MWL campaign on Mrk 501 (March-May 2008):
Roadmap for the data analysis, interpretation and publication
:
:
:
:
Now that the observations have been already performed, we need to work towards the analysis and the interpretation of those observations. Several publications will come out from these efforts. The steps we want to undertake are 1) data reduction and submission, 2) Interpretation of the reduced data and 3) Publication. In the paragraphs below we expand somewhat those steps:
1 - Data reduction and submission
The different groups will analyze the data from the observations, and will produce files with the format described in the Data format web page. The collaborations or proposal PIs are the responsibles for the data reduction and the reliability (best efforts) of the results.
The campaign finished on May 26th and we should aim to have the data reduced by the end of June or beginning of July. We'll be organizing a virtual (EVO) meeting where the different groups can report on their respective data analysis. This will allow the participants of the campaign to have a good overall picture of all the individual instrument results. The pdf/ppt files from this meeting will be archived and made available to the others for future references. The date of such meeting (and thus timing for sharing the data) is not yet fixed, and will be set according to the convenience of most of the participants of this campaign. In principle, it will be somewhere between the first and the second week of July.
2 - Interpretation of the reduced data
All groups who participated in the campaign and agree (sign) the Data Policy agreement will have access to all the observational (reduced) data from this campaign, and thus will be able to participate (if they wished) in the physical interpretation of the overall data set. The data will be accessible through the Data Access web page.
We'll organize several (weekly or biweekly) virtual (EVO) meetings to discuss the results from the different people/groups contributing to the interpretation of the data. We hope we can reach convergence within 1 or 1.5 months (that is beginning/mid August). The agreed results will be the prime material for the combined data (MWL) publication. The reports (pdf/ppt) from these meetings will be archived and made available to all the participants.
3 - Publication of the results
The plan is to have two sets of publications: a) Single Instrument publications and b) MWL publications .
The single instrument publications will describe the instrument, data analysis and will report in detail all the observational results in the particular energy range covered by that instrument. Such publications should mention that are part of a MWL campaign and can (encouraged) make references to other single instrument publications or even to the MWL publication. However, they should not use results from the other frequencies. The MWL publications will use references to the single instrument publications, rather than describing instruments and data analysis, which will allow to quickly get into the physical interpretation of the overall data set. The MWL publications will not use all the results from the observations during the campaign, but only those observations that are relevant for the points under discussion.
The single instrument and the MWL publications should be done in a coordinated way, so that the people participating in the campaign can benefit from the knowledge of the observational results before the rest of the scientific community.
If the observational results allow, more than one MWL publication could be produced. The first MWL publication will provide a rather straighforward (little bias or high concensus among MWL campaign participants) interpretation of the broad-band observational results. Additional MWL publications could be done from a different (perhaps more biased) perspective, or could address additional topics using (or not) a more extended set of the observational results, which should probably have been published in the single instrument publications.
The single collaborations (through their contact persons for this campaign) or proposal PIs are the ultimate responsibles for the preparation of the single instrument publications. The author list in those publications will be decided by the respective collaboration boards or proposal PIs.
The campaign managers are responsible for the first MWL publication, yet the contents of such publication will be discussed and agreed among all participants of the campaign. The author list in these publications will be a generous list of the people who bring data which are used in the MWL publication, as well as people contributing to the physical interpretation of the results. Additional MWL publications could be lead by other people (that is, not by the campaign managers). The same author list rules apply as for the 1st MWL publication; yet the physical interpretation in those additional MWL publications could be more "biased" and thus not requiring concensus among the MWL participants. In any case, discussions among the participants are very much encouraged.
The single instrument publications are not mandatory, but highly encouraged for all instruments. Note that the MWL publications will contain only those data sets that are required for addressing the topics under discussion. Therefore, the single instrument publications are the way of publishing the entire set of observational results. The single instrument publications make the publication of the results more modular and produce well defined references to the observational results that will facilitate the first and subsequent MWL publications. However, the single instrument publications will be mandatory for the big collaborations (like GLAST, HESS, MAGIC, VERITAS...) which require the entire collaboration to show up in all papers with unpublished data. This procedure will allow to have MWL publications with (only) tens of authors instead of many hundred (note that GLAST + single Cherenkov Telescope would imply more than 400 authors), and at the same time, this strategy will give the deserved credits to the entire (big) collaboration lists by being the authors of the paper with the unpublished/new data obtained with the instrument where they work on, as well as all with all the citations that will be done in the subsequent MWL publications.
We think that the publications with the results of this campaign (single instrument and first MWL publication) could be ready 1 month after convergence in the physical interpretation (point 2); which means sometime around mid September. Those time estimates are, obviously, educated guesses, and could vary somewhat. We'll have better estimates as we go through points 1 and 2. Note that, since the release of the results to the scientific community needs to be done in a coordinated way, all of us will have to try to keep the agreed timing as much as possible.
Campaign announcement and development
Broad band observations performed during the campaign
Quick and dirty analysis of some of the data taken during the campaign