EVN ACTIVITY OF RADIONET TNA PROGRAM REPORT EVN CBD MEETING, November 2005 17 November 2005 Bob Campbell 1. I took over responsibility for the EVN activity for the RadioNet Trans-national Access program in April. This includes coordinating: a) access hours for eligible experiments on the EVN b) travel support for investigators from eligible experiments to JIVE or any other EVN institute c) travel support for PC members to attend PC meetings, and for the PCchair and EVN scheduler to attend CBD meetings and User meetings. 2. The following table shows a summary of eligible experiments and access hours in 2004-2005. All named experiments are counted separately (e.g., EQ617A & EQ617B = two experiments), and tallies are independent of the destination correlator, since the "access to the EVN" occurs at the time of observing an experiment that appears on the EVN block schedule. 2004 2005 N_elig/N_tot Access hours N_elig/N_tot Access hours Feb/Mar 6/13 81.0 5/15 87.5 May/Jun 7/16 106.0 4/14 45.0 Oct/Nov 13/26 151.0 10/22 121.0 ----- ----- ----- ----- 26/55 338.0 19/51 253.5 These access hours are well above the contractual minimum (111 access hours) and the amount claimed last year (1.35 * 111 = 149.85 access hours), so there's no problem with providing enough access. 3. The following table summarizes why individual experiments didn't qualify for TNA support. There are three ways of to lose eligibility: PI is from the Netherlands, PI is from a non-EU/affiliated country, or <50% of the authors are from the eligible EU/affiliated countries. The table shows how many experiments failed to meet these tests, where the two (mutually exclusive) PI tests are applied first. The PI is determined from the first author on the proposal (not the contact author), and the association of individual authors to countries is set by what appears on the proposal (no in-depth study has been made to characterize how the eligibility would change by fixing the author-country association at the time of observation, although there are individual cases known where the status would change in each direction). The 50% rule is applied only if the PI tests are met. Were it not for the PI tests, an additional 4 experiments from 2004 and 3 from 2005 would have met the 50% rule (out of the 26 & 29 experiments, respectively, that failed the PI tests) -- typically non-eligible PIs lead groups that are themselves ineligible. 2004 2005 PI==NL PI!=EU <50% PI==NL PI!=EU <50% Feb/Mar 5 0 2 2 5 3 May/Jun 1 7 1 5 5 0 Oct/Nov 2 11 0 3 9 0 - -- - -- -- - 8 18 3 10 19 3 Note that in Oct/Nov'04, there were 7 P-band PSR experiments with US PIs, and in Oct/Nov'05, there were 5 (separately counted) parts to GL028, also with a US PI. 4. Informing PIs of eligible experiments about the TNA benefits (& responsibilities) is done in two stages: we include a standard explanation in the pre-observation e-mail sent to all PIs following public distribution of the block schedule, and we send a separate follow-up e-mail after the notification that the FITS files are ready for distribution after correlation has finished. 5. Each eligible project is supposed to complete a Project Summary (a pdf form, to write on if no pdf-editor is available) sent to me and two (virtually identical) web-based questionnaires (one sent directly to Brussels, and the other to Jb). Each experiment observed through Jan'04-Jun'05 has received at least two requests/reminders to complete these forms. The problem of course is that there is neither stick nor carrot from the PI's point of view compelling them to fill in these feedback reports, except for the requirement to have the Project Summary turned in prior to receiving travel reimbursements for data-reduction visits to JIVE or another EVN institute (category [1.b] above). The table below summarizes receipts (so far) of Project Summaries for experiments observed in the past two years. 2004: 5 experiments comprising 56 access hours 2005: 3 experiments comprising 21 access hours 6. The table below summarizes TNA travel-claim reimbursements paid since the beginning of 2004, both the total outlay (categories [1.b-c] above) and payments to the experiment PI or a group member for "data-reduction" visits (category [1.b] only). The Values are in euros. total data-red. visits 2004 19,404.78 1,744.45 through Oct'2005 15,989.64 2,168.10 Two-thirds of the data-reduction visits have been made by PhD students, and one was made to an EVN institute (Bologna). We have received the Project Summaries for the experiments associated with the visits from 2005.