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ePIC Collaboration Council Meeting
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America/New_York
Description
This is an open CC meeting. All ePIC members are invited.
See below for five new applications to join the ePIC Collaboration. Following the Charter, the application proposals should then be made available to the CC for review at least 2 weeks prior to a CC meeting.
Minutes from the ePIC Collaboration Council Meeting on May 29, 2026
Mode : online
Agenda: https://indico.bnl.gov/event/32806/
The following minutes refer to the agenda above and only record the discussion and questions not contained in the posted talks.
1) Thomas Ullrich - Welcome slides
- Approval of minutes 55/56 vote to approve, 1 abstain
- no additional questions
2) Daniel Brandenburg - CTC discussion
- Silvia Della Torre comments that it is important to know the distribution of the collaboration (in terms of gender, career position etc) in order to have a meaningful interpretation of the talk statistics. Daniel says he will work on normalized distributions
- Ernst Sichtermann asks about next steps that could be taken in trying to address some of the biases that are inherent in collecting this data (for example self-reporting bias). Daniel responds that one of the benefits of the automated workflow is that it should give more consistent and less biased data.
- Guido Maria Urciuoli asks how dual representation is accounted for in these statistics. Daniel says that the person is only counted once, but both institutions are credited.
- Barbara Jacek asks if it is possible to log into comanage with a home institution instead of a lab account. Daniel responds it is possible and he has found it does work. Thomas put link to instructions on the website into the chat.
- Silvia Della Torre asks what to for talks that discuss ePIC in general (ie not associated with a just one working group) in the workflow submission. Daniel responds several people raised this issue and they are thinking how to address it.
- Maria Zurek asks if emails are sent to the appropriate working group in the workflow? Daniel responds that is the first step in the automated emails. There is no email to the general collaboration and committee is considering this. Daniel also comments that they are working support comments via annotated pdfs.
- Ernst Sichtermann asks if the 8 day rule is realistic as there are many reasons why late contributions come in. Daniel says that committee understands there are exceptions and they will be flexible, but the majority of the "late" submissions are simply poor planning, that is the speaker has known about the talks for many months..
- Thomas Ullrich asks if there are statistics about funding limiting acceptance of talks. Daniel says the committee has not tracked this and people often don't offer this information and it is a bit sensitive to inquire.
3) Eric Lancon - Membership Committee Policy Update
- Barbara asks for definition of coordinators. Eric responds there are activity coordinators and detector coordinators. John makes the note that we need to find another word as the people verifying the SOS extend before thee coordinators and include the working group conveners. Eric notes and will come up with new word to help clarify going forward
- The proposed policy stated a requirement for more than 2 PhD level members for a new institution. Tyler asked for clarificaiton, if a PI + PHD student would count as 2 and Eric responded yes (although it didn't seem consistent with the language written on the slides). John followed up at the end of the talk, stating he thinks a requirement on any # of PhDs is ill-advised. It biases against institutions wiht a small number of members. Ernst jumps in to point out that the new charter explicitly removed this language so that this limit would not be imposed. John points out that the charter does leave it open to the council and its committees to develop a policy and that policy could indeed impose a limit (although he would not support that). John makes a motion to remove the language from the policy, Rosi seconds and Thomas asks for additional discussion. Barbara says that due to the current funding climate she supports removing this condition on number of members. Thomas calls a vote 44 people, a clear majority, vote to remove this language from the policy. Later Thomas realizes that the motion was made by John, who is not a CC member and so the vote is null. None the less, Eric modifies policy to say the institute shoudl have at least 1 PhD.
- Austin asks if it is possible to update the task catalog in the middle of the year. The motivation is that we need to give people credit for working on an unexpected, but high priority, service task that arises in the middle of the review cycle. Eric states that this is definitely possible.
- Ernst points out that participation is not well-defined and that there are many different interpretations and asks how we might come up with a consensus across groups going forward. Eric notes this is a thorny issue and discusses that it might be easier for coordinators to simply throw a flag when lack of participation is very clear or by coming up with simple conditions, like giving a talk once a year to discuss work with broader audience.
4) Susanna Constanza - Culture Committee Policy Update
- Guido asks if it is possible for an institution to appeal a ruling and ask for a change in the review committee membership in the appeal. Susanna says this was not considered but they could discuss in the committee.
5) Thomas proposes to move the discussion of the Publication Policy and CTC Policy to next Tuesday council meeting as this meeting is running long. Will finish this meeting by moving to the last discussion item - limited author papers.
6) Annalisa Mastroserio - Discussion of Limited Author Paper publication policy
- John asks how the policy would apply to the case where, for example, effort on a test beam run had been provided by PES. Should that be a collaboration paper, or would a limited author paper still be allowed? Annalisa says it might be necessary in some cases to add the whole collaboration, but limited authors should be possible for detector and technical papers.
- Kong makes the point that the distinction between "detector" and "simulation" and "software" is artificial. Developing a software tool is very similar to developing a detector tool, so why not make the policy blind of the source of tools?
- Kong makes the point that the distinction between "detector" and "physics" categories are also artificial as both use collaborative tools. And shouldn't that be the point in any case?
- Kong raises one more example - of the case where a theorist provides input into collaborative tools that are then used to evaluate a physics impact. Is this an ePIC Collaboration paper?
- John Arrington echo's Kong's inquiry, asking what really is the difference between a paper on detector development and software development?
- Annalisa comments that papers that use simulations should be collaboration papers.
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