above. In any collaboration there are people who carry more than their "fair share" of the responsibilities for construction, operation and maintenance of the detector. These people inevitably have less time to spend on the physics analysis which is the ultimate goal of the experiment. Any new authorship model needs to carefully address this. If someone does an analysis that relies crucuially on the very good resolution of some detector component that another group spent years designing and building, then who has made the most important contribution to that paper ? You can say that the people responsible for the detector design and construction can "opt in" as authors (in some of the models), but they might not always do so (there are many different personalities in the field) even if they should. I most strongly disagree with the idea that two names should appear at the top of the paper; there are often more than two people intimately involved in an analysis. The scenario where 10 or 20 are listed seems like it has more promise, but there is not going to be room to include all the people who built the detector there. So I have my qualms about that model as well. You can argue that they will be listed on the relevant detector papers published in NIM, but I don't feel that this is really adequate. Most of the people who build detectors do so because they want to do the physics. To potentially marginalize their years of effort by relegating them to "second-class" authorship is a mistake I believe the field cannot afford to make. It is difficult to see to what degree the scenarios outlined above attempt to address these issues. What is meant for instance, in Q8, by "and to others who have contributed directly..." what do you consider a direct contribution ? This is really not clearly stated, so I think that the interpretation of the replies to these questions will be rather difficult. I think that each of the questions should either be more clearly stated, or should come with its own comment box. To state one example, the Belle model seems to make sense, but relies to a large extent on an honor system that will not be adopted by everyone (or, rather, each person will have their own interpretation of what is meant by a contribution).

Authorship lists must give fair credit to the many years of scientific effort that is required to plan, design, build, commission and collect the data that is finally analysed and published.

What to do with the countries where financing is direct result of the number of scientific papers ?

One must first reach an agreement on and clearly define the purpose of the author list before it will be possible to reach a consensus on an alternative way to publish authors. Is the purpose of the author list to give credit to people for their work, is it to satisfy funding agency requirements, is it to provide useful information to the reader, etc.? Could separate functions be served by different sections of a paper? Perhaps in the end the author list is an obsolete concept and should be eliminated in favor of new sections such as scientific cerdits, contacts, editors, etc.

I am concerned that all the work needed to finiss LHC detectors, commision them, calibrate them, mainatin them, develop and understand trigger etc etc. Will be discouraged by your scheme. It seems that only the activity of physics groups would be rewarded with publications.

In Q2, I miss the huge class of people who build the detector and readout electronics. Remember, without the hardware (detector and electronics), there is no experiment and no measurement. Remember, data analysis is the very last step, not the only step, towards a publication. Please DO NOT mislead young physicists and turn them into only "piano players". We need real physicists who start from the detector design, construction, electronics design, construction and then data analyses.

A large fraction of the published Scientific Notes have the level of internal notes, without any specific personal contributions.

Experimental physics requires a detector as well as analysis of the measurements made by the detector. To partition authorship on the basis of physics analysis alone demeans the efforts of those individuals who perhaps spent many years to design and construct part of the detector. Indeed, many of the so-called software developers and analysis experts would be hard-pressed to design and construct any part of the detector needed to perform the measurements.

The system is flawed because the person doing the analysis is just the end of the productive chain. The waiter never gets any credit in a good restaurant, the chef and its crew does. As long in these large collaborations the people designing and building the detector, developping and testing the software get no or little credit, then the problem is there. Are you ready to put a minimum time served cutoff to any member to become an author ? For example a minimum of 3 years actively served in the collaboration will eliminate 60% of the 'last moment' analysis authors. Also this will motivate members to stay longer in the experiment and get involved earlier.

I think particle physics shoud simply realize that the number of publications is NOT a figure of merit regarding the quality of individuls. I strongly encourage publishing with only th enam eof the collaboration and have a bi-annual update of the large collaborations is the Particle Data Booklet. Saves paper and does justice to the realities of particle physics. Sad but true. I consider this enquete not too good. To much text and afraid to address the eral issue: publications not a way to assess individual excellence.

Conditions in different experiments are too different to establish a general recommendation which fits for everybody. Groups with several tens, hundreds or thousands of authors cannot be recommended the same thing!

All the people in th ecollaboration must be in the author list until and unless they specifically ask there names to be excluded or like Belle there is a system which allow people to choose whether they want to be author of the particular analysis or not. Otherwise some group of people have no right to judge the others for them to be author or not. As every one is participating in the running of the experiment equally and this also helps the collaboration to get the funding from the funding agency by any means.

Working in OPAL, I found very effective the organization of physics research into operative working groups BUT the great success of such organization was also due to complete freedom of every individual to join and contribute to whatever working group. The alternate scheme - especially when used as a rule to establish authorship - looks worrying when a commettee, made of Institutes with different political strenght, supervises the sharing of human resources between the different working groups (and, as a result, decides who signs what).

One could list the names mentioned in Q6 on the front page, and keep the full author list elsewhere. Giving proper credit to those specializing in detector construction remains a big problem.

Alphabetical order is the best way to avoid long-lasting internal fights and the phenomena of EPP ("End of Pipe Physicist"). First: we are doing physics for the physics and not the glory. Second: if you really wants to know if somebody is good or not, just ask around! Trying to do that with HEP autorship list will lead to nowhere, because to political.

Just starting a PhD, I am concerned that any contribution I might make in the future will be swamped by the enormous number of names listed in authorship lists. However, I know that my work would be impossible to do without the efforts of thousands of others who have been working on this for many years. So, the most sensible thing to do would seem to pick out the greatest contributers to a given paper or article, whilst still acknowledging the rest of the collaboration.

The present approach to authorship is certainly unwieldy. The proposals here for restricting authorship inevitably lead to drawing lines in a continuum of levels of contribution. If collaborations retain control corporately over the publication of results, the whole collaboration will need to sign, with the opportunity to opt out. Publication with fewer names would imply that only that smaller group is responsible and accountable for those results. This could come about if the detector and its collaboration are operated as a facility and smaller groups have the opportunity to carry out analyses without close oversight and control by the detector collaboration. The smaller group would then have ownership of the results and would sign the paper.

In fact, I would split Q5 in two - as the reduction in the number of publications may differently affect myself (e.g. no any negative effect) and my group (may lead to reduction of the financial support)

Exceptions should be made to ensure proper credit for graduate students when a paper is substatially based on a PhD dissertation.

A simple question is... would the person (or small group)who did the analysis be able to construct the detector and write all necessary detector software in a couple of year (time took to finish the analysis)? If the answer is no, then the author list has to be broad.

While I don't have strong reactions to the proposals, I do think it's a fairly serious problem for the field. 2000 authors is nonsense.

People may spend years (10-15) building a detector like ATLAS. In the past, 'owning' the detector meant owning all the results. With current practice and necessity, someone who has done no construction could, under some policies, author more papers than someone who has made this possible. Does not seem reasonable. While the HEP practice of listing all authors is cumbersome, like democracy it is better than any alternative.

I would like to have a way in which people who contributed most are credited rightfully. Meanwhile, I believe it is important to recognize the fact that there are so many little things that researchers do within the collaboration which could be very time-consuming and at the end prove to be not the way to deal with a problem but at the same are valuable. I would not like to see those efforts completely forgotten. The simplest things are taking the shifts for running the experiment. almost everyone, one way or the other, participate in that and it is very important. It is not the most important, but at the very least the time spent on the shifts collecting data contributes to reducing the statistical uncertainties. Other examples are the validation efforts by many people, as simple as checking their own analysis against any changes, which directly facilitate the analysis of many others as well. Given all that, I am not clear what should be the right strategy. It might be useful to follow the method used by Bell, at the same time for the people who have some contributions similar to what I mentioned above, what would be the case? I know it is each person's discretion, but what is the level of difference here? Will it be fair to everyone, when it comes the time of looking into the publications? I am not clear on that!

This is a serious problem in HEP, people do not get the credit they deserve and vice versa. Within the field, we rely on "word of mouth" to communicate who did what since the author lists are meaningless and this can (is) sometimes distorted by whose mouth the words are coming from. Outside the field, this mechanism doesn't work and our colleagues are quite unsure of what it is that we actually do as individuals. If we do not address this problem in the LHC era, the consequences for the longevity and vitality of the field will be dire.

percentage of time should have a teaching box. Automatic authorship like in CDF is not sustainable for the LHC era. The majority of CDF authors has not read the paper of even know od its existence! Every author should acknowledge that he/she's read the paper and agrees with the contents.

It seems that this debate is always driven by the set of people who devote 100% of their time to detector operations. No one wants to upset them because they are so vital. However, I would argue that they are not balanced physicists. Encouraging them to join a smaller physics research group would be beneficial to them and would make them better balanced. Also, if they are contributing to a detector system that is used in an analysis, it is likely that they would be able to more easily diagnose detector problems that people may see in their analysis. Having the 100% detector folks be in physics research groups therefore accomplishes several things: 1) Cuts them down to ~80% detector folks 2) Allows them to contribute to physics and become more balanced physicist 3) Provides their expertise in physics group meetings

The "analysis" is only the final product of all the efforts people made including building detectors, operation on data taking, technical issue on software or data production. The analysis is probably the easiest part of the work. If any other part is missing, I don't believe any physics results can be yielded and published. Also many young people spend almost 100% of their first 1-2 year working on operation or technical group. This new schem is actually discouraging people on spending time working for that. For ex, a professor can just refuse unnecessary work to their grads or postdoc and ask them to do "physics" 100% if possible.

