S-PLUS Consortium Policies

Membership Policy

The S-PLUS consortium is open to all scientists from Brazil and the participating institutes in other countries (University of La Serena), as well as any member of the J-PLUS and J-PAS collaborations. Membership can be requested by contacting the PI or the Project Scientist using the email splus@iag.usp.br and providing the email used to access the splus.cloud. Any other scientist interested in joining S-PLUS can request membership through a vigorous external collaborator program (see below). Those interested in external collaborator status should contact someone from the collaboration who can then submit a request on their behalf. Any other requests or inquiries about obtaining full membership status will receive full consideration.

External Collaborator Policy

We welcome the involvement of External Collaborators as a means of (1) bringing more visibility to the S-PLUS project, (2) providing outside expertise, and (3) increasing the scientific output of the survey. In principle, we encourage any S-PLUS member to bring in External Collaborators. In order to request an External Collaborator to be involved, a project team member needs to submit a request to the PI or the Project Scientist using the email splus@iag.usp.br and specifying the project one wants to work on and a short description of it, the S-PLUS contact member and providing the email used to access the splus.cloud. The request will be reviewed and handled by the Project Scientist, who may consult other members. External Collaborator status will be given only on a project-by-project basis. If an External Collaborator is involved in several projects, several requests are needed. In order to avoid surprises and misunderstandings, we strongly advise that External Collaborators be announced at the start of a project, rather than at the end. External Collaborators furthermore agree to follow the same procedures and policies as regular members and cannot share any S-PLUS data or results with non-participants without explicit approval of the project lead and the Collaboration Council. Suggestions and requests made by any S-PLUS member to collaborate with other survey teams or projects on a collaboration-wide basis will also receive careful consideration from the Collaboration Council. Requests should be submitted to the Collaboration Council, which will take the lead in exploring possible synergies with the external team and make a final proposal to the collaboration.

Conflict Resolution Policy

Our Ombuds Committee is tasked with resolving any conflicts that may arise between members of the collaboration, including conflicts or disagreements regarding its management, disputes about authorship, and the receiving and handling of complaints, criticism, or suggestions from members in a manner that respects the integrity of the team and all of its individual members. The Ombuds Committee will furthermore respect the confidentiality of comments or complaints made by any member of the collaboration (if confidentiality or anonymity is requested by that member). If the Ombuds Committee does not succeed in resolving a particular conflict, it will submit a summary of the problem and a recommendation to the survey PI, who will then take the final decision. The Ombuds Committee will consist of three staff members from within the S-PLUS collaboration who are appointed by the survey PI. It is expected that the committee will rotate, giving other members of the collaboration a chance to serve as the Ombuds person.

Publication Policy

This policy covers our procedures for proposing and handling projects, scientific publications, and other means of communication, such as presentations of results, project updates, and technical aspects in talks, meetings and conferences, as well as in the media or to the general public.

1. Refereed Publication Procedures

The standard procedure for writing a successful S-PLUS paper should be as simple as possible, but it will require some modest amount of administration. The process is as follows:

Announce: Any individual member may announce or update a project through the form linked on the Member Actions page. At a minimum, the project announcement should include a title, a list of the members involved, and a brief abstract of what the project is about. If the project is primarily a thesis project, special thesis protection status may be requested (see below). Once submitted to the webpage, the project description will be reviewed for clarity by the Project Scientist. The project will then be added to the project list in regular updates.

Join and do: At this point, any member can request to become part of the project by writing to the project lead and expressing her or his interest. The project lead will be responsible for regularly updating the list of project members on the project webpage. Joining a project does not mean that co-authorship is guaranteed. The project lead, in consultation with other members, will be responsible for rewarding contributions to the paper in an appropriate manner.

