Membership Policy
MeerTime is a consortium of organisations that have officially joined via application to the consortium. Applications from new organisations are considered at the bi-monthly MeerTime telecons and should be sent to the MeerTime Chair. Institutions are admitted by a simple vote from the institutional chairs, where each institution has one vote. In the event of a tie the chair will have an additional casting vote.
Each organisation has a nominated chair. Organisations put forward personnel for membership from within their organisation. If someone leaves an organisation they can apply to join at their new institute and if they have been "good citizens" would normally be automatically reinstated but will require an application from their new institution and would normally be expected to contribute to the MeerTime project costs on a pro-rata basis.
Letters of intent for new institutions need to supply:
New staff, postdocs, students or technical staff at member institutions can join the collaboration by having their institutional chair sending their name, contact details and proposed membership of working groups to the MeerTime chair in advance of the next bi-monthly meeting.
South African institutions are automatically eligible for membership in recognition of their country's investment in the MeerKAT telescope and are not required to contribute to the running costs.
Institutional Obligations:
Each organisation has a nominated chair. Organisations put forward personnel for membership from within their organisation. If someone leaves an organisation they can apply to join at their new institute and if they have been "good citizens" would normally be automatically reinstated but will require an application from their new institution and would normally be expected to contribute to the MeerTime project costs on a pro-rata basis.
Letters of intent for new institutions need to supply:
- A nominated contact person.
- List of Personnel and contact details - academic staff, postdocs, students, technical staff.
- Working groups and science projects that everyone from the institution is interested in joining, along with an appropriate email from each participant giving their permission to be included in the application.
- A statement that they are happy to contribute towards MeerTime's running costs should they arise - ie hardware upgrades.
New staff, postdocs, students or technical staff at member institutions can join the collaboration by having their institutional chair sending their name, contact details and proposed membership of working groups to the MeerTime chair in advance of the next bi-monthly meeting.
South African institutions are automatically eligible for membership in recognition of their country's investment in the MeerKAT telescope and are not required to contribute to the running costs.
Institutional Obligations:
- The nominated contact person should attend the bi-monthly telecons or nominate a proxy.
- The institution should contribute towards the running costs and equipment required to run MeerTime. The last equipment upgrade was funded in 2019-2020 and the servers are expected to last for 4 years at a minimum.
- The institution should contribute a pro rata amount towards any staff positions that support MeerTime in South Africa.
- The pro rata amount is proportional to the number of staff and postdoc members. Currently no staff members are being funded by the MeerTime members.
Adding a pulsar to MeerTime
Third parties would normally become MeerTime affiliates if they wished to add a specific pulsar or pulsar to one of the existing four MeerTime themes for regular or one-off observations. Such requests will be balanced against the scientific value of existing targets by discussion with the relevant Theme leaders. The degree to which MeerTime members would become collaborators on any new sources would depend upon the value they add, not because of any ownership of the PTUSE equipment or MeerKAT time allocation. Urgent (time critical) requests for high value science should be sent straight to the PI [email protected] and CC the project scientist [email protected] for quick scheduling with SARAO.
It should be noted that the PTUSE equipment is publicly available to any user and when open access calls are made by SARAO that include pulsar observations they will be supported. Any data obtained via PTUSE should ultimately be removed from the hard drives as to not prevent other users using them, and provided to SARAO for archiving and ultimate public release.
MeerTime will not be making judgements about the relative merits of pulsar observations that are not included in our theme's observations.
It should be noted that the PTUSE equipment is publicly available to any user and when open access calls are made by SARAO that include pulsar observations they will be supported. Any data obtained via PTUSE should ultimately be removed from the hard drives as to not prevent other users using them, and provided to SARAO for archiving and ultimate public release.
MeerTime will not be making judgements about the relative merits of pulsar observations that are not included in our theme's observations.
MeerTime Affiliates
Individuals can apply to the MeerTime chair to become MeerTime affiliates. MeerTime affiliates are usually just working with MeerTime members on a specific project or subset of projects within one of the four themes, have no financial liabilities, and are subject to MeerTime's data release and publication policies.
Data Release Policy
MeerTime data will be released according to its data release policies:
- Data from the Thousand Pulsar Array project will be released as soon as it is validated on the pulsars.org.au website. It will be possible to both view calibrated profiles and obtain arrival times, and see what folding ephemeris was used to take the data and correct any archives.
- Data from the Pulsar Timing Array project will be released in periodic time releases, on similar timescales to that of the other PTAs that comprise the IPTA. (Typically every 18 months). The first data release contains data up until September 2021 and is described in Miles et al. (2022). A tarball of the TOAs will be presented on the pulsars.org.au website.
- The Globular Cluster project will release folded full-Stokes parameter profiles for known pulsars within 18 months of their observation and decimated forms of the filterbank data that was obtained in Stokes I that might be suitable for future folding or searching. Published results will have their profiles and associated arrival times available on the website.
- The Relbin project will release their data when student projects using the data are published which would normally be within 18 months of the conclusion of observing campaigns.