Let me add that a subdivision of the collaboration in subgroups signing their own papers (or sort of) would certanly impact the physics interests of young collaborators at least. Personally I would never do again "low profile" physics like exotics or search for possible deviation of the SM, but I'd join the most "hot" analysis to have my signature on those important papers. In other words in the "old way" I choose the area to give my contributions based on my interests and personal taste, with the new scheme I would go for the most important and relevant topics for sure.

Discussion of this topic tends to conflate two questions: how "authorship" should be reported, and how credit should be assigned. Maybe the current difficulties are partly due to trying to answer these questions together. It's long been known that formal authorship is a clumsy tool for recognising "support" work, even of a very inventive kind, by physicists in collaborations. Dividing collaborations into a number of "consortia" does nothing to get around this; nor does the Belle policy. I'd propose more attention be given to determining how faculty appointment committees and grant-awarding bodies in fact reach their decisions; one could then ask how best to keep those decisions well-informed. This could involve mechanisms quite separate from the author-list and its derivatives.

HEP, particularly experimental HEP have to be done by a large groups of people. Any publication is based on the effort of the whole collaboration, detector building, maintainance, DAQ, event reconstruction and analysis software, .... Asigning credit to the significant and effective contributors is somewhat alien to this field. Alos it will be difficult as any sigle analysis will depend on quite a few people and any attempt in ordering them by their contributions in that paper will be tough if not subjective. As we know the authors list even in papers by 2-3 people from table top experiments does not necessarily reflect the authors' contribution. Trying to do that in experimental HEP will be even more difficult if not disastrous. We may take the Belle model and ask people to sign up each paper. We are probalbly being unduly influenced by other subjects, where papers generally have a few authors and assigning credit is straightforward. Restricting authorship is needed, many people in HEP collaborations don't contribute in any form other than lengthening the meetings, but the cure should not kill the patient.

In my opinion, there is a very dangerous tendency in our field to promote managers, not scientists. All people in our field are relatively smart and capable, however, when the choice has to be made between two capable persons, most of the time it's managerial skills, not the originality or/and creative thinking that are chosen. This is especially so inside any large collaboration but less so at the universities, when a person is promoted. It's a complicated subject, of course, and I am not even 100% sure I am communicating my point here. Anyway, the bottom line is that 1) the persons or people who came up with the idea and actually worked on the analysis should be listed as the first authors 2) people like analysis coordinator, physics coordinator, and other "officers" should not be among these people unless they actually worked on particular analysis 3) there should be as small number of administrative levels in a large collaboration as possible.

I think the practice of optional first/second (and maybe up to 5 (or maybe even more) authors for execptional analyses) is a good way of indicating the contact persons for each analysis. However, I am not certain it would be beneficial to the experiment, if hardware specialised members are 'forced' to join an analysis group. Although I see problems for future experiments with 2000 collaborators.

It is important to have the same approach in all collaborations. Otherwise there is a risk to get a bias in estimates of scientific activity based on citations which are often used by funding agencies.

I believe that alternative scheme of 10-15 authors does not really improve the situation, I suppose that all authors from third on would have to be listed in alphabetical order anyway. Having paper with only 1-3 authors makes a difference in recognition of those who did the main part, but it does not recognise the neccessary work of all (detector related) and it can strongly affect the funding. Therefore I favour a scheme with first author(s) to be the one who is recognised for the work he did on this particular analysis and the rest listed this way or another for the acknowledgement of their contribution.

Scientists of institutes that have not contributed to the detector itself should not become authors in the first 5 years of data taking. (which is the effective time to design and contruct a detector). In the first five years these scientist can perform service tasks (shifts, management, software maintanance) to acquire authorship. For young physisists (Phd students, post-docs) this period shall be shortened to 2 years.

The current publishing practise in big HEP experiments is certainly not optimal. But the "opt-in/opt-out" or other schemes to the reduce the number of authors on a paper will deeply affect the nature of the collaborations as we know them. For example, I am working on the construction of the ATLAS silicon tracker at NIKHEF, counting on the fact that my work will be acknowledged by my name on the ATLAS papers. With a new publishing scheme I would immediately "drop my screwdriver" and start making ntuples. I would certainly not contribute to any maintenance or day-to-day operations of the silicon detector.

Another suggestion: Only a small number of scientists who made the analysis will be signed on the paper in a non-alphabetic order, while all other members of the collaboration will be written in alphabetic order below them or in a web page.

It is difficult to ascertain the contribution of each person and I don't think a "best" method exists. For example, hardware physicists, which have thought, built the detector and make it run, usually don't do analisys. So they don't contribuite in the final step to publication, but their contribution to the overall result is very far from zero. How to deal with it? I think that the final result is not only merit of the last (few) persons who made the analysis, but of a larger ensamble, which is often difficult to circumscribe clearly.

The new regulations on the policy of the publication of the scintific works must be accepted step by step. We have to consider the objections and reactions of funding agencies.

The Belle approach is one way to encourage that eligleble authors have to acknowledge they have in fact read the paper they sign off on. This is close to an idea that I jokeingly have proposed, namely that before submission of each paper a quiz is send to the collaboration (with all answers in the paper), and only those you get 8/10 would be on the final list. Jokes aside, in larger collaboration (I am not in a very large) people contribute quite differently, some though technical skills (operating experiment, having build the experiment, developing it). Without these people there would not be scientific output, and having subgroups taking sole credit for some research is not fair. On the other hand ones the primary data have been published any subgroup can write additional papers exploring the primary data further. I think it is important to have this discussion in the community, since it is in fact difficult to recognize the many people who contribute much to papers. This is why the ascheme in Q6 is worth discussing.

I do not like the way some questions are asked, as I cannot answer them in an intelligent way: for instance Q1: I think that alphabetical order is the best way to publish (so I should say strongly approve), but this has nothing to do with whether it is the best way to give credit to people who worked most on a given publication, obviously this says nothing on this specific point (so I should say stronlgy disapprove). Several questions make me feel uneasy about how to answer ... I gave it a try but I am not sure my specific answers will be interpreted correctly ....

I fear for the coherence of a collaboration when it is split up as a consortium. Also "discovery" papers would not be signed by the whole collaboration, which I strongly disapprove: the work even in less trendy working groups is necessary to achieve these discoveries. I think the principal authors of a analysis get credit and recognition in our field by other means than being first on an author list and we should avoid to loose time and energy in determining who should be first on a list of authors. Not to mention, that also analysis results are most of the time due to a group effort and not a single person and therefore iherently injustice would always be done. To have only 2 contact person printed is valid in my point of view if these contact persons are the spokes persons of an experiment. I don't think the Belle initiative is going in the right direction: a collaboration should approve its results in total and be responsible for them in total.

You seem make too many assumptions about how different collaborations are organised.

at last some common sense! thank you for your efforts! a case in point: for funding purposes at my local institution I'm obliged to sign up for as many papers as possible, and although I do my best to contribute, I feel deeply uncomfortable about authoring many papers where my role is at best minor and often negligible. I also think the huge author lists are a grotesque waste of space which could otherwise be used for displaying physics, though this is becoming less relevant with the web.

What does permanent untenured mean?

In using the 'alternate scheme' some attention should be taken to the possibility that a detector/physics consortium even with hard work of their members may not achieve the results expected at the time of experiment design due to unpredictable factors and might be strongly affected with respect to other consortia in the collaboration.

Missing from the above statements about the way in which the Belle collaboration authorship policy works is that the burden is placed on those who would like to be an author to do something (rather than just being included because one is a sentient being) and that one actually endorses a statement indicating that they have read and agree with the conclusions of the paper.

We severely penalize our students for plagiarism but countenance the listing of persons who haven't even read a paper as authors. Is this hypocrisy or what?

I personal think the preset policies of Belle publication serve good enough.

Somebody having pass most of the time building/running/maintaining detectors would not be part of a physics research group due to an obvious lack of time. Without the great hardware work of many, physics would not be possible !

In my view the current Belle practice is only halfway there. I think that potential authors should be required to prove that they have provided significant input into the development of a paper, or be supported by the primary author(s). Service tasks, such as detector work or data collection shifts should be considered as requirements for being able to acess the experimental data, not requirements for being an eligible author - as there are seen currently.

The new scheme may work in theory better than in practice...

I am currently experiencing problems because I took authorship confirmation very seriously, and declined authorship to most BELLE papers since I felt I haven't contributed enough. The current BELLE authorship confirmation scheme is certainly a step in the right direction, but as long as the pure number of publications is taken as a measure of scientific quality when it comes to decisions about (further) employment, one is tempted to confirm authorship although one hasn't really contributed to the paper (in my opinion, just reading a paper and agreeing with its result does not justify authorship). I think membership in a collaboration, and authorship of a specific paper should be handled as totally separate issues - there should be an official record at some neutral place (e.g. spires) about people contributing to a collaboration (giving credits to their specific work). In such a database it would be still possible to list all papers somebody has contributed to! by being part of a collaboration (this could be very interesting information in case of e.g. technicians), if one wants to get this kind of information. Papers, however, should really be signed only by those who directly contributed to it (main authors first, then internal referees and others who contributed to the discussion, like (active) members of the working group); otherwise, only the collaboration should be named (giving credit to all the people which made the analysis possible in the first place). If there is a good and widely accepted new system to give credit in large collaborations, I am sure this will take away pressure to sign papers one hasn't really contributed to, and on the other hand it will be easier to assess scientists. Thus the establishment of this working group is a very good idea, and should be supported by everybody very strongly.

