ALADIN and ALATNET News ?

New rules for the Newsletter !

Sorry, no "News" part this time. It is of course a pity, all the more since some teams sent contributions. But the Newsletters are so late that informations became obsolete. So, why such a delay ?

There are many causes to this problem :

more than half the contributions were late, i.e. arriving after the (already loose) deadline, with a few available only at the end of September;
there were anyway many contributions, and very long papers;
there was a huge editorial work for some contributions;
there was an attempt to make everything available in-line, as some persons complained;
the main part was available in html form from the end of September, but was not made public on the web site due to some misunderstanding;
and afterwards there was a month of meetings and travels abroad for the editor.

However the problem is not a new one. Along the last years, the ALADIN Newsletter changed significantly, and in the right direction in my opinion, even it was sometimes proposed to suppress it (too much work for too few readers ?). This is quite clear from the following figures :

1998	2002
4 Newsletters	2 Newsletters
154 pages all together	341 pages all together
10 papers (mainly verification)	27 papers (mainly research)
PhD reports :10 pages	PhD reports : 101 pages
> editorial board : 1½ person	> editorial board : 1 person

The other topics : general informations, operational suites, ALADIN and ALATNET developments did not change that much in volume (globally).

Just the editing task now requires more than two months work per Newsletter, and there is only one person to do it (among other non negligible duties). This is too much and cannot last. In the meantime the presently used platform and tool will disappear within the end of this year, in the context of a general move to Linux.

So here is the proposal from the Toulouse Support Team to alleviate the editorial stuff. Indeed, more a requirement than a proposal.

A. The format of contributions

Up to now : ANYTHING !

text, doc*, rtf, latex, html, latex2html, applix, pdf, ... and even more for figures
the complexity of the format is usually independent from the content of the contribution

==> Editorial requirement : Use of Open Office

free software, available on Linux and Windows
user friendly for both word and latex fans, equations allowed (in-line or latex-like)
new also for the Toulouse team
anyway, no choice : Mandatory from the next Newsletter !

B. The form of contributions

==> Editorial requirement : Please, check English and READABILITY at home first !

this concerns everyone, i.e. also some experienced researchers
it should not be so difficult to have another member of the team read the contribution

C. The content of contributions

less problematic than the two previous points, up to now
why not a decentralized editorial board ? (instead of 1 person)

==> volunteers are welcome !

The present editor
Dominique Giard