- 100% of the raw folded data and metadata will also be stored in the SARAO archives and ultimately released to the community. MeerTime will attempt to point out any inconsistencies in the data, or macroscopic time/frequency offsets in the data gleaned from our analyses.
Authorship Policy
The MeerTime authorship policy is as presented below:
A list of "builders" is established via a process of expressions of interest and judgement by a sub-committee formed by the MeerTime Executive Committee. Papers produced from data wholly obtained in the next ~18 months (in the first instance until 31 Dec 2020) were required to include the builders if they used more than 10h of telescope time or included more than ten objects from different pointings. Thus a paper on 20 MSPs from an 8h globular cluster observation would not require the builders to be authors.
Currently the builders list has been revised and is current at 1 Jan 2022. If required, the next call for builders will be made in Q2 2023 for a mid-2023 revision by the MeerTime Executive.
Secondary products from already published data do not require authors from the builders list to be added to their authorlists.
The list of authors will comprise (in order):
Papers that describe the entire project (eg the Bailes et al. (2020) system description paper) would normally be by the main author of the paper and then everyone who has contributed to the writing of the paper in order deemed by the theme leaders, followed by the remaining members of MeerTime in alphabetical order, followed by any staff SARAO want added to the publication.
When a scientific result is first considered for publication, the project leader should contact the Science Theme Leaders and work with them to determine who will be involved in the preparation of the manuscript and associated science, and ask if any of the current builder's list want to be listed on the paper. Builders are still expected to read the papers and provide scientific or technical commentary.
Papers circulated to co-authors would normally require 10 clear working days (ie 2 weeks) for authors to provide their comments on the manuscript.
A list of "builders" is established via a process of expressions of interest and judgement by a sub-committee formed by the MeerTime Executive Committee. Papers produced from data wholly obtained in the next ~18 months (in the first instance until 31 Dec 2020) were required to include the builders if they used more than 10h of telescope time or included more than ten objects from different pointings. Thus a paper on 20 MSPs from an 8h globular cluster observation would not require the builders to be authors.
Currently the builders list has been revised and is current at 1 Jan 2022. If required, the next call for builders will be made in Q2 2023 for a mid-2023 revision by the MeerTime Executive.
Secondary products from already published data do not require authors from the builders list to be added to their authorlists.
The list of authors will comprise (in order):
- Members of the science team responsible for the result. First-author position will normally go to the person who did the most work in deriving and presenting the science, and often a student or postdoc. The Science working group chairs would decide the ordering of the personnel involved. Where close supervision of a student has occurred, the second author position would normally go to the supervisor. The Science working group chairs have an obligation to give students and postdocs that have contributed to the working groups the opportunity to lead projects that can lead to publications.
- Members of the "builder's list" in alphabetical order.
- Any critical personnel deemed appropriate by SARAO in alphabetical order if the project used commissioning time.
- For large-scale projects and summaries of major data releases, the MeerTime institutional leads may opt in.
Papers that describe the entire project (eg the Bailes et al. (2020) system description paper) would normally be by the main author of the paper and then everyone who has contributed to the writing of the paper in order deemed by the theme leaders, followed by the remaining members of MeerTime in alphabetical order, followed by any staff SARAO want added to the publication.
- Neither financial contributions, nor membership of a MeerTime Science Theme or Working Group are ever sufficient criteria to obtain authorship on a scientific paper. Authors must contribute their time to one or more of essential MeerTime infrastructure, observing, intellectual aspects of a project's planning and execution, writing or significant management overhead to appear on MeerTime publications.
When a scientific result is first considered for publication, the project leader should contact the Science Theme Leaders and work with them to determine who will be involved in the preparation of the manuscript and associated science, and ask if any of the current builder's list want to be listed on the paper. Builders are still expected to read the papers and provide scientific or technical commentary.
Papers circulated to co-authors would normally require 10 clear working days (ie 2 weeks) for authors to provide their comments on the manuscript.
Working Group Policy
The MeerTime Chair recruits MeerTime staff and students to lead working groups for critical project infrastructure.
Chairs of working groups report at the monthly MeerTime meetings and are responsible for delivering against project milestones.
Chairs of working groups report at the monthly MeerTime meetings and are responsible for delivering against project milestones.
Science Themes Policy
There are four Science Themes each of which has leaders. The Science Theme Leaders decide what projects are operational within their theme and allocate sufficient time for them to achieve their goals. Students and postdocs making significant contributions to the working groups should be given the opportunity to be a nominated project Primary Investigator. Each project should be given a unique code to track its time allocation. Many projects can be used for multiple pieces of science. Science Theme Leaders will ensure active projects have a description commensurate with their time allocation.
The four themes have the acronyms:
Science Theme Leaders will provide a summary of progress of their projects at the monthly meetings and list active ones on the MeerTime website. They also are responsible for reporting on their projects in the annual reports.
The four themes have the acronyms:
- TPA: 1000 Pulsar Array
- GC: Globular Clusters
- RB: Relativistic Binaries
- PTA: Pulsar Timing Array
Science Theme Leaders will provide a summary of progress of their projects at the monthly meetings and list active ones on the MeerTime website. They also are responsible for reporting on their projects in the annual reports.