Astronomy Roundtable and Breakfast was held on Monday, June 13, from 7:30 AM -9:30 AM
Topics/Speakers:
• Introductions (Moderators: Kathleen Robertson and Lisa Johnston) with a profile of Liz Bryson, CFHT and an ADS Update by Donna Thompson.
• Data Curation and new NSF requirements by Lisa Johnston
• Everyone Wants to Publish, but No One Wants to Pay by Marsha Bishop
• Lisa VII Update by Uta Grothkopf and Marsha Bishop
• ArXiv support plans update by David Ruddy
The session kicked off at 7:30am on Monday (June 13th) of the SLA conference with an excellent breakfast sponsored by SPIE. Moderators Kathleen Robertson and Lisa Johnston began with introductions from the large group of around 40 people.
During the introductions, Liz Bryson shared with us her plans to retire later this year. We took a moment to reflect on her career. She has made many contributions to PAM. She chaired the Astronomy Roundtable at the 1983 conference, and the PAMwide Roundtable at the Montreal conference in 1995. She served on the Nominations and Elections Committee from 1991-1992 and again in 2010. On the Public Relations Committee, she served three terms from 1992-1995 and a fourth in 2008. She was PAM chair-elect from 1996-97, and Chair from 1997-98. In 2000, she received the PAM Achievement Award. Beyond PAM, Liz was co-chair of the Science Organizing Committee of LISA IV (Prague, 2002). In 2006, Liz produced the DVD “Gathering the Forgotten Voices,” an oral history of the early years of the Canada France Hawaii Telescope. She is currently working on a second DVD with the working title “Images and Voices of the CFHT Legacy,” focusing on telescope’s instrumentation during the 1990s. Since 1995, she has produced the ASTRONOMICAL MEETINGS list, first as a paper newsletter, and now as a web site. As a parting gift, Liz shared with us her famous recipe for Long Island Ice Tea. Also, during the introductions, Donna Thompson gave us a brief ADS update.
To save money on convention center AV charges, a new format was initialized for some Roundtables: the seating was in-the-round about a central dais, with only a microphone and without computer and projector options. The speakers faced the challenge of doing their presentations with only charts as visual aids. They successfully met the challenge, but having AV equipment may have helped communications.
Lisa Johnston, Physics/Astronomy/Geology Librarian at the University of Minnesota, presented on their data management program. The university libraries took on a role in researcher data management in 2009 following user-needs assessment results from several studies of faculty and researcher, including a 2010 survey of over 780 researchers on their cyberinfrastructure needs. The program includes a public-facing website, www.lib.umn.edu/datamanagement, that gathers relevant resources from campus as well as best practices in areas such as digital preservation techniques. Johnston also described a successful faculty workshop that the librarians developed on how to create data management plans, in response to the 2011 mandate by NSF. The session has reached over 250 faculty and been followed-up by individual consultation. Another component of the program is focused on library staff education. The UMN Libraries have built E-scholarship into their librarian position description and build skills so that all library liaisons can speak with their departments on issues around digital data, open access to research results, and perform data audits with their disciplines. Finally, Johnston described the data archiving infrastructure currently being developed within her library to help researcher preserve their research data for long-term access. The libraries are expanding their institutional repository for data ingest, with a pilot using data from dissertations, and building preservation platforms for different types of media, such as videos and images, and GIS so that the data is not just stored, but can also be manipulated and explored.
Marsha Bishop, National Radio Astronomy Observatory Librarian, brought a unique perspective to journal subscription costs and page charges in her presentation “Everyone Wants to Publish, but No One Wants to Pay.” At NRAO, the library manages the page charges incurred by NRAO researchers and scientists using NRAO data. And, NRAO Library has been migrating from multiple paper journals for its branches to shared electronic subscriptions. This has slowed the comparison of the component costs per article, both the page charges and the journal subscription costs. Many astronomy journals use page charges to defray publication costs. As publication technologies have migrated to electronic options, more journals are adding charges. For example, Nature, a journal with no formal page charges, has begun to request amounts as high as $3200 per color figures. Marsha was able to compare the trends of subscription costs and publication support costs for 2008 and 2010. Her analysis shows that a complete switch from subscription based publishing to Open Access/publication support/page charges would not guarantee reduced costs for the Library. She notes the potential value of AO, but alerts us that it may not be less expensive.
Her presentation is available at: http://pam.sla.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2011BishopAstroRT.pdf
Uta Grothkopf, ESO & Marsha Bishop, NRAO, have been working on the planning for LISA VII. Uta began by reporting on LISA VI, held at Pune, India, in February 2010. Marsha Bishop & Bob Hanisch, IAU WG Libraries co-chairs, had suggested holding LISA VII in conjunction with (in parallel, before, after) IAU General Assembly in Beijing, China, August 2012. During discussion on PAMnet and Astrolib: concerns about LISA conferences losing their identity, venue too exotic/expensive, time too short for preparation, and lack of local librarian were expressed. The results of a poll taken by CfA librarians Chris Erdmann & Michael Blake indeed did not show a clear majority in favor of holding LISA and IAU in conjunction. Uta and Marsha are now considering planning LISA VII for 2014, location TBD. And they are exploring the option of a booth at IAU GA in Beijing, to raise the profile of astronomy libraries and librarians. The presentation is available at: http://pam.sla.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2011LISAAstroRT.pdf
David Ruddy gave us an update on the new collaborative arXiv business model. Halfway through the three-year interim plan (2010-2012), arXiv has received support from many of the top 200 users. In May, arXiv staff conducted several conference calls to gather user feedback. With that input, they have enhanced their business model. They have recently created an announcement email list for updates about arXiv support efforts. More information at: http://arxiv.org/help/support/