I think the authorship scheme can be different collaboration-by-collaboration and there is no need to unify it in the HEP community.

There is a question of whether to emphasize specific analysis contributions to a physics paper, or how it came to be. Experiment is an enterprise, so how do we establish credible reward system? Clearly the most knowledgeable (often the coordinators), and especially those who directly worked on the subject, should be those to be contacted for scientific discussion. But "contribution" to the scientific effort is a complex thing. Accelerator? Experiment as a whole, and parcel (leadership within experiment)? Training and logistics (esp. bringing in capable and trainable people)? Finding and identifying topics, and finding and identifying the people (coordinators as well as home group leaders)? Drumming up morale? Long and short, the analogy is like doing battle (except, thanks goodness, no bloodshed). There are frontline, foxhole battles. There are company level battles. There is also the "big picture" battlefield. Which one do we emphasize in giving credit for a scientific, experimental, paper?

I think the Belle authorship policy is the best compromise between the standard HEP practice and the acknowledgement of the individuals who really did the work. At the same time, it keeps a lot of flexibility for those who really need publications for their founding agencies etc.

Listing too many authors for a paper makes each "author" feel less responsible for any mistakes that may creep into the paper. The problem with the Belle system is that conscientious people may avoid signing papers despite spending significant time on service work, while less conscientious people are free to sign every paper even if they haven't contributed in any way to the analysis or done any service work. A better system would be to list as authors those people who contributed directly to the paper, and list everyone else under the heading, "and the X Collaboration".

I think that it is effective enough to put the most contributing one (or ones) as the first author (or authors) in front of others arranging alphabetically. It is better to keep the names of the whole collaboration, in order to reflect the scale of the experiment.

Mechanism of the alternate proposal sounds fine, but real problem is how (with what criteria) people are assigned (sign up) to each working group, and how the assignment is optimized. That is why I rated "neutral" for now.

The major issue in this discussion is, to my mind, the way authorship practices in HEP are viewed by physicists in other fields of physics and funding agencies. It is in peer review processes involving panels outside of the field where problems arise, and HEP authorship practices are viewed with bewilderment or derision. Within the field the rules are understood and other means than authorship are generally considered when evaluating individuals.

The current system is far from perfect. But the nature of HEP, it's size, cost, time scales etc. makes it inevitable that there will be a lot of specialization. If we are to get all of the work that must be done, done, it is often impossible for people to work on all parts of the process. Trying to define only that part of the process which results in the final paper, the analysis, as being somehow "better" than the rest will and has only created severe injustice, bad feelings and the loss of very good people from the field. ALL of these proposals try in one way or another to define the final analysis stage as being somehow the only part that is "doing physics" and therefore worth recognition.

Make the authors recorded in alphabetical order in a file accessible electronically and make this gain in space in paper for more scientific results. It is hard to exclude somone from a list, since some people (for instance those who spend day and night in the control room trying to improve data taking efficiency) are more useful than other but they don't necessarly contribute to papers directly (even some don't care at all).

The categories are missing something like "software development/algorithms", therefore finally acknowledging the fact that there is more to particle physics than hardware and analysis.

Not sure that establishing smaller physics research groups will effectively reward people who spend most of their time on detector hardware and software.

Everyone working on an LHC experiment is doing so because of discovery potential. It is critical that those who do the work of making the data useable be on at least the same footing as those who did the final analysis steps. Would you imagine the root jockeys would object if certain publications were strictly reserved for those doing "service" work?

One of the most important issue is that the person who only take experimental shifts and do not do any task can be a author.

Questions are extremely leading, appearing to reflect the biases of the survey authors.

Another idea: Have 10 or so primary authors, in alphabetical order, with two indicated as primary contacts. All others who worked on components of the analysis get cited in movie-like credits (either at the beginning or the end). For example: Specific analysis code: John Doe, Kathy Smith Software framework: Xu Calman, Susan Muson, Ben Tracker, ... Detector operations: Kazu Monitor, Bill Runcoor, Keith Shifter, Betty Triggermeistresse, ... Detector construction and commissioning: Bob Builder, Q.T.O.Kay, Dan Solder, ... ... and so on

I do think that the current system is skewed. For instance people who focus almost entirely on electronics work are guaranteed to be on all D0 analysis papers while those who contribuite in other ways such as actually writing a paper, studying the data, debugging software, etc are shunned if they don't do enough electronics work and can't get on the author list. Some of the proposals above would mediate this because they would associate people with a given physics group and author status wouldn't be determined just by how much electronics work a person does. However, this has to be balanced with the fact that scientists in other disciplines of physics are able to release papers at a much higher rate due to the lack of so much peer review and waiting for data. So in some sense I think there has to be either some amount of 'over attribution' of authorship _or_ more lenient standards which would allow people to publish papers which are not reviewed for months! and maybe focus on very specific aspects of their research.

The last proposal, in particular, would make it very difficult to get the "scutt work" done. There is *NEVER* a time when "the most common software and calibration procedures" are completed. We are continually refining them. Yes, the main parts are done. But there is no less work needed on the 10th iteration than the 1st.

The partitioning of a collaboration into smaller physics research groups for attribution can only lead to political fiefdoms and in the end only limit the amount of cooperation that can occur collaboration-wide.

Doesn't HEP have more important problems to worry about than the size of the authorlist? Political, funding, people, outreach?

I find that a ridicoulous big fuss is made about a non-problem. Within experimental HEP, we know how to deal with long authorlists. Our field faces more pressing problem, such as standing and competing with other fields of science, both for funding and person power. Work on those problems is hugely more important than micro-managing the authorlists.

One option to resolve some of the HEP authorship issues is to repeat what has happened ~40 years ago when accelerator and experimental physics teams "split". Have team (collaboration) which is designing/building/operating detector and another team(s) (collaboration(s)) which are doing physics analysis. This is similar to some of astrophysics experiments as well. It might not be as easy split as between experimental physics and accelerator physics, but it would potentially create less problems and be more efficient for the final physics results then deviding single collaboration into "consortia".

Considering large collaborations, I find the current practise for authorship still the best one. It's absolutely true that no physics result would be possible without the effort of everybody, in particular people who built/maintain and run the detector, or people who wrote/write and maintain the common/detector software. I think these people should get the SAME credit as the ones analysing data. This is a principle declaration, but not only. I think that it would not work in any other way: who would do the enormous amount of basic work if only physics analyses gave credits? Full professors at the end of their career, without any need of further credits? The responsability for technical tasks is usually a full time job, normally much harder than a physics analysis. Subdividing a collaboration in consortia would simply reproduce the problem at a smaller scale. I think that voluntary sign-up is also not a good idea because if someone starts not signing should instead better consider of leaving the collaboration. I think this is probably the main problem: authorship should be better revised, mainly be the group leaders but also by special collaboration committees. Too many authors do not really contribute, they are just numbers for the funding agencies. Or if they contributed they do not stop signing at the right time. How to give more credit to all people who really work still remains the problem, I think in particular for those guys mainly involved in technical tasks. A possible solution are the Scientific Notes, if they do not become personal publications of physics results, which would not be correct. Maybe these notes could replace conference proceedings. Another possible solution is a clearly defined rotation of the technical responsabilities or, better to say, of the physics working group responsabilities, to avoid people making only 'physics' for years and others only doing basic work. Still the principle remains: a physics result out of a big experiment only comes with the contribution of everybody, who really contributed to the experiment!

The questions about the current practise at Bele are poorly worded. The clearest issue is whether authorship should be an active, rather than passive, exercise. I strongly feel that members of the collaboration who wish to sign a particular paper should be willing to actively do so (while no-one is forced to do so - or to not do so). With regard to "first authorship," the number of first authors should be small; restricted to those who have *really* *done* the analysis. I think that deep down, everyone knows what is meant by this. The list should not extend to those who have been involved in a supervisory capacity. In the usual case (but not always), first authors will be students and/or post-docs. The alternate scheme proposed is truly appalling. Any scheme which aims to limit the scientific activity of physicists (by restricting them to "one, in some cases two and in exceptional cases more working groups", is fundamentally flawed. Finally, we should not be scared of the simple fact that we have very long lists of authors, since many people's work is necessary to allow publishable results.

Dropping the number of publications to a few per year (vs. 10 per year) would have little effect on support. Dropping to zero per year would have an effect.

I think the author list should include only those people who directly contributed to the work being reported and can answer detailed questions about it. The collaboration web site can recognize contributions made to various aspects of the experiment.

The person who made a histogram has not contributed "more" to a physics result than the person who built the silicon tracking detector. They all should be authors, on all papers, in alphabetical order.

As a physicist if I spend 100% of my time for 10 years designing and building important parts of detectors, and do not get time to do a simulatoin or physics analysis, is my impact zero? this is insulting. People would not be able to get their data, if not for my valuable contribution. Are physicists only defined by the final analysis? In that case follow the NASA model. Make the data public to the rest of the world and let them analyze. Why do I want only people in my collbaoration who can work out of root-tuples, making plots which a theorist suggested anyway. What an easy way to get a publication. Stand on the backs of people who make the detectors for you, rely on the theorists to tell you how to extract the signal (which variables to plot) and then you publish a paper in your name. That would ba a shame for the field.