Write: Once a project has resulted in a draft ready for circulation, the draft should be circulated to the mailing list and announced through the email s-plus@googlegroups.com. Any member may submit comments and request co-author status (provided a direct and real contribution is made, at the discretion of the lead author). The Project Scientist checks that all the key technical references have been given and that the draft includes the standard S-PLUS acknowledgement. Each draft that is circulated will be open for review and comments for a period of two weeks, after which the team can choose to post revised drafts among the authors until no more comments are received. If members of the collaboration are holding up the final submission longer than deemed reasonable by the Project Lead, the Project Lead should consult the Project Scientist and/or the Ombuds Committee.

Publish: If all authors are satisfied with the draft, the team may then submit the draft to a journal as well as upload the draft to the arXiv if they wish. Referee reports should be shared among all the co-authors of the paper, and the revised document should be prepared and resubmitted on a timescale at the discretion of the team directly involved in the paper. In principle, it is expected that no new co-authors will enter at this stage, unless the referee report requires new work that cannot be performed by any of the existing authors, or the team decides to add new work to the paper.

2. Author Order

Scientific papers following from a specific research project will have an author list composed of the individuals who have made a contribution to that project, along with all Builders who have agreed to co-authorship (see below for the definition of Builders). Except for Builders, those requesting co-authorship (if not yet listed) must have done actual work in the form of, e.g., sharing of data or software, data reduction, analysis, writing, or substantial comments on the draft paper. The Lead Author, in consultation with the project members, may determine that an acknowledgement is more appropriate in some cases.

The standard author order on S-PLUS papers will consist of two tiers. The first tier will consist of a list of the authors closest involved with the project, ordered on level of involvement or alphabetically (at the Lead Author's discretion). The second tier will consist of a list of the Builders who have agreed to be listed on the paper. The Lead Author may decide to include the full list of Builders in the draft stage. Although it is discouraged, projects that plan to have a fully alphabetical author list should announce this clearly from the start of the project, so that everyone involved will understand this special circumstance. Any disputes about co-authorship should be directed to the Project Scientist. If this does not resolve the conflict, the Project Scientist will recommend that the Ombuds Committee be consulted, who will study the request and make a recommendation to the survey PI.

The Lead Author is responsible for keeping an up-to-date list of authors. Once placed on a paper's author list, authors may request to the paper's Lead Author at any time to have her or his name removed. It is important that all authors have read and broadly understood the content of all papers they are co-authors of before final publication.

3. Protection of Thesis Projects

The success of S-PLUS will rely in part on the work by students who perform significant parts of the data processing, building tools for exploiting large data sets, scientific analysis and other tasks as part of their MSc or PhD thesis. Students should be able to perform this work in a positive, collaborative atmosphere that benefits both the collaboration and their personal scientific careers. It is therefore reasonable that the collaboration offers some protection for thesis project. As opposed to regular science projects, thesis projects may receive a special status that protects the students from engaging in direct competition or publication race with other S-PLUS team members. However, in order to receive this protection, three requirements need to be fulfilled.

(1) The thesis project needs to be announced to the collaboration in a timely manner (preferably at the start of the project).

(2) The thesis project needs to make it explicitly clear what work will be performed as part of the thesis. It should be precise enough to allow other S-PLUS members to still perform related (but non-overlapping) projects.

(3) The thesis protection is not open-ended but will follow a reasonable timescale. If a publication has not been submitted not to exceed two years after the announcement of a project, the specific project may lose its thesis protection and could be opened up for other team members to pursue.

(4) If the supervisor or the student leaves the collaboration, the project goes back to the regular project list, leaving the thesis project protection status.

4. Non-refereed publications, conference proceedings, posters, presentations, etc.

The work rules that fall into this category are significantly more relaxed compared to those regarding refereed publications described above. Presentations and non-refereed publications may credit those members who are actively involved with the particular project by listing them as authors or otherwise (acknowledgements, or mentioning on slides, are fine, too, at the lead presenter's discretion). Builders are generally not listed on non-refereed publications or in presentations, unless the lead author or presenter explicitly chooses to do so. No prior announcement or approval for publishing non-refereed work or giving any kind of presentation related to S-PLUS is required, but people are, of course, welcome to do so if they prefer. Comments provided on a draft conference proceeding do not need to result in co-authorship (again, discretion of the lead author). In fact, we encourage S-PLUS members to share the developments of the survey and its scientific results as frequently as possible and to a wide audience and to be good advocates for the S-PLUS collaboration. For those who are interested, we will strive to make available standard S-PLUS presentation material, and we encourage members to share their own materials with the collaboration through the team webpage.

