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Based on a report prepared for the International Executive Committee by the Publications Subcommittee: Bill Colson, Avi Gover, Kunioki Mima, George Neil, Alberto Renieri, Peter van der Slot, and Jialin Xie (with additions by the FEL 99 Local Organizing Committee, and modifications by the FEL 2000 Local Organizing Committee).
1. Introduction
The guidelines given in this paper reflect the experience with the publication process of the last few conferences. The Organizing Committee hopes that this document will be refined by future organizers of FEL Conferences as the organization of the Conference and publication of the Proceedings evolve.
2. Proceedings
There will be two separate parts of the Proceedings according to the advice of the Publication Policy Committee presented to the Executive Committee at the 1996 FEL Conference in Rome. The first will be part of a regular issue of NIMA and contain reviewed manuscripts. This part will be distributed among all subscribers of NIMA. Attendees of the conference will receive the first part plus a second part containing extended abstracts in camera ready format. The latter are not reviewed by referees.
The time schedule for publication of the Proceedings is to have it published well in advance of the next conference, preferably before the meeting of the International Program Committee in which the conference program is selected.
In addition to a printed version of the proceedings, the local organizing committee will try to make all conference contributions on the WWW available in the form in which they are handed in during the conference, e.g. without refereeing.
3. Abstracts
The following procedure is followed: Abstracts are briefly reviewed by the local organizers upon receipt then fowarded to the conference organizers to administrate. Poorly written abstracts (e.g. containing no information) will be returned to the authors as unacceptable. A resubmitting period of 2 to 3 weeks will be allowed.
Referees (i.e., Program Committee members) are allocated to the topics of the conference according to expertise and expected number of abstracts per topic. The conference organizers will determine whether certain topics need to be combined into one session due to few responses or extended to more than one session because of abundant responses.
All abstracts belonging to a specific topic are distributed among the referees allocated to that topic and to the chairman of the session. Referees will advise the chairman which abstracts they find suitable for oral presentations. They may also advise the chairman about speakers with interesting presentations who have not submitted an abstract.
The final program will be determined by the International Program Committee and the Chairpersons of the oral sessions. If the contents of a presentation deviate from the submitted abstract, the authors are requested to inform the conference organizers, who will inform the chairman, if it concerns an oral presentation.
4. Manuscript selection
This section describes the rules according to which the manuscripts are published in the reviewed section or the non-reviewed section of the Proceedings.Section with reviewed manuscripts
A few remarks are required. Anyone may submit a contribution for selection into the reviewed section. However, space is very limited so that only about 100 reviewed papers can be accepted. Typically we have many more requests for publication than can be honored. If your work does not fulfill the above criteria please save yourself and the reviewers time and submit a two-page extended abstract (see below).
As the conference is about Free Electron Lasers, all contributions accepted for publication in the reviewed section should be relevant to this topic. This means that manuscripts presenting material about optical cavities, accelerator technology, diagnostics etc. are not suitable for publication in the reviewed section unless the paper clearly shows either new technology not previously used in FEL research and/or a significant improvement in FEL performance due to modifications in current technology. As this is a Conference Proceeding, work will only be accepted if it is actually presented at the conference. This means that someone has presented the work by explaining it to the audience and that this person was capable of answering questions about the work. So just placing a poster on a board is not sufficient.
When selecting the program the International Program Committee will come across contributions about topics which are not (directly) related to FELs. If the contribution deals with a new device, idea, invention or proposal, the question arises whether the contribution belongs to the conference or not. One could formulate a set of rules by which a FEL is defined and use these to decide if that particular contribution falls within those rules or not. For example, is a device which generates radiation of a certain wavelength by Compton backscattering a FEL or not? However it is not the purpose of these guidelines to formulate strict definitions of what a FEL is. Acceptance or rejection of these type of papers is a task of the editor(s) and International Program Committee who can debate about evolution in the field and advise the Executive Committee to broaden or narrow the area covered by the conference.
Section with non-reviewed manuscripts
For manuscripts to be published in the non-reviewed section of the Proceedings the criteria are similar to those in the reviewed section, however the material need not be new and relevance to FELs may be less strict than in the reviewed section. The criteria for the non-reviewed manuscripts are:
Authors should examine the layout of NIMA for the non-reviewed section of the proceedings for consistency. No abstract is required for these camera-ready copies. Templates in LaTeX and MSWord will be available on the Instructions Page.
The manuscript may not be a copy or a summary of work published earlier either by the authors or somebody else. This section of the proceedings does not have to fulfill the normal standards of a refereed journal, therefore more contributions can be accepted. Proposals, crazy ideas, phenomena that are not understood, false trails, etc., are all perfectly acceptable for publication in this section. Manuscripts submitted for this section are not reviewed by referees, therefore they must be checked on the above criteria by the editors with the help of the local organizing committee (or other colleagues from the organizing institute).
Manuscripts on the WWW
In order to make the presented contributions available as early as possible, they will be put on the WWW without any form of refereeing until a printed version of the proceedings is available. Only those contributions that have been presented during the conference are considered and in addition only in those cases when the authors have made an electronic version available that needs no or only minor editing by the local organizing committee.
Authors should examine the layout for consistency.
5. Manuscript Review
All manuscripts submitted by authors for the reviewed section of the Proceedings must be reviewed by at least one referee. These referees are typically members of the Program Committee. In the previous section rules are given to be used by the referees to decide to accept the paper for the reviewed section or not. If the referee has doubts whether the manuscript is suitable or not, the referee may request a second opinion on that particular manuscript from the editors.
For both sections it is required that the manuscript is written in correct English. The referees are requested to correct small typing errors. A major revision of the text due to poor use of the English language is not required from the referees. It is a task of the editors to decide to reject those manuscripts or use local resources to revise the manuscript. Experience obtained at previous conferences shows that sending the manuscript back to the authors generally does not improve the use of English language. If English is not a native language of the organizers and they feel that revising the manuscripts by local resources may prove difficult they can either try to make arrangements with the publisher or try to find colleagues at other institutes (possibly abroad) who are willing to help them in this respect.
If a certain manuscript is rejected by a referee for the reviewed section, the referee should indicate which modifications are required for acceptance for the non-reviewed section. The referee should in that case determine whether the manuscript fulfills the criteria for the non-reviewed section.
When a manuscript requires only minor changes, the referee may contact the authors directly to clarify these points (e.g., check possible errors in formulas, clarify some points in the text, figures, etc.). The referee documents applied or agreed changes and sends these to the editors together with the manuscript if required. However, when the referee rejects the manuscript, requests a major revision or when the referee judges the remarks about the manuscript to be sensitive, all communications with the author should be through the editors. In either case the editors are fully aware what has happened to the manuscripts.
Finally: Time is of the essence. In order to meet contractual obligations with the publishers and to allow the book to be published before the next Program Committee meets, the papers must 1) be turned in at the conference ready to be reviewed, 2) if changes are requested by the reviewers these must be completed in the required time. Competition for inclusion in this volume is very severe. The editors will take advantage of any opportunity to make the down selection process easier. A word to the wise.
FEL 2000 Committee