Comments on various questions: Q2: Already available as Internal Notes, Scientific Notes could be the long publication, instead many times only letters are now written Q3: Might be good, but could imagine that a student or postdoc does most of the work but an unscrupulous (more senior) supervisor/professor(s) may put their name first so having just two names may not be just. Q4: Initially thought this was good, but unscrupulous authors may add their name to every paper anyway so it does not help in identifying credit. Also if an author is missing you do not know if the author thought they did not contribute enough, or that they actually disagreed with the published results. Q7: Already the (non-really-top) students and postdocs are too specialized and only know about their particular subtopic. I find they could greatly benefit from knowing a lot more outside their little study. Further splitting could just make this worse where researchers do not find out about the best techniques as a huge collaboration will end up generating competition within the collaboration instead of all working together to get the best physics. Also I heard of about one group convener who got to talk to all the contacts, e.g. with theorists, but kept his own secret physics topics list and did not share it with his working group. Q8: Cannot really generalize like this. Sometimes a short discussion with someone outside the group, or a piece of code written by someone outside the group (or use of piece of hardware) could make a very significant difference in the physics result. Also see last point. Last comment. Although I agree that the current authorship practice is not optimal and probably could be improved with changes. Any implemented change may not necessarily end up being an improvement. There is a real potential to set up a framework where it takes more time to decide on the authorship of a paper than to do the analysis itself! Currently, if needed (e.g. for someone interviewing for a job), one can establish fairly well a person's contribution by talking to the set of people within the collaboration. What is missing is a quick and easy way to gauge this from a paper. You cannot necessarily get this from just an author list (which is the assumption in this survey). Collaborations could put in a section in each paper summerizing who actually did what. This could include listing (e.g. via codes) of what hardware/software was crucial to the analysis.

If you only list people who do the physics analysis on the paper, then who will waste their time on service work, such as: prepare comom sample data, hardware maintance?

The current practice is best. For most of D0 RUN I, I had significant responsibilities for the detector and software. This precluded me from taking as big a role in physics analysis as I would have liked but I rightly felt that the best way to contribute was by making sure that the information being used by the analyses was the best it could be. Many of those who were very active in the analysis were relative newcomers. That was sensible, but one needed to give proper credit for those who nominally did "less" on the analyses. The only fair way is to inlcude everyone alphabetically.

It is hard to give definitive answers without seeing how such a system works in practice. CLEO's system (with randomization of first-listed institutions) is not perfect but I have found it satisfactory.

I believe the best way to allocate proper credit is to have final result papers signed by the name of the collaboration giving 2 contact people + references in the paper to all the relevant scientific notes. It should be understood that contact people are not singled out for special credit.

Various of these propositiond seems fine to me if each physicist contributes to an analysis : it allow indeed to reward the people who effectively made most of the analysis. However this will discourage people working strongly on software and operation tasks which could (should) be in large collaboration full time job. This part of the job is in my point of view already not popular enough because it is always more rewarding to do an analysis even if of course this work lead to puplication results of greater quality.

I believe that Belle/CDF practice is the way to go. It doesn't break any of long-term traditions and at the same time allows to avoid shameful situation when an author of a paper have absolutely no clue about its existence or couldn't answer any questions about the content.

Listing all members as authors does not make justice to all members. The number of articles signed by a member should reflect that member participation and contribution to the whole effort. This way, a member would be granted a certain number of papers according to the risponsibilities taken by that member. The number of papers that would be granted to a member should be previously defined and agreed when the member declares his/her dedication to the collaboration. Some, of course, will sign all the papers, some will sign 2 or 3 a year, others 4, 5, and so on. An authorlist with hundred of authors (or thousands as is expected for the LHC) becomes meaningless and ends up affecting the evaluation physicists have from their institutions and funding agencies.

Scientific notes sound in many ways to be the sorts of publications that are already available to us but which are not frequently taken advantage of. A publication that "details a specific analysis" sounds like a PRD! Simulation publications can go in Computing in Physics Research (or something like that - I can't quite recall). Same for algorithms. If these aren't "real" publications, how will they matter for, e.g., promotion and tenure. Within the field may be one thing, but as soon as you go out of the field, they would require endless explanation and would probably be dismissed by most people.

I feel a bit of a pull in two directions here. On one hand having hundreds (or thousands in the case of the LHC experiments) authors on a paper seems absurd. In reality, only a few people on the list had anything to do with the direct analysis or understand the analysis in all its detail. So it seems like a logical choice to put the authors who are most strongly involved in the analysis at the top of the paper. On the other hand, i feel as though this would only encourage an all to common phenomenon in experimental HEP. While some toil away making the detector function properly, develop reconstruction software, designing triggers, and write firmware for readout electronics others seem content to float through on the work of others and simply do analysis. Although this is of course the ultimate goal of the experiment, it is not possible without all of the above properly functioning and supported. If HEP were to take this route I fear that this would only make the problem worse, encouraging people to do as little "service" work as possible - often closely tied with their specific analysis - and to ignore the underlying components which make the experiment possible. If we were to develop such a rule, I think we would also need to have much stricter rules to individual service contributions.

Voluntary sign up is a laudable idea, but will not work in the limit in which would penalise "honest" people effectively signing-up for a subset of the collaboration's publications when compared with other "less honest" authors. This is amplified in those cases when promotion/hiring/review are held in front of committees which tend to "weight the amount of produced paper"

I believe the current D0 practice renders authorship almost meaningless. The Belle approach is a big improvement, but it seems that it doesn't go far enough. Of course Belle is a much smaller collaboration than D0, so it may play out differently. The notion of a scientific note sounds potentially interesting, but it is not clear how it would differ from a D0 note. Would there be any sort of peer review process? The very limited authorship options (either two contacts or the top 10-20) is the most promising, but of course there needs to be a way of crediting the vast amount of service work that people put in. Perhaps we should try to encourage the publication of more limited authorship NIM papers. The notion of partitioning the collaboration is interesting, but I have am concerned that it could create a cliquish and poisonous atmosphere in the collaboration.

I find the proposals in this survey so immature as to raise questions about their true intents. I can see where the suggestions are coming from, and it is unfortunate that those who stand to lose are also the ones that are less likely to voice their opinions. How do propose to partition a large collaboration into smaller physics groups? Even within a collaboration, where it is imperative to do this for reasons of practicality, it is causing all sorts of problems. Many pieces of work, including analyses, span across physics groups. Under the proposed modifications, those that are skimming off the top will exploit the rest even more.

Much depends on the details of execution. I don't feel particularly trusting that the field's hierarchy would produce a fair or sensible execution plan for determining authorship in a different way.

I tend to have an alphabetical list of primary authors, with an electronic link to the full author list/collaboration members. There is too much battle already for the first-author position, we don't need more. This practice accomodate the intention to have a list of primary contributors/authors, and general contributors/collaboration members to the publication at the same time.

It is very hard to separate those who have worked primarily on the "service" tasks (trigger, reconstruction software, hardware, etc.), from those who have concentrated on physics analysis. In any authorship plan, all of these (and other) contributions must be included in the author list. Without that acknowledgement, the "service" tasks will not get done.

Question 5 is only directed to scientists at the asst. prof. level or above. It does not raise the question of how a large alphabetic author list is detrimental to junior scientists trying to get jobs. For junior scientists in HEP, the only metric on scientific achievement is word of mouth since the current author lists give no indication of anything above nominal participation in a collaboration. It is clearly meaningless for someone with a few years of experience as a scientist to have a publications list including hundreds of publications and this is clearly seen as meaningless to scientists outside HEP. In all other scientific fields, the publications list is one of the main metrics for scientific merit. In HEP, it is becoming more like a stamp collection. There is also the broader issue of the ethical misconduct associated with claiming authorship for a result where the authorÕs only claim to involvement is some fraction of their research time on some small portion of the experiment and in many cases hasnÕt event read the manuscript. While this would be an ethical problem in most fields, it is encouraged in HEP. In particular, at Dzero, scientists are discouraged from removing their names from publications even if they do not feel they made a significant contribution to the science presented in the manuscript.

The current status quo has some drawbacks, but the additional burden and subjectiveness involved in selecting prominent authors is probably deleterious to the overall physics mission of the collaborations. Formalizing a partition of large collaborations into physics research groups at the level of publication is harmful to encouraging research which cuts across sometimes arbitray group structures and does nothing to acknowledge detector contributions. With many of our projects being decade-long efforts and more, a change to the system which does not reward (in fact discourages) detector contributions is very worrying for the health of the collective endeavor.

I think Q8 is very relevant. This would encourage people to really spend some percentage of time doing analysis which is really what a physcicist is here for, and not just doing software or hardware in order to be included in a publication. However, we have in HEP, many people who are non-physicists and just doing hardware or software. How they can be included in an authorship in this scenario, is something to ponder upon. Perhaps a new class of publications as addressed in Q2 would give credit to people not involved in analysis, NIM publications etc.

On Q2, that alredy exists in most of the collaborations. On Q3, the list of author changes with time. So this can lead to wrong association of papers with authors. On Q7 and Q8, it can be dangerous to have such a partition since some areas may be overflown(for instace Higgs search) while others will have shortage of manpower.

No offense but these questions are very poorly posed and therefore any results of this survey will be suspect. For example, Q4 asks if the Belle practice is "a good way to identify and appropriately credit" people. I approve of the Belle practice but, since 50% of Belle signs the papers, I don't believe it's a good way to allot credit. So I disagree with Q4 but I agree with the Belle practice. I'm concerned that misleading conclusions will be drawn from this survey.

Current practice has its drawbacks, but all these ideas for alternatives are infinitely worse.

If you want to reduce the number of authors without direct contribution partitioning is only a gradual improvement.

