Present: Laura, Chris, Inés, Orlando, Leo, Viktor, Jeremy, Frank
This meeting was devoted to discussion on a single topic only: that of phenomenology papers (co-)authored by DUNE members, making detailed statements on DUNE physics sensitivity but published with limited authorship. (At present we have two requests for papers to be classified as such.)
A broadly shared sentiment was that this ought not to occur, and that such papers ought to have full DUNE authorship (which is precisely what the policy document docdb-1115 stipulates). This connects to the question what use it is to the DUNE collaboration to have theory/phenomenology colleagues who have access to all the DUNE-internal information (and co-sign the DUNE collaboration papers) but whose phenomenological work is not to the benefit of the collaboration. (As an aside, we believe that once DUNE starts implementing a Common Fund, and thereby the threshold for joining -or remaining on- DUNE becomes higher, to a good extent this problem will sort itself out.) It also does justice to the fact that we believe that statements on DUNE sensitivity made by DUNE collaborators are easily interpreted as having been made by the collaboration.
The practical concern is how to enforce the policy, however. It is certainly technically possible for colleagues to bypass the APB altogether and publish this sort of phenomenology papers. This has in fact happened already. (We discussed in particular a paper by Beacom et al., which in the end was deemed to have been "beneficial" to DUNE; but also one paper that went against DUNE's general views.) Effectively this means that the policy penalises "good" collaborators who at least make the effort to notify the APB.
Laura made a proposal, which met with broad support: namely, to urge authors of such papers anyway to strongly consider making their paper into a full-DUNE paper; but not to insist. This amounts to accepting that we have an imperfect policy (and therefore steps need to be taken to improve it), while at the same time not blocking progress. If authors insist on keeping their paper in limited-authorship form, they ought to make a more explicit statement that their paper does not represent the DUNE collaboration's analysis/views.
Action items: