
Dear Dr. Forveille,

     Dr. Hrvoje Božić is slowly recovering from his illness and we plan
to resume our revision of the paper on a half century of UBV photometry
at Hvar. We understand your concern about the length of the paper and
are prepared to use ZENODO intensively. However, before starting this
tedious work, I would like to clarify the following thing with you. 
This is, why I am writing you privately, to your institutional address.

    Let me to summarise the story.

We submitted the first version of the paper on November 28, 2024.
In it we indicated that we plan to publish whole Hvar archives
after finishing a few detailed studies of particular stars.
I then received the following email from you:

=============================================================================
From editorial.office@aanda.org Sat Nov 30 09:51:13 2024
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2024 10:51:03 +0100
From: "Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A)" <editorial.office@aanda.org>
To: petr.harmanec@matfyz.cuni.cz
Subject: aa53206-24: Data policy
Resent-From: <petr.harmanec@matfyz.cuni.cz>


Article reference: aa53206-24
Title: Half a century of UBV photometry at Hvar I. Overview and emission-line
stars
Author(s): H. Božić , P. Harmanec, J. Horn, K. Juza, P. Koubský, S. Kříž, P.
Mayer, P. Hadrava, D. Ruždjak, D. Sudar, S. Štefl , M. Wolf, P. Zasche, M. Brož
, J. Havelka, J. Honsa, V. Kocourek, M. Tlamicha, F. Žďárský, A. Harmanec, J.
Jonák, A. Oplištilová, I. Piantschitsch, I. Skokić, J. Švrčková, K. Vitovský,
D. Vršnak , M. Zummer

Dear Prof. Harmanec,

A&A authors are required to publish the data that are presented and discussed in
articles and needed to reproduce the results. Archiving the data also increases
the value of the article, and thus its impact in the community. Publication of
the data, usually at the CDS, should occur immediately upon acceptance of the
article. Some common examples of data that must be archived are measurements of
radial velocities that led to the detection of planetary or stellar companions
to stars and photometric data used in asteroseismologic studies. By data, we
mean not only primary observational material, but also tools of general interest
such as catalogs or theoretical tables of lasting values.

Unless you are willing to reconsider the data availability policy which you
state in Sect. 5, I will therefore be unable to consider your manuscript for
publication.

With best regards,

Thierry Forveille
A&A Editor-in-Chief
===============================================================================

Not very happy from your request since the archive contain unprecedently
long and well reduced series of photometric data, which we have the
right to fully expoit, we nevertheless submitted a revised
version, in which we agreed to publish the whole archives immediately
after the acceptance of the paper for publication. 

  The paper was then sent to the referee, Dr. Dietrich Baade, who
suggested many changes, additions and a significant shortening, 
but at the same time also various extensions of the paper.

   We shall reply to this report in due time.

  Shortly after receiving the referee report, I became quite disappointed 
when I noted that Astronomy and Astrophysics accepted for publication 
a very long paper by Labadie-Bartz et al., with dr. Baade as an active 
co-author, which   d o e s   n o t provide tables of individual 
equivalent-width (EW) measurements and measurements of EW ratios, 
which are then subjected to rather questionable period analyses 
(often based on a very limited number of data points). This is in 
a strict contradiction with what you wrote to us. Are all animals equal?  

See
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/forth/aa53321-24.pdf

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Current A&A policies
----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
  While writing you, let me also to express several comments about the
  current journal policies from the point of view of a person, who
  served in the Board of Directors and for some time also in the A&A
  Ececutive Committee. I would like to ask you to provide my comments
  and suggestions to the Board Members before the next Board meeting
  for your and their consideration.

I am aware that I do not know all reasons which led you to implement
the Open Access policy but it is obvious that it is one of the main
reasons of the current push on short articles, and of the situation that
the journal is less and less serving to the astronomers from 
journal sponsoring countries.  In practice that means that the
member states of A&A are actually sponsoring libraries and institutions
from non-member states, in many cases those that could afford buing
the journal. 

   There are, in my view, two aspects of your current policy, worth
reconsideration. You are pushing on concise and short atricles but
at the same time you ask the authors that they put even the short focused
studies of individual objects into ``broader astrophysical context".
This in turn means - if I take example of the field of hot stars -
that we all read repeatably about how hot stars are important for
the galaxy evolution, that most hot stars are probably binary or
multiple systems etc. And all respective papers get for one page
longer.. I think that this evaluation of broader context should be
reserved for summarising studies but that the studies of individual 
stars should remain focused on the new findings about them. They
represent important pieces of information that helps to built 
the general picture.

   Another aspect is the rather prudent insistence of language
editors that every abbreviation should be explained with the
first occurrence of it in the paper. While I understand this
reccomendation in principle, my recent experience is that it is
again prolonging the papers and I am not sure that at the age
of easy electronic searches such well-known abbreviations like
the astronomical time unit JD, or short names of well-known
space observatories like IUE, Kepler or TESS need explicit 
explanation, especially in cases when the references to
instrument description is given in the paper.  

   I hope you will consider these aspects.

   Wishing you success in your hard work,

            With my best regards,

                                     Petr Harmanec