The suggested changes greatly reduce motivation to work on the detector. Splitting the collaboration is even worse. How would you allocate trigger bandwidth if half of the collaboration had no stake in the other half's physics? If I were a trigger expert why would I spend time implementing specific code for the higgs group if I were in the b group? For experiments liek ATLAS where the focus is on finding the Higgs initially won't everyone end up working in the Higgs group to the exlcusion of others just to get theor name on the discovery paper? I'm not saying that everyone would behave like that but I would guess that it will be a large enough effect to really harm the functioning of large collaborations. Already there is trouble getting recognition for service work and these proposals will, in general, make it a lot worse.

The wording of these questions seems biased against technical contributions in hardware, software, and operations and biased towards analysis. Physics papers are the tip of a very large iceburg and it is important to include all contributions.

I believe that with enough public discussion...fanfare...that university departments would appreciate the efforts of HEP to deal with these important matters of attribution and adjust their internal calibrations to accomodate the changes. I think that this is a critical matter and that we should change the way we have managed these matters.

I am also working on particle phenomenology. Therefore the total percentage of my time for the experiment is 80%, not 100%.

I am a member of Belle; the Belle system seems to work (to my surprise)

I like having just a couple contact names with full authorlists available electronically. Instead of taking away author list criteria from the collaborations, my suggestion would be to have something like a APS-DPF Policy on CVs that state in general terms how to give credit to yourself for both the global publications from your collaboration and for those publications or other bodies of work that the author was directly involved.

The alternate scheme becomes effective only when the detector itself is managed by a separate staff (i.e. just like the accelerator is managed by a division that is not as a division participating in research analysis). In this model, the groups then are effectively all differenet experiments who "apply" for data from the detector. I don't think the field has grown to this size yet but perhaps we are close. The Belle voluntary system is wrong since every potential author will apply a different set of standards. An author list should at least reflect some set of policies applied uniformly. This is a difficult problem with more socialogical issues than are obvious.

Concerning Q3, I would suggest a different approach: in each journal volume the publisher presents a list of authors corresponding to a set of papers in that volume clearly specified.

I would suggest a different approach about Q3. In each published journal volume, the publishers should add a single list of authors, indicating the articles this list applies to.

While I can acknowledge real concerns for enormous author lists, I find the tone of this authorship excerise disturbing and VERY one-sided. Most of the impetus seems to be to satisfy parties *external* to the experiment, i.e. publishers, faculty hiring & promotion committees, funding agencies.... The discussion seems to ignore what is best for the functioning of the experiments *themselves*! Is the primary function of science ego and authorship? Or maybe it is something else? If so, how do we best promote "it"? What exactly is in the best interest of an experiment can be debated, but clearly one component of this is people dedicated to service tasks like building/maintaing hardware/software, and perparing for upgrades. The direction for proposed changes to authorship seem to me to drive (force?) many people to weaken their dedication to these important tasks by driving up the competition for "lead" authorship, and getting it as often as possible. It is a little like the uncertainty principle: if we could set these new rules without altering people's behavior, it might not matter; but by "measuring" performance by authorship, the "system" is perturbed, and people will respond in ways that are likely not in the best interests of the experiment. I personally have spent several multi-year periods away from physics analysis, that would, under smoe more extreme proposals, take me out of the author pool. The fact that I had remained an author, made such dedicated periods more acceptable. Had these periods involved suspension of authorship, I would have been much less willing to fully dedicate myself to them. It is sometimes said people in such positions will instead get their hardware/software publications to recognize their work. This is true, but until faculty hiring/promotion recognizes pure technical work instead of physics production, the hardware/software laborers will always be 2nd class citizens....and I think inevitably feel pressured to compromise dedication to a service task for more effort to physics analysis. I do not think this is in the best interest of experiments. Aside from this practical reasoning, I think the technical contributions of detector/software builders is truly a significant contribution to a physics result. Even more, in some instances the detector builder deserves *more* credit. A precision measurement is often more a testament to the careful construction and alignment of detector than the contribution of someone writing some scripts for analyzing ntuples. If the day comes of professional detector builders and professional data analyzers, the author lists should be restructured, but for the forseeable future I think most of the authorship changes (aside from Belle's) is unfair to many, and heaps too much acclaim on the folks who simply last happened to touch the data. Let's put the priority on what is in the best interests of the experiments, and not on publishers, faculty committees, funding agencey, award committees, AND people's egos. As a practical summary I would say: a) Belle's system is probably not very harmful b) restructuring authorship to have first ALL those directly involved, and then everyone else would not generally be so much of a problem (but there will always be problem cases---is it worth the trouble? Although I do think in *any* scheme thesis students should be lead authors, for at least once in their careers!) c) any scheme to selectively and forceably exclude authors is likely destructive.

It is true that no paper can be done without the participation for years of thousands of physicists building the detector, installing it, testing, establishing trigger criteria, hardware and software. So everybody should be credited for all papers. To me it is very important that a list of all current authors be accessible electronically to give credit to everybody since every body's contribution is needed. On the other hand, those working on the analysis will be the ones whose names should appear in the most prominent place since they best can defend and explain the paper. So these physicists are in a special position. My solution would be to list the names of the 5 or 10 people who directly contributed to the analysis. This list should be very selective and not include a whole working group like say the Higgs working group for a Higgs paper from Atlas but only the authors and main reviewers say. Then a link to a list of the 2000 some other people whose work was instrumental in making this analysis possible should be given separately. For funding agencies, if one person contributed to the software or hardware, that person can then claim that their contributions are acknoledged on all Atlas papers. Those devoting their time to analysis will have to point to their specific contributions and won't be able to hide behind long and meaningless list of all publications from their experiments. This is always how I wrote my CV and reports to funding agencies: I enlighted the few papers where I was main author or co-author, as well as those where I had been main reviewer.

When results are published, people have been working on the material aspects of taking the data and should not be ignored in the list of authors by listing only the people who did the analysis.

Voluntary sign-up obviously has the risk of people signing up without having contributed. -- Physicists working as run managers, computing support groups, software experts and in management deserve recognition just as much as the people doing the analysis, and authorship on publications is one way to do so. These people are usually not mentioned in the "lead author" category, although without their contributions there would be no analysis. Getting on the author list may become more difficult for them in some of the above schemes.

I would like to emphasize that any new authorship scheme needs to ensure that those collaborators who make essential ongoing technical contributions ought to be given the choice of signing publications, even though they may not have played a direct role in the specific analysis or the writing of the paper. Their contributions are nevertheless vital and should be recognized in authorship.

The nebulousness of the "concern" mentioned in the fails to convince me that anything is broken that requires fixing. Nonetheless, Belle's approach strikes me as the most reasonable of the alternative listed.

You have not considered, in this generally good list of problems and solutions, the relationship of those specialized analysis groups and the developers of the instrumentation they used. In certain cases, those developers will not participate in the analysis, but need to be able to check that those who do the analysis understand the instrumentation. They also may have to check the papers to see no errors have been made due to a pssible lack of such understanding. THE TEXT FOR QUESTION 3 IN THE SUMMARY ALSO INCORRECTLY INCLUDES THE TEXT OF QUESTION 4. MY ANSWER FOR QUESTION 3 IS ONLY FOR 3.

I would likely support Q7 and Q8 after a reasonable period of time had elapsed where those responsible for contructing the apparatus were rewarded appropriately. This should be ~5 years and not 1 or 2 as the detector will not be debugged before 2 years have passed. Also, I would insist that some contribution to the construction of the detector (including software) be required from all authors. Participating in physics groups alone should not be enough to qualify for authorship.

It is critical that technical work on hardware problems, software development, and calibration be highly values and respected; otherwise, most ambitious individuals will abandon these tasks in favor of physics analysis. In most fields of experimental physics the physicists are involved in all these issues. We should encourage and value this in HEP too. For these reasons I am reluctant to give most of the credit to those who plot the final histograms. It is only a rather modest part of what it takes to make a meaningful measurement.

Please excuse my long comments. Arguments 1-3 have most likely been made by somebody else already. However, I have not seen (4) anywhere so far. (1) The large experiments of today and tomorrow are never the work of individuals. They can only exist because many people work together as a collaboration. It is not justified to exclude a contributor to the experiment from authorship only because this person happened not to contribute directly to a particular analysis of data produced by the experiment this person helped build or operate. (2) I think it is justified for physics papers to list those coauthors directly involved in the analysis ahead of everybody else. It allows for proper recognition of both the analysis team as well as the team which made the analysis possible. (3) For printed publications, I would consider it a good compromise to list those coauthors directly involved in the analysis by name, and refer to them as 'contact authors' on behalf of the collaboration. The full collaboration list could be made available elsewhere. (4) It would be desireable not to limit the contact author list as described in (3) to graduate students and postdocs, since only few of them generally remain in the field. It should also contain coauthors who are certain or likely to be accessible more than a few years after publication.

