eROSITA_DE Individual External Collaborators: Guidelines

The text below provide a guideline for all potential Individual external collaborators. It is mostly extracted from the official eROSITA Policy Document (signed on 16.04.2019)

Individual External Collaborators (IEC) are scientists who are not Consortium members, but who are nonetheless permitted to participate in or lead projects using eROSITA_DE proprietary data in collaboration with Consortium members, contribute to eROSITA-related activities, and author related papers.
IECs are approved by the PS upon request and recommendation of the relevant Working Group chair(s) and in consultation with the CCB.

An IEC is typically an individual but is understood also to include an individual and a PhD student working under their direct supervision. 

IEC requests are evaluated based on a written proposal. These should have defined aims, scope and duration, and specific outputs/deliverables, typically a scientific paper or papers. IEC proposals must also be submitted for non-members of the Consortium who wish to co-author publications led by a consortium member based on eROSITA_DE proprietary data. Proposals may also be submitted for projects initiated by the IEC. 

All IECs must be sponsored by an existing consortium member, who presents the IEC proposal for consideration. The sponsoring member must be involved in the scientific work of the IEC and any resulting publication(s), and is responsible for ensuring the IEC and their project adhere to the consortium rules. IECs may also be submitted without a sponsoring consortium member. In this case the WG chairs will assign an appropriate sponsor or sponsor(s) from within the consortium to work with the IEC. The rights and scientific interests of External Collaborators shall be subordinate to those of Consortium members. 

IEC proposals will be evaluated by the relevant WG Chair(s), in consultation with the WG to ensure there is no conflict of interest. The WG chairs may suggest additional participants or collaborators in the project in addition to the sponsor(s). Other consortium members will be permitted to join the external collaboration project and become an author of any consequent publications should their contribution merit authorship, consistent with the publication policy. The PS grants IEC status upon recommendation of the WG chair(s) and in consultation with the CCB, to ensure there are no remaining conflicts with other Working Groups.

The CCB should review periodically the status of IEC and the progress of their activities. When requested to do so, IEC shall submit reports to the PS and the relevant WG chair(s) describing their activities related to the use of eROSITA_DE proprietary data. 

IECs will typically be granted for a period of one year, with the possibility of renewal/extension. Renewal requests are the responsibility of the IEC and/or the sponsoring member and IEC status will lapse by default in the absence of such a renewal proposal. The sponsor may nonetheless apply for renewal of IEC status that has lapsed with the agreement the WG chair(s). 

Research projects and publications led by IECs will be submitted to the Publication Archive by the sponsoring Consortium member. If he/she has left the Consortium, a new member will act as liaison for the External Collaborator, and will be responsible for uploading and updating EC-led publication in the Publication Archive.

As per general policy, IEC may not participate in research projects that make use of proprietary eROSITA data outside the eROSITA_DE collaboration (i.e. work at the same time on Russian proprietary data), unless authorized to do so by the PI.

Collaborative projects of scope greater than that described above will need special consideration ('Group External Collaborations').

Practicalities

Proposal Preparation: standard IEC

3 The first step is to identify the relevant Working Group(s) for the project. Within the WG(s) the IEC proposer should contact and define a "sponsoring member". This can be the Chair of the WG, or any full member of the consortium. Once the project is identified and defined, please fill in the doc template with all relevant information.

- A complete proposal will contain:

After the project is defined and the template form filled in, it is the responsibility of the Sponsoring Member to submit it to the collaboration, following the instructions below.

Proposal Preparation: co-authorship IEC requests

These must be based on existing approved projects/papers already present in eROPUB. Co-authors IEC are not supposed, under normal circumstances, to work directly on eROSITA data. Once the project leader/PI is identified and defined a list of collaborators who need to be co-authors of the paper (because of their contribution to the followup efforts, or interpretation), she/he should fill in the doc template for co-authors IEC with all relevant information. There is no limit to the number of collaborators that can be included in a COA-IEC proposal, provided it is restricted to the collaborators that actually contributed in a way or another, to the paper. For standard papers the request should be submitted as early as possible after eROPUB publication, and in any case before the submission of the paper for the 3 weeks internal review, at the latest. For particularly urgent cases ( Atel, ToOs, DDTs) the request can be submitted for a fast response directly to the PI who will discuss it with the relevant WG chairs.

- A complete proposal will contain:

After the template form is filled in, it is the responsibility of the Sponsoring Member to submit it to the collaboration, following the instructions below (first approval by Working Group and then CCB).


How to submit EC proposals in the eROSITA_DE Wiki (for sponsoring Consortium members)


1. Uploading Proposals on the Wiki

1.1 Login into the Wiki

1.2 Edit the URL

1.3 Use the right Wiki template and save the page (you might also want to subscribe to this page to get notification when it is evaluated) with the Name specified in point 1.2 above.

- Do not forget to set the appropriate EroXxx group in ACL and Title etc.

2. Proposals Submission and Evaluation