[fitsbits] Publishing FITS conventions on arXiv?

[Dick Shaw]

I feel compelled to pick the following nit. The official FITS standard is 
published at http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_standard.html. While v3.0 was 
reproduced in A&A, it is strictly speaking not correct to say that this is the 
standard. From the text of the Foreward:

"We caution that this presentation of the standard is for the
convenience of the community, and that it may be superseded
by newer versions. We refer the reader to the extensive set of
resources on the FITS Support Office at NASA/GSFC web site1
which contains the latest version of the standard document as
well as a comprehensive collection of FITS-related documents,
software for validating and viewing FITS files, and sample FITS
files from a variety of sources."

That said, it may well be worthwhile for authors of the conventions to publish 
their FITS conventions on arXiv, provided is clear to the readers that said 
conventions are not officially part of the standard. This would certainly 
raise the profile of the conventions in the research community.

>From: Rob Seaman <seaman at noao.edu>
> A major feature of the FITS standard is that it is published in the refereed 
>literature.  This is unusual, perhaps unique, in the realm of standards. 
> FITS is now also defined by the registered FITS conventions that are layered 
>on top of the standard itself.  Few, in any, of these have been published in 
>any sense.  A recent trend in astronomy has been to use the arXiv preprint 
>archive as a publication mechanism for papers from the astronomical software 
>community, for instance for IVOA Recommendations such as:
> 
> 	http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0523
> 
> Comments on whether we should similarly publish the FITS conventions in the 
>same way?  The value of FITS, in particular the value of the FITS 
>conventions, is a network effect that is proportionally increased by the 
>number of community members exposed to the documents.