I am glad someone is paying attention to this issue. Publication has not been an effective way to measure someone's contribution to an experiment. We need a fundamental change in attitude. Unfortunately, these proposals do little more than perturbing the edges of the problem. I believe the Belle practice is good. My negative response to Q4, despite what I just stated, is because I disagree that it will have the stated effect of giving credit to the true contributors. Anyone in the collaboration can still be an author, and it does not in any way indentify the true contributors. It is a very good way for peopple to opt out when they disagree with the analysis. Note that it is sometimes the most active people that know enough to disagree! Regarding Q7 and Q8, the partitioning has been in effect in a number of experiments for a long time. It is indeed an effective way to organize. It may even be an effective way to establish authorship, i.e. it can be the basis of (arbitrary) rules. However, that does not make it an effective mechanism to identify contributions. Working groups tend to be non-trivial in size, and it is rare that everyone in it contributes to every result from that group. At the same time, it is not at all uncommon for people outside of a specific group to contribute to individual results of that group. While Q8 has some flexibility, I cannot agree with the default of membership equals authorship. It simply moves our current situation to a larger number of smaller grousp without addressing the real problem. For example, does anyone seriously believe that the Higgs analysis group in LHC will not have hundreds of people? I would also like to comment on common software and calibration. The preamble to Q7 and Q8 acknowledges that these areas are vital to any experiment, and therefore proposes authorship restrictions after the first year or two. Reality is that these activities are crucial and must be maintained vigorously throughout an experiment's entire lifetime. Modern experiments are so complicated that the initial procedures are adequate only for the initial phase of physics, and much more detailed calibration and/or reconstruction are needed to extract detailed physics in subsequent years. One can see that by plotting the statistical error vs data set size in many measurements, and see that it scales faster than one would naively expect. If we go to a scheme where people's contributions to common software and calibration will not be recognized after the first two years, we will discourage people from this activity and effectively throw away a lot of the physics power of these very expens! ive experiments!

My comment: in large collaborations we are ~all physicists - "unfortunately" may of us must do more technical hardware/software work, support & maintenance. We must avoid labelling people as first or second class physicists, also in author lists - otherwise we will have everyone doing analysis and no data coming out of the detector!!! Therefore - all technical work needs to be acknowleged and recognised at the same level & context as physics analysis

The partition of a large collaboration into smaller physics research groups seems inevitable, but so far my experience with it has been that it's harmful.

In principal, having the person who did the analysis somewhere at the top of the author list or else in some way acknowledged is a good thing. However, as one who spends much time doing infrastructure work, this would tend to cheapen the value of my contribution, and I would be far less motivated to work in common for the good of the collaboration as a whole. I fear that such a system would encourage selfish and destructive behaviors. There are already enough people out there who's major contribution is only analysis - I would have to join them should author lists be revised and the experiment as a whole would suffer.

My concern with the alternate scheme is that one of the main attractions to working on an HEP experiment is the ability to work on several different kinds of physics. Of course this comment is mainly from a collider experiment (ATLAS/CDF) perspective where there are several different avenues of research. I supervise students who work in three different CDF analysis groups. Would I (be forced!?) to sign up for all three federations? I would much rather just sign those publications that I actually work on and decide for myself if some other publication depended crucially on the hardware or analysis algorithm I helped develop. I guess I don't see the advantage of the partitioning suggested here.

HEP is a team effort and small groups have to rely on inputs from other groups, the contribution of all groups must be acknowledged.

I don't entirely agree with some of the numerical values presented in this survey, but I do agree with the goal of reducing the size of these author lists. In principle, splitting a large collaboration into smaller groups is a good idea (and surely a necessary one for those the size of ATLAS and CMS), but I'm not convinced that there isn't an unnecessarily large potential for fracturing the collaboration too greatly, and losing the consensus that it needs for some of the wider decisions that it may face.

I would hope that any eventual change in best practice does not lead us to the trap of identifying position in the author list with importance to the paper (the "first author" syndrome). I would prefer the actual authors of a paper to be listed in alphabetical order among themselves, followed by the rest of the collaboration (or a link to an electronic copy of the author list, ...)

Authorship is a difficult problem with 2000-3000 man collaborations. I see no easy solution but am strongly prejudiced against restricted authorship. I think that attributing credit for a physics result is very subliminal and must be as inclusive as possible. The voluntary path is probably the only way to proceed.

I am strongly in favor of changing the way we do things, but your specific proposals above are too limited for me to "Strongly Approve". Instead, I would suggest that rules for authorship be replaced by rules for eligibility to publish. Then we allow eligible physicists to analyze and publish independently, forming whatever collaborations with other eligible members they so choose. Publications could be sent to non-collaborating members of the experiment for review, keeping a high level of quality control in place. Spurious results would damage the credibility of the authors, not the entire experiment, and quality results would benefit those that accomplished them.

It may be worthwhile to separate the various problems one may be trying to solve, e.g.: -- Wasting journal space with pages of author names -- Not indicating specific contributions at all -- Same as previous, but with specific worry about possible difficulties for younger scientists trying to establish themselves -- Worry about changing a system that to some extent avoids a potentially damaging preference for analysis work over other infrastructure actvies. etc.

Anyone who has contributed to an analysis (and this includes the people who built the detectors, the people who were on call and who took the data taking shifts and the people who made the MC samples and the reconstruction code developers, besides the people who did the actual reported analysis) should be credited. I believe it is wrong only to list those who are members of a specific physics group as authors.

I strongly support the Belle approach and have tried to advocate it inside of CDF. I also believe that the chief contributors to a paper should be listed first.

I believe partioning by physics working groups is the best thing to do, and perhaps also could be done with Belle style sign-ons. However, major discoveries should be signed by the full collaboration since all of the collaboration are needed in the end to make the experiment a whole, and because almost everyone in the collaboration does get involved in the reviewing and study of major discoveries.

For the purposes of the research assessment quality, we are requested to choose 5 papers to which we contributed. The rest of our authorhship is irrelevant. For one stage of promotion in the UK, it does seem to help to have a large author list. I believe that far too little information on how to do the measurements is being published. The underground collaboration notes system becomes the real record to which we refer when we wish to reproduce results. There should be a way in which the method for doing analysis can be published and referenced when the publication is done. Updates are possible for collaboration notes. This sequence of updates is very useful and should be available in general. There is a intersting suggestion that each part of experimental work has its own occupational reward. Detector developers get their rewards, computer programmers theirs and physics analysis people get theirs. This is a reasonable approach although people may not wish to be categorized. I see this as a further refinement of the split in the field between experiment and theory. In fact, we begin to see a backwash of theorists who are participating in experiments. All of these aspects need refereed journals and archiving. The large collaborations are laboratories of their own, and nobody would suggest that everyone at CERN, FNAL, DESY, KEK or SLAC should sign every paper.

Since any physics analysis paper can not separate from the performance of whole detector, so it seems still reasonable to include the names of detector builders unless they exclude themselve. In such a case, I would propose to have two groups of people to sign each physics paper: (a) those who have really the direct contribution to the publication of a paper (e.g. to have done the detailed physics analysis or/and have participated extensive discussion for the publication, etc.). Whether it should be alphabetically ordering in this group or not is depending on the consensus among this group of people themselves, i.e. the group may put the person who made the most significant contribution to this paper at the position of the 1st author, etc. (b) then the 2nd group is the rest of whole CMS collaboration in the order to magnitude of 1000 names which may have to be in the alphabetical order. In such a way, the 1st group of people also have to bear the direct responsibility for this paper and to answer all questions whenever reviewers or readers would ask.

If I were not given CDF authorship status fully equivalent to the people writing the publications, I would certainly not be working on the antiproton source to keep CDF running. However, I feel strongly that voluntary sign-up would encourage people to read and to be willing to defend in public each CDF paper, and I support it. I also feel that individuals should be as free as possible to document their novel analysis concepts and technical contributions in articles analogous to conference proceedings and NIM/TNS papers.

One might ask oneself if the experiment-internal process to publication is optimal: Some analysis take more than one year from finishing till submission to journal. This could also be changed.

I basically agree with the non-alphabetical order of author list in order to show the contribution of the works to the public. However, I think that partition into small groups may be difficult for many cases because the analysis method and/or motivation often get over several areas. For example, many exotic people are using the calibration results done by top people, also some of exotic themes are being dealed with in B group just with the reason why they use B mesons, and so on ...

I think the idea of having the first 10 or so people being the principal "players" in an analysis/hardware/... paper is the best. Everyone should remain on the list but there should be some way of seeing who are the main contributors. This would be useful for getting jobs etc. Quoting 35 publications in ones name is silly but there should be some official way of selecting out few which the person made a big impact on. Otherwise there's no way the employers can know what the person has done or not.

High energy experiments today are collaborations of large numbers of physicists because it takes a large number to build, operate, and maintain the detectors. The people who do these tasks are at least as important as those who analyze the data and deserve full recognition.

Basis principle: Who did the work sign the paper. For great discovery all the collaborators might sign.

I strongly disapprove the notion underlying a number of the questions above that the analyst(s) who does the "final fit" and writes the paper should get more credit for a publication than the those who maintained the detector, worked on simulation programs, etc. The issues of "getting credit" and of "being a knowledgable contact person for a given paper" must be more clearly separated in these authorship discussions.

Questions are complicated. Strictly, answer to Q 1 is no; but I am in favor of alphabetical listing of authors.Recognition needs an alternative mechanism. Similarly for some other qus.

The purposes that an authorship must serve should be enumerated and agreed upon before a new policy can be adopted. For example, is it the purpose of an author list to supply the reader with technical contact information? What other purposes does it serve? The reason the issue is controversial is that an author list means different things to different people. One must fix this first.

The idea of authorship in large collaborations has been around for as long as there have been large (100) collaborations. It is clear that the ability to distinguish specific responsibility for work is difficult in such large collaborations, especially when one considers the gigantic effort required to design, build, operate, and manage the experiments. To only acknowledge those who skim off the analysis results (or to even give special consideration to those) is only acceptable if it does not reduce the credit to those who make such analysis possible. Certainly a line does need to be drawn somewhere (not every person who touches such a large experiment should be recognized). Some special acknowledgement is possible (contact person(s) for a paper) and appropriate. But given that HEP experiments are getting larger and larger and that all of science is heading in this same direction it is worth thinking about and clarifying how to give credit to everyone w! ho makes the science possible.