5. Definition of S-PLUS Builders

To give proper credit to those responsible for the construction of the most crucial S-PLUS infrastructure, the PI will establish a list of Builders who have made significant contributions to the S-PLUS project beyond its explicit scientific results. This may include work on optics, telescope, observatory infrastructure, calibration, camera, data reduction and archiving software, management, and fundraising.

Builders have the right to have their names added to any scientific paper unless they indicate they would not like to be added as co-authors on the paper. The names of the Builders will be listed in alphabetical order in a second tier that follows the first tier of names of those closest involved in the writing of the paper (ordered alphabetically or ordered on the level of commitment, to the discretion of the lead author). Builders who have actively contributed to a paper beyond their role as a Builder can appear in the first tier, again at the discretion of the primary person responsible (usually the lead author). The author responsible may choose to include all Builders in the list of authors upon circulation of a paper draft, but should still seek the personal approval of each Builder that they want their name is to be listed on the paper before final publication. Builders do not need to be listed on non-refereed and informal publications, including conference proceedings, presentations and communications to scientific audiences, the media or the general public. However, any S-PLUS member is, of course, free to do so and is encouraged to give proper credit at their own discretion.

6a. S-PLUS Survey Overview Paper

All S-PLUS members were invited to be part of the Survey Overview Paper (Project 1; now published as Mendes de Oliveira et al. 2019), regardless of having provided comments or other direct contributions.

6b. S-PLUS Data Release Papers

The regular public data releases of S-PLUS data will be accompanied by a paper (or papers) describing the contents of these data releases. The S-PLUS PI shall be responsible for the planning and production of such papers. Data Release papers will follow all the standard rules related to the publication of a (refereed) scientific publication (see above), including announcement of the project, management of the work, the writing, circulation and revision of drafts, and the proper inclusion of co-authors and Builders. The PI may consider again to include all members, regardless of their contributions.

7. Acknowledgements

Each S-PLUS publication (including theses and conference proceedings) must include a standard minimal S-PLUS acknowledgement that is maintained by the Project Scientist and can be found on the website. In cases where the publication platform offers no room for the inclusion of the acknowledgement (for example, abstracts or conference proceedings), this requirement is obviously waived.

The current text of the standard acknowledgement reads:

The S-PLUS project, including the T80-South robotic telescope and the S-PLUS scientific survey, was founded as a partnership between the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), the Observatório Nacional (ON), the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), with important financial and practical contributions from other collaborating institutes in Brazil, Chile (Universidad de La Serena), and Spain (Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón, CEFCA). We further acknowledge financial support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq), the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), the Carlos Chagas Filho Rio de Janeiro State Research Foundation (FAPERJ), and the Brazilian Innovation Agency (FINEP). The members of the S-PLUS collaboration are grateful for the contributions from CTIO staff in helping in the construction, commissioning and maintenance of the T80-South telescope and camera. We are also indebted to Rene Laporte, INPE, and Keith Taylor for their important contributions to the project. From CEFCA, we thank Antonio Marín-Franch for his invaluable contributions in the early phases of the project, David Cristóbal-Hornillos and his team for their help with the installation of the data reduction package jype version 0.9.9, César Íñiguez for providing 2D measurements of the filter transmissions, and all other staff members for their support with various aspects of the project.

8. Page Charges

Page charges are the responsibility of the authors of each publication.

9. Right to Embargo

The lead author(s) of a publication may embargo the results until the paper appears on the arXiv, is published by a journal, or until the embargo is lifted (whichever comes first). The project webpage and the email circulating a draft paper should state clearly in case the work is embargoed.

10. Conflict Resolution