Notes on the Jefferson Lab CLAS Collaboration Meeting

October 17 - October 19, 2002

Important Points:

1. Next Meeting:  Thursday , February 27 through Saturday, March 1, 2003 

                                        at Jefferson Lab, CEBAF Center

2. The meeting was again broadcast on the web, and the recordings are available from the archives at http://cc.jlab.org/services/streamingmedia/WebCastGuide.php.  Real thanks are due Marty Wise and Greg Adams who helped get this service in operation.

Meeting Notes

Because the information presented in the talks is available from the web, the following notes concentrate on the discussion that took place at the Saturday business meeting.

1.  There have been a number of complaints from authors concerning the time it takes a paper to get through the CLAS review process.  It is very clear to most members who have participated in the review  process that the resulting papers are much improved in almost all respects, and therefore we do not want to abandon the the current system.  Nevertheless, improvements almost always possible.  The CLAS Coordinating committee considered this problem and has suggested two modest changes designed to speed up the process.

       i)    There is often some confusion concerning the exact roles of the two review committees (the Analysis Review committee and the CLAS Ad Hoc committee.  The CCC will develop a better set of guide lines for these committees.

       ii)    The Analysis reviews often start so late in the process that it takes too much, often repeated work to satisfy the concerns of the reviewers.  This situttion can be helped by starting the Analysis Review sooner.  Members are urged to get the Analysis Review started as soon as they are well along in the project so that the Analysis Review committee can work with them while the project is underway, rather than waiting until what was thought to be the very end.  The Working Group chairs will help to implement this policy

2. CLAS Charter Problems:  The document under which the CLAS Collaboration operates was written slightly more than 10 years ago and was designed mostly to assure that the CLAS was built in a reasonable manner.  It has continued to serve us fairly well, but there are a number of problems that it does not address well.  It is time to to consider fixing those parts that need to be fixed.  Some items that need to be considered are:

       i)    Physics working groups:  The size of the present Working Groups varies greatly, and it is not clear that the present alignment best addresses the physics of CLAS

       ii)    The technical working group structure listed in the Charter is no longer operational.

       iii)    There is no mention of CLAS++.

       iv)    Is it now time to move to a system that requires a positive response to be included on a paper as an author, as opposed to a positive response to be removed as an author? 

   The CCC will try to put together a committee to consider these issues and to make suggestions.  Volunteers for this assignment, especially those with ideas for a better Charter, will be considered by the CCC for possible membership on the committee. 

3. Two amendments to the present Charter and the Bylaws, one concerning PAC proposals and one concerning authorship rules, passed.  These amendments had been previously sent to CLAS Members, and are now included in the CLAS Charter,  http://faculty.cua.edu/obrienj/charter.htm.

4. The CLAS Approved Analysis "Semi-inclusive pion electroproduction off the proton" Raffiella De Vita, et al. was approved by a unanimous vote. 

5. There was considerable discussion concerning the timing and number of CLAS Collaboration meeting per year.  The questions addressed were how many meetings should we have, and should we have better coordination with the PAC meetings?  An additional e-mail concerning the points brought forward in the discussion will be sent to the CLAS membership shortly.

6. The membership committee reported that at the next CLAS Collaboration meeting, Full membership will be considered for Ralf  Gothe and Maurik Holtrop.

7. Members were reminded several times during the meeting of their obligation to notify the Speaker's Committee whenever talks about CLAS are given.  The link to the web site that makes this task easy has been moved to a prominent place on the Hall-B web page.

8. For your information, the present CLAS Committee structure is as follows: