INFORMATION BULLETIN ON VARIABLE STARS
| Konkoly Observatory Budapest 13-26 July 2003 HU ISSN 0374 - 0676 (print) HU ISSN 1587 - 2440 (on-line) |
WWW: http://www.konkoly.hu/IBVS/IBVS.html
During the past three years the editing of IBVS went on its way without
any serious complication. After a short (half year long) period, when L. Szabados and J. Jurcsik served together as scientific editors, László retired and Johanna took over the editorship (beside K. Oláh). Taking seriously his new position as advisor, László still checks all
issues before print (finding our mistakes all the time), and we would like to thank him this service very much expressing our hope that he will continue to help us.
As it is well seen from Fig. 1., the number of printed issues strongly fluctuated
during the last three years. The fast growth of the yearly issues was very
probably due to the spread of the CCD cameras in small observatories and
among amateur astronomers which resulted in the fast growth of newly
discovered variables. Since the beginning of the mass photometry of various
projects catalogizing of the new variables is a serious and still unsolved problem (as we discussed in the Manchester GA). Thus we decided, that new
discoveries should be submitted in collected form, i.e., the authors should put as much new variables as possible into 4 pages. Still, the question arises, if
it has any scientific importance of discovering e.g. 8 new W UMa stars between
14-16 magnitudes, and is it really important to publish those data?
Of course all those discoveries that have some astrophysical importance, are always welcome (e.g. bright stars that were not known as variables etc.).
New light curves of known variables that are made in one color, or without any filter (CCD R!) are also accepted in collected form. Only multicolor light curves with analysis could be accepted on a single object.
Similar is the situation with the times of minima of eclipsing binaries. We stress the importance of publishing these results, but we ask the authors to collect their minima times and submit them together e.g. once or twice a year.
Fig. 2. shows the fluctuations of the issues/year and the printed pages/year
since 1995 to the present. This figure shows, that while the number of issues decreased and in 2002 was about the same as in 1995, we printed 100 pages more. This follows from introducing the collected form of publications: less number of
issues but more results.
All authors are adviced to attach their data to the publication, and a lot of them do so, when they notice that this way their data would be stored for the future. We also asked the authors of the past issues back to the beginnings to send us their datafiles and indeed, many of them sent us the data.
Since about a year ADS lists IBVS among the refereed publications. Indeed, we put a lot of effort for the refereeing with the help of many external referees, who help us a lot. Most of them make the report within a few days, that is necessary for an express journal like IBVS.
Reading the literature we meet IBVS all the time in the references sections of various journals. Table 1 shows the citations/issue numbers of our papers from 1990 till the present. We plan to ask for listing in the Science Citation Index.
During the last three years the Editorial Board of IBVS was the following:
and ex-officio members: E. Guinan (Div. V.), J. Christensen-Dalsgaard (Comm. 27.), P. Szkody (Comm. 42.).
Advisors: P. Harmanec, N.N. Samus, C. Sterken, L. Szabados
We would like to thank them for their help and support during the past three years.
As H. Duerbeck, D. Kurtz and C. Maceroni served 6 years a Board members, they will retire, and the Board will vote for new members. Our suggestions for future Board members are:
Suggestions are welcome.
Drawing inspiration from the STELAR project, the electronic IBVS
was conceived in 1993, and made its debut at the General Assembly in
The Hague (in 1994). By 1996 archive (scanned) issues had become
available on the Internet. Computer-typeset issues have been offered in
HTML format from 2000, and scanned issues are served with figures in
HTML format by the Sydney General Assembly.
There is a choice of different formats: the PostScript is
an identical representation of the refereed printed paper; the HTML,
which has richer features but, as it is created automatically, it
could be different from the authentic PS version, the differences, however,
are only formal; and finally the source,
which is ASCII for the archive issues (produced by an Optical Character
Recognition program, and therefore might contain errors), and LaTeX
for the issues produced after August, 1994.
The PostScript versions are made available on CD-ROMs: Konkoly Obs.
has published two CDs with issues 1-4000 (2000) and 4001-5000 (2001),
and the issues of the JAD regularly contain a few volumes of the
Bulletin.
Cooperation with the ADS and CDS enables cross-linking IBVS with
the ADS Abstract Service and SIMBAD. The software for the production of
HTML version of the papers was developed with the help of the
CDS.
The present activities concerning the electronic IBVS include
the development of tools which the authors can use for
checking and/or submitting their manuscripts, and setting up
a database-like service, which uses the material published in
IBVS. This new service is intended to serve specific data
like i.) finding charts, ii.) comparison stars, iii.) auxiliary data
files (mostly photometry), iv.) light curves, v.) ephemerides,
vi.) O-C curves, and maybe even vii.) minima times. This new service
will respond to standard Astronomical Server URL queries, and will
be Virtual Observatory enabled.
Papers, talks on the electronic IBVS:
New countries (users) : Colombia (2), Croatia (1), Jordan (1), Taiwan (2),
At present (at the previous GA): 719 (556) registered users from 59 (54) countries
Fig. 1. Issues of IBVS from the beginnings till the present. Note the interesting fluctuations of the number of issues /year and their explanations in the bottom panel.
Fig. 2. Comparison of the issues/year with the printed pages/year between 1995-2002.
Year Number of issues Number of citations cit./issue 1990 136 309 2.27 1991 146 327 2.24 1992 130 277 2.13 1993 147 269 1.83 1994 173 352 2.03 1995 143 343 2.40 1996 132 251 1.90 1997 128 223 1.74 1998 114 199 1.75 1999 165 283 1.72 2000 190 273 1.44 2001 202 172 0.85 2002 146 45 0.31
country XXIV GA XXV GA country XXIV GA XXV GA registered users registered users Argentina 9 14 Latvia 1 1 Australia 20 22 Malta 1 1 Austria 3 4 Mexico 3 3 Bangladesh 1 1 Moldova 1 1 Belgium 7 7 New Caledonia 1 1 Brazil 8 12 New Zealand 3 8 Bulgaria 2 7 Norway 1 1 Canada 32 35 Pakistan 1 1 Chile 6 8 Peru 2 4 China 2 3 Poland 11 17 Czech Republic 7 17 Portugal 1 1 Denmark 7 6 Romania 2 4 Dominican Rep. 1 2 Russia 5 17 Egypt 2 3 Slovakia 2 6 Estonia 3 4 Slovenia 2 1 Finland 1 1 South Africa 5 5 France 11 14 Spain 31 36 Germany 16 27 State of Bahrain 1 1 Greece 4 5 Sweden 7 7 Hungary 10 13 Switzerland 2 4 India 9 13 The Netherlands 2 4 Indonesia 1 1 Turkey 10 18 Iran 5 8 UK 35 40 Israel 3 3 Ukraine 3 3 Italy 31 44 Uruguay 1 2 Japan 12 13 USA 197 223 Korea 10 12 Venezuela 2 3
Uzbekistan (1)