Open access honor system and the problem we are trying to address:

Goal: In every other SN project that the members of the SNfactory have either led or participated in we have always announced every SN discovered as soon as possible, so that all researchers can study them.

What has made this particular set of SNe different? We are allowed to use the Palomar QUEST camera under rules that assign each of the types of transients/SNe to specified research groups. We only know if we have any rights to a given candidate after it is already spectroscopically typed -- and the typing is almost exclusively performed by our custom-built SNfactory IFU spectrograph at the Hawaii 2.2-m. It has taken some time to see how these rules work in practice, and we have found that the various groups have become willing to send out announcements of spectroscopically confirmed supernovae . With their permission, we can now therefore consider making the standard procedure the announcement of all supernovae as they are spectroscopically confirmed.

The goal of the SNfactory is to study a statistically significant sample of SNe Ia in the nearby Hubble flow, to apply them to cosmological measurements, and to refine their use as distance indicators. The only way to get such a large sample of Hubble flow supernovae was to build significant infrastructure (cameras, telescopes, software, etc.), and commit significant manpower to carry out an unbiased SN search. This also required us to build a spectrograph and pay for the use of a 2-meter telescope to classify our discoveries (and then follow them). This was full-time effort for several years for several students, postdocs, and scientists, both to build the capability and to begin to run it. These supernova announcements are the products of these efforts.

The main worry with respect to early announcement of all the discoveries is that a new project could be built that would simply follow up these SNe and then often scoop the SNfactory team on much of the science results. Presumably, with no day-to-day search, observing, analysis, and screening operations to maintain, a group just working on follow-up and its analysis could stay just ahead of the SNfactory team. If this happens, it would certainly badly hurt the careers of the students, postdocs, and scientists, who would then be doing more than half the work (conservatively estimated) for none of the papers -- and none of the scientific fun part of the project.

A Proposed Solution: In the end, it seems that other scientists should understand this problem, and be trusted to work to make this a mutually beneficial experience. Clearly, there is a difference between observers who would like a few supernovae here or there to follow-up and study, and those who wish to build a statistically significant sample with a concerted follow-up effort. This is why we feel that we should make our supernova discoveries “open access”: We would certainly like other observers to feel free to use SNfactory discoveries for studies that are not going to undercut the SNfactory’s program. Please just sign in, grab the finding charts, etc., and remember to cite the SNfactory in any resulting paper at first mention of the supernova. In particular, include the following citations:

• Aldering, G., et al., 2002, SPIE, 4836, 61
• Copin, Y., et al., 2006, New Astronomy Reviews, 50, 436

We ask that if you are contemplating a larger, more systematic use of SNfactory SNe Ia – say 10 or more a year – that you work with us in collaboration, rather than compete with our team on these supernovae. The goal would be to come up with a reasonable collaborative style of operation that would allow the various teams autonomy, but also the benefit of interesting scientific discussion and -- ideally -- discovery! So if you are in this category, please contact us to discuss.

Collaborations of Particular Interest: We also welcome possible collaborations on any individual SN or sets of SNe. We would be particularly interested in collaborating on cross-comparing photometry and calibration for supernovae observed in common, at telescopes with well-calibrated photometric systems. We would also be very interested in observations that are complementary to the SNfactory’s spectro-photometric time series, such as near-IR lightcurves/spectra, spectropolarimetry, more frequent (nightly) sampled high-signal-to-noise optical lightcurves, etc.

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