The Bell system is quite nice, although is a bit risky because it relies a lot on people honesty, and somebody could profit: nevertheless, this is true even now, some people are for ages in a collaboration doing basically nothing. Partition is great, but sometimes things are not so well defined, and people not from your official group or institution might be more supportive than who is really supposed to....

The way it is now, all collaborators listed alphabetically, reduces the importance of being an author on a HEP paper, but excluding those that have worked hard on other parts of your experiment is not fair. I think the best solution is to list the names of the 'authors' (those people that did the analysis and are familiar with the results, like what other scientists would call 'authors') and then the name of the collaboration - where the names of the members of the collaboration are available on-line. This gives the same credit to collaborators not involved with the analysis, while restoring meaning to being an 'author' on a HEP paper.

I strongly oppose the creation of a two-caste system of "detector people" and "analysis people." Beware of unintended consequences!

1) I think that one has to allow a certain amount of flexibility. Personally, I like the physics group or even physics sub-group author list idea. But for more important papers or more involved analyses, I could see the author list expanding, and then maybe you go with the 10-20 names idea or the two contact people. 2) I would be interested in the results from a survey of Labs and Universities on whether they dismiss candidates who work primarily on detector physics topics. 3) Regardless or whether the primary author list is changed, I think that funding agencies should REQUIRE the introduction of Scientific Notes. The number of times I have seen people re-inventing the wheel in a technical area does not bear close examination, and is an obvious area of waste. 4) Thanks for doing this. I wish they would have done this at Snowmass.

People may sign up to several groups and perambulate in order to gain more publications. Or they may really contribute to several groups. Q8 doesn't distinguish. Q8 and maybe some others can encourage alienation from groups in which one doesn't participate. Apparatus, service and operations oriented people will claim authorship of all papers. Perhaps they have the right! But it seems anomalous.

Scientific notes are common practice for hardware and software. The only place where it is not common practice is physics. No matter how you change things, make sure it does not increase the painful politics already prevalent in large collaborations. Given that we already spend too large a fraction of our collective effort pushing each others around, I find the Belle solution by far the most attractive.

The trouble with most of these plans is that they do not acknowledge at all the contribution made to every physics analysis from the people who make the detector operate. Noone who devotes their time to collecting the data rather than analyzing it gets rewarded in these schemes in a way that I believe would be meaningful for career advancement. "Sign up" practices may work but beg for dissention amongst collegues as to "who belongs on this paper". One possible idea would be to once every 6 months or so just "publish" both the author list and the standard acknowledgements (plus any useful information on for instance the upgrade of a detector perhaps-as the detector description is also often verbatim included in every paper from the collaboration) and then simply cite the full authorlist but use a restricted set as decided internally-so all contributions are accounted for by counting how many citations of the authorlist there are, yet acknowledging individual! contributions on individual topics. Plus, think of the amount of paper you'd save!

Thanks for the survey, I think it is an interesting issue. I do not like the way the authorship is handled right now. I am sure that the funding agencies wil not react too bad after a while if everybody does not have as many papers as before.

The danger with all the purposed authorship schemes is that it actively encourages people to avoid service duties, hardware or software, to maximize the number of publications (which is what people are rewarded for). I believe the field is suffering from this, with D0s and CDFs upgrades being prime examples. The field has to establish or recognize the equal importance of this service work because without the detector and software, the data will not exist. As it now stands, people that feel responsible to provide for the colloboration these services, because they believe it is the most important thing to do at the time are punished. This has got to stop. We've been playing chicken with these duties too long.

Q2 is a bad question. I would support a mechanism for publishing software algorithms or physics simulations separately (as is done with hardware development) but I do not support such a mechanism for physics analysis. I don't have a problem with the Belle scheme, but I also don't believe that it somehow improves the way that "credit" is allocated. Finally, all the schemes that try to isolate "physics groups" or "primary physics authors" put too much emphasis on the data analysis and zero emphasis on the detector, trigger, data acquisition. Example: with no databases, an experiment cannot hope to analyze any data in any credible way. Therefore, anybody who worked on the database played a crucial role in every single analysis. Will they get credit in a scheme slanted towards "primary authors"? Of course not.

The promotion and hiring process has become accustomed to large alphabetical publications. Coherence will be a bigger problem than giving credit. I like having to at least click something to be an author.

To bring a result to publication requires aLOT of effort. Most people think of just the final analysis -- but it takes calibration effort, alignment effort, etc. In addition, it takes people to build and maintain the detectors and collect the data. Its a team effort. As such the paper authorship should reflect that. Trying to do more than that is a nightmare for the spokespeople who have better things to worry about.

1. I've taken the % time spent integrated over the 25 years I've been working on CDF, starting with design of the detector, and many management positions. 2. The general thrust of Scientific Notes is the right one, but the implementation should be in existing journals- NIM for technical things, Computational journals for algorithms, etc.- PRL for papers. I really don't support publishing analyses separately- too much competition and strife, and the incentive is to go fast and sloppy- careful and systematic loses.

One think to be careful is to let to people who are doing service work the possibility to appear in publications lists. And to this regard the Belle approach looks quite dangeours: when should the guy who is administrating the software or carrying the pager for the tracker should put his name in a publication, specially if the (important!) work he is doing does not leave him time to be part of any physics group ?

They are people who worked for up to 10 years in R&D before even the experiment starts, without them the experiment wouldn't even exists. I think the newer scheme just forget about them... (or try to integrate them in an non obvious way in the publishing process which is in my opinion very subjective) All the physics results which are published by large collaboration as CMS result from the fact that a large part of the HEP community has agreed to put in common their talents, efforts etc.. and this at different level in the experiment. I don't see any reason why only a small fraction of this community should be considered for the authorship. Also to add a realistic note to that, usually everybody knows who does what because of the various workshops, conferences... (even if there are several hundreed persons listed as author...)

Hi, The most important problem is our institutes that usually don't know about the common rules in hep-exp, They expect a graduate student to have a single author paper like a student in cond matter or hep-th to approve his/her PhD degree.

In my opinion restricting to the physics groups is a disadvantage for the people doing the service work like running the detector. It just sends the wrong message that within the experiment there are two kinds of people the service worker s and the glorious ones that know how to do physics. There is no real achnoledgement of the people who in the end make the analysis possible. In the end every one will crowd the physics groups. It takes all kind of people to make an experiment sucessful and that should be recognized.

OK. Here is my two cents: Belle model is great but will not work for a collaboration like CMS and ATLAS where we have more than 2000 physicists. Given the fact that LHC will produce fountain of physics results, it is definitely a great idea to give credits and allow authorship to that perticular analysis working group responsible for the papaer. One might then follow the Belle model by asking people in that analysis working group to sign off for the authorship.

Most of the latter schemes would tend to leave out the hardware physicists who may have spent 8-10 years developing and building the detectors, and without whom, the experiment may not even have worked. If they dont participate in any analysis groups (perhaps because they are building the upgrade), would only be authors on the subdetector hardware paper and the overall experiment hardware paper. If there are only a few physics papers in the first years of operation and then this rule of "physics groups memebers only" comes to play, they are left with very few papers of authorship. If getting a job (or advancement) will continue to be based on authorship (and I know this still applies for most cases), these physicists will be short-changed. Thus I would like to see a scheme that treats these cases fairly. I do not think the Belle scheme a good idea. It basically means the most honest people are penalized the most. Those who are "padding" their CV will make sure! they are on all papers (and I know plenty of physicists in this category, unfortunately). The scientific notes scheme is to me the most promising for giving credit more fairly, provided all collaborations agree to this scheme and apply it more or less in a similar way.

In my experience, HEP is currently highly specialized. I describe four groups below. These groups do mix but less and less as the years pass. In my opinion, if we deviated from the inclusive and alphabeticaly ordered choice, we would be sending the wrong message to detector/software physicists. Nowadays they enjoy little respect, many of them are employed on soft money or as computing professionals. * Group 1: people who do physics analysis, and by this I mean the "high end" in the chain: counting particles and using statistical methods to interpret results, running generators, participating in physics workshops, going to physics conferences. * Group 2: people highly specialized in particle algorithms and identification, simulations, offline calibration, detector or algorithm corrections in general Group 3: hard core software development such as frameworks, software infrastructure (what you fill-in), data bases, some of the simulation and algorithm implementations. Group 4: detector research, development, construction, and commissioning.

This survey only deals with Physics analysis, calibration etc. This survey does not deal with detector construction, detector operation, beamline optimization for experiments like MINOS and MiniBooNE and many other such jobs which is necessary for an experiment to reach a stage of publication. There could be people who will join the collaboration in data taking phase, work and do analysis for few years and get more papers than someone who spent several years (lets 7-8 years) building the detector, or optimizing the beamline. What happens to a professor who can't spent more than 10% of time at CERN or Fermilab but supervises 5 students. This survey is more optimized to award what I will call Ntuple physicists, who have abounded in the time of large collaborations rather than a well rounded physicist who can do hardware both detctor and accelerator, software, analysis, and management. I believe this survey is too generic and not well thought off.

