[fitsbits] Publishing FITS conventions on arXiv?

[Rob Seaman]

On Dec 5, 2011, at 10:48 AM, Dick Shaw wrote:

> 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 convenience of the community, and that it may be superseded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."

This is an interesting discussion and perhaps amounts to more than a nit, however it is a different interesting discussion than I was seeking to have.

> 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.

This was a good idea for the IVOA recommendations (wherever their normative versions reside) and I think the same logic would apply to the FITS conventions, perhaps even more strongly since they don't otherwise have a normative version, being merely conventional and not otherwise published at all.

Rob
--

>> 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.