The NOAO Publications Tracking Program: Developing Policies & Procedures for Usage, Acknowledgment, and Citation of Data

• Main Authors: Hunt Sharon, Norman Dara J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: EDP Sciences 2018-01-01
• Series: EPJ Web of Conferences
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201818612007

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) has a complex publications tracking program, which is coordinated by the NOAO Librarian. We track publications that use data from multiple observatories (Kitt Peak National Observatory [KPNO] in Tucson, Arizona, and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory [CTIO] in La Serena, Chile, as well as non-NOAO telescopes to which we grant community access at other observatories); multiple telescopes and instruments; multiple observing programs, including survey programs; and multiple datasets in the Science Data Archive (SDA) at NOAO. The growing SDA and new user services, such as the Data Lab, ensure that the use of NOAO archival datasets will become even more widespread and important for scientific discovery and research. Accurate and complete publication tracking is essential for reporting to our funding agencies, developing our programs, and determining our scientific contributions and impact. Setting policies to guide authors in specifying and acknowledging usage of NOAO data is an essential element in our ability to determine and document relevant publications. Developing systems to track the use of our telescope data and archival datasets is another critical element. New policies to track the use of our telescope data are being developed, new systems to track the use and reuse of datasets within our particular institutional context are being explored, and methods of linking our publications data with our dataset usage data are being devised. Updated policies for the proper and ethical usage, acknowledgement, and citation of our archival data are being written and reviewed.