Your survey will be difficult to evaluate: people who work hard and take part in the analysis/operation will vote for selected author lists. People who hide behind a large collaboration and dont work (hard), will vote for including everyone in alphabetical order. I think it might be that simple. So, these questions will be decided based on what % or people work hard? Would be unfair. I dont think this should be solved democratically, because of the above. ALso, if my experiment places very strict rules on authorship, and my friends working on some other experiments get included on 100s of papers a year, they will get all the support and I will not get anything from my government. One should be very careful with that.

The physicists who build and run CMS should not be excluded in any way from authorship of physics papers. In addition there is a very great danger of this creating a lack of manpower to run the experiment. It will also create very great resentment of people from groups that have more recently joined and played no major part in the construction of CMS but have access to the data and are able to produce physics results. If anything along restricted lines is introduced then there should also be an authorship qualification of a service task or detector contruction activity for each individual author. question 2 is ill defined. If this does not refer to the use of CMS data then it is acceptable, but there is no problem with this type of paper anyway. Anything that uses CMS data must acknowledge all physicists who played a role in acquiring this data. Wuestion 3 is ill defined. Who are the two named people to be. This would only be acceptable if they are the spokesman and the physics coordinator. Question 7 is also ill defined. The standard procedure is for people to work in analysis groups. What does this question propose is done differently?

Good idea to publish experiment's author list once per year, so that subsequent papers can just refer to it, rather than listing thousands of authors. Naming a dozen or so people who made an important contribution to the analysis at the start of the author list sounds OK. But I fear it will neglect the work of the people who contributed detector hardware or event reconstruction software, that made the analysis possible.

This topic is quite complicated: lots of people do contribute to the results, supporting hardware/software. From another point of view, those who did the most of the analysis should have a credit. Q8 could be a clue, but this would turn huge (2k people) collaborations to smaller sub-collaborations with a huge (it's still huge!) number of authors. Number of papers is important: for theorists it's quite usual to publish 5 papers a year, and I don't know many experimentalists, who would do 5 analyses as a first author: life is tough: one has to do many checks for different things in the analysis itself and lots of maintaining work for hardware/software. Best Regards, Andrey Loginov

Difficult issue. Anything other than full authorship each paper potentially means a bun-fight every paper about who can sign, or who is in the Elite Group. Could see this as a nightmare in CMS. Alternate scheme seems to imply different subsets of the "Collaboration" could submit mutually incompatible papers. At least one strength of the previous Mega-Collaborations was most published analyses were largely sound. Belle scheme interesting.

An important aspect of the current practice is to credit those who have invested considerable time (10 years in the case of LHC) in design and development of the detector. There is a understandable tendency for such people not to be at the forefront of analysis in the early years of the experiment. Any new scheme for authorship should see past just crediting the people who finally 'push the button' on the analysis, and make sure those who invented, organised and maintain the large infrastructure that makes this possible are credited on an equal footing.

It is the personal "moral correctness" which plays a big role here

The suggestions above seem to hint to a separation between physicists "doing physics" and those running the detectors, both categories being vital to High Energy Physics. I do not see how HEP experiments could be run, let alone built or upgraded, unless the dedicated people working on hardware are guaranteed their rights to access the physics and the publications stemming, after all, from their work. Monte Carlo experiments do not produce physics...

One has to maintain balance between the recognition of the people who have been deeply involved into a given analysis and the fact that one needs an ( equivalent if not more ?) amount of work to maintain and run the detector, calibrate it etc. As number of signatures remains one major evaluation parameter in hiring in research one could see a tendency to move students and postdocs away from technical/basic services (calibration, software task developments, monitoring data quality etc) in order to maximize the number of papers they are signing. In other words a change of policy for signing papers should be accompanied by a policy coherent with these changes on how to value the contributions of people ( especially young ones) when hiring into research posts. The usual answer to this is: one can write technical papers/notes: fine... but then the work described in a technical note might be fundamental for the final erros on a given measurement whose paper mig! ht not be signed by the guy who did the ground work... One way then to keep this into account would be to use number of citation of technical notes as a parameter ... It gets soon rather complicated. Moreover from my experience these issues might have considerable different impact in the US when compared to certain european countries. To terminate this little ramblinga a 2 cents question: how do you make the difference between a guy who has been working for the last 10 year building CMS or ATLAS ( hence no physics papers) and a guy coming into CMS or ATLAS now 2 years before physics starts flowing ? Last comment: some of your questions are somewhat ambigous: Q6: my reply is assuming that besides the first 10-20 authors listed in non alphabetical oreder there are all the other name so fthe collaboration. If this is not the case change my reply to 'Neutral'

Voluntary, opt-in authorship is a no-brainer that should be implemented throughout the field as soon as possible. Collaborators might even read the papers that they "author" if this is done. The other issues are thornier by far. In a highly distributed and fragmented collaboration such as CMS, broad inclusion in authorship (or at least authorship opportunity) is probably needed to encourage collaborators to actually collaborate!

I don`t like the practice that the author lists typically start with the first name in alphabetical order (e.g. Aabb et al.) - should be just the collaboration or the name of a representative. People who build an maintain the hardware should be included in as authors of "physics papers" - otherwise no one would be willing to do "service tasks" (this is already a problem to some extent). Having one or a few contact persons on a paper is a good idea (also in case somebody wants to ask a question to the authors). It is hard to believe that on average 150 persons from Belle have made a significant contribution to a paper. I would expect of the order of ten authors on average. In my opinion, the Belle system does not help to identify the real contributors. (In addition, my gues is that among the 50% of signing people the faction of students is rather low and the fraction of senior scientists is too high - would be interesting to check.) Finally, I would like to stress that there is no ideal solution and it will always be hard to give the credits to the right persons.

What about idea to indicate conveners of the submitted papers in case of the publications on behalf of Collaboration. The list of conveners could be in addition to the authors list and can be given in the abstract of the paper. May be the name "convener" is not good and, probably, there is necessary to find better terminology...

Proposal on issue covered by Q3. Propose to have all author names in a file accessible electronically to create more space for the scientific information on space-limited publications. General Comment An active autorship a-la-Belle is a good proposal to create participation in a physics analysis. The proposal covered by Q8 or Q3 would create a strong incentive for young researcher to focus mostly on research, removing support from the activities that make an HEP experiment possible (software management, operations, calibrations, detector upgrade, etc.). It would certainly be great to go to an hardware store, buy an HEP experiment, put it on an accelerator and do "physics" happily for ever after, but the HEP reality is different and at least in my experience support for the detector is essential during the lifetime of the experiment. I don't see the situation evolving differently for LHC or ILC experiments.

Most of these proposals seem to degrade the contribution of people (other than those doing software analysis) who's participation and work was essential in obtaning the physics result; I suspect your working-group is over-represented by such software people and is inherently bias.

The widely used scheme of listing all eligible collaborators as authors is clearly unfair to those people who did the "heavy lifting" on any given paper. However, the effect of that unfairness varies according to any individual paper reader's purpose. Fellow practitioners (insiders, if you will) will know who did the serious work and who appears as a matter of convention. On the other hand, members of tenure committees and university deans, for example, are generally not privy to that information and are forced to either guess or, even worse, average in some idiosyncratic way. In such cases, almost any scheme other that what we now do is an improvement provided the rules are widely understood, generally adhered to and known to be taken seriously. This strikes me as being fairly difficult to accomplish, especially outside the HEP community. This should not prevent a serious re-evaluation of the current system. I mention it only to point out that the adoption of a new system is, in many ways, only the beginning of a long and potentially difficult transition.

Strong risks: Q1,Q2,Q3 - have lots of young physicist that are doing "technical" work, which is essential for every experiment, not doing it anymore as everybody would go for more "scientific" work. BELLE practice: seems the more reasonable approach since who does the work and needs publications would sign up for them and who does not do anything could get tired to do that (signing up) as well. BUT Q6 is very very bad idea since limiting the number of name would (often) result in having the names of people that did not actually do the work. Alternate scheme: constraining the work of physicist in a partition or two for the porpouse of authorship seems to me not worth it as by nature the work keeps changing. For example, say I am in the SM working group and I find a signature of physics byond SM. Should I call a friend of mine in another group to continue my analysis? I forsee only problems (also for the authorship).

the very delicate point to address is to properly consider those people that do technical work, albeit very important like mainataining databases, maintenance, calibration and bookkeeping... etc.

There is not perfect solution to the problem of authorship in big collaborations. However the present situation where all collaborators names (order of 500 at LEP/Tevatron) cannot continue at the LHC, because nobody gets advantage from having a publication with thousands of collaborators. Probably, a good compromise is to have the detector people signining the detector papers and the analysis people signining the analysis papers for which they are authors. Of course, detector people are allowed and even encouraged to contribute significantly to analysis publications and viceversa, analysis people to detector publications. The question is then: what is the definition of "significant contribution"? Wha is the minimal contribution above which a collaborator enters in the list of authors, for a given publication? This is the question which eventually the collaborations and the different working subgroups will have to address.

I feel, that making any system giving a different weigth would be very complicated and hard to establish. Also many cases there are physicist at the important at the output, who have not contributed to construction of detectors and visa versa. How could one weigth between this?

*2 names per institutes might disadvantage young physicist who have performed the work with respect to those that sign the funding request for lab. * Dividing collaborations in smaller group might be the best way to have signatures corresponding to effective contributions. * As for voluntary signatures as in Belle. What about physicists who have left the collaboration after a postdoc and PhD, but still should sign papers using their contributions (software/hardware developments for instance)... How to make sure they are still aware of the publications and can signal they would like to sign a particular article ?