IVS 2011 Annual Report

Call for Submission and Instructions



Call

The IVS Directing Board invites all IVS components to submit reports for the IVS 2011 Annual Report. The 2011 Annual Report will cover the calendar year from January 1 through December 31, 2011.

Due Date

Reports are due by January 31, 2012. The Annual Report is a valuable way to document and communicate IVS' activities within and outside the IVS community, and this value increases the earlier the report is available. We hope to have the report ready for distribution no later than two months after the deadline. Please help us to achieve this goal by adhering to the deadline.

New information

New and/or critical information is distributed throughout this Web page, highlighted in red. Even if you have submitted previous annual reports, please scan the page for this information.

Contact Information

If we have any questions or problems, we will contact the author identified by the \ContactAuthorReference keyword. To tell us to contact someone other than one of the authors, please include two comment lines at the start of the report:

    % Contact_person: (person's name)
    % Contact_e-mail: (person's e-mail address)

Citation

The Annual Report will be published as a NASA Technical Publication. The reference should be cited as follows: International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry 2011 Annual Report, edited by D. Behrend and K. D. Baver, NASA/TP-2012-??????, 2012. (NASA's publication office will provide the running number represented by the six question marks, once the volume is finalized.)

Contents of the Annual Report

As in previous Annual Reports, the publication will include reports from all components and Coordinators:

  • Network Stations
  • Operation Centers
  • Correlators
  • Data Centers
  • Analysis Centers
  • Technology Development Centers
  • Network Coordinator
  • Analysis Coordinator
  • Technology Coordinator
  • Coordinating Center

We will continue with the bibliography list. So, please provide in addition to your report, a list of publications from the calendar year 2011 that you would like included in the bibliography. Send your list directly to

Other items of general interest to IVS will be included in the publication. Please send the Coordinating Center any suggestions or contributions for other articles to be included in the Annual Report.

What to Write About in Your Report

Suggested topics include the following:

  • Section 1: General Information. Please provide general information about your component such as its location, its sponsoring agency and what type of contribution you are making to IVS. If you have a photograph of your antenna, correlator, analysis center, etc. you should include it.
  • Section 2: Component Description. Please provide a technical/scientific description of your component: for example, parameters of your antenna, capabilities of your correlator, types of analysis solutions that you do, technology developments in progress, etc.
  • Section 3: Staff. Please provide a list of your staff members who are contributing to IVS, provide some information about them and indicate what each person is working on.
  • Section 4: Current Status and Activities. Please provide information about the current status and activities of your component during the reporting period, such as operational support, milestones reached, analysis performed or ongoing projects. Please describe any significant changes compared to the previous year's report, such as staffing changes, new equipment, changes in methods, new types of results or a change in your activity level. You do not need to repeat information already provided in the previous year's report.
  • Section 5: Future Plans. Please describe your plans for the coming year: scheduled operations, planned activities, maintenance, upgrades, new equipment, new staff, new software development or algorithms, new hardware arriving, etc.

Format

Please use the following guidelines in preparing your report.

  • Re-use of files. If you decide to use your .tex file from last year's Annual Report as a starting point, please consider getting the .tex file from the 2010 Annual Report ftp archives instead of using your local copy. Many reports last year were altered slightly (e.g., to add keywords necessary for processing). Using the final copy will prevent these problems from recurring. With the 2008 Annual Report we discontinued the support of the IVS style file ivs.sty and we only accept reports with the IVS class file ivs2e.cls.
  • LaTeX format. The required format for reports is LaTeX.
  • Class and style files. Your tex file must reference the IVS class file (LaTeX2e). Other available style files support inclusion of figures, floating figures, html code, bold math and wrapping text around floating objects.
  • Length. Component reports may be a maximum of four pages. The limit will be strictly enforced for this publication.
  • Abstract. It is strongly suggested that your abstract include highlights of your component's current activities and/or future plans.
  • Graphics. The use of pictures and images is strongly encouraged to make the publication more interesting. Images can be included if you have them in encapsulated PostScript format. The Coordinating Center will try to accommodate images in other formats, but results cannot be guaranteed, because non-encapsulated formats are not easily scaled and manipulated within LaTeX. Please bear in mind that the printed version will be done in black-and-white only. If you converted a graphics file from a non-PostScript format (e.g., gif, jpeg or tiff) to encapsulated PostScript, we request that you also upload the original file. This may assist the Coordinating Center in solving problems with PostScript graphics files that stem from the conversion.
  • Tables. The use of tables is encouraged to group information and break up the page text visually. But authors should be aware that most table formats do not translate precisely to HTML. More details are available later in this list, under the Example File entry.
  • Acronyms. The Annual Report will include a list of acronyms used throughout the Report. If your report uses acronyms but does not explicitly define them, please add comments at the top of your report to define them (e.g., % AIPS = Astronomical Image Processing System).
  • Acknowledgements. If you want to acknowledge funding, contributions of non-co-authors, or any other item, please add an acknowledgement section at the end of your report. This section should be unnumbered and should thus be coded as \section*{Acknowledgements}.
  • Example file. An example .tex file, ivs-ar-example.tex, offers basic guidelines for preparing the Annual Report (section 1) and basic LaTeX examples and information (section 2). A third section discusses caveats, such as discrepancies between tables in a printed version and under HTML. Authors may download and view the postscript output and HTML version to read the contents and to see how the example file would look in the printed publication and web copies. Authors may also read comments in the .tex file to get more detailed information about the LaTeX commands used in the example file, and authors may use the .tex file as a template for their reports. A shorter template, ivs-ar-template.tex, is also available.
  • FAQs and Common Problems. A collection of answers to frequently asked questions as well as common problems can be found on the FAQs page.

File Names

  • If your component submitted a report last year, please look at the 2010 Annual Report ftp archives and use the name used for your report there. Please do not change the name (e.g., from acgsfc to acgoddard). The Coordinating Center is trying to preserve the order of reports in the Annual Report publications, and the order is currently alphabetically based. Please do not add the year to the name. Adding the year causes processing problems.
  • If your component is submitting a report for the first time, please contact to assign names to your files.

Testing

You can use the Coordinating Center's installation of LaTeX to test how your report will look when it is published. To use this facility, put your file(s) on the entry level of the IVS Annual Report ftp site, ftp://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/arincoming/, then fill out the LaTeX test form and submit it. You will need a user name and password to access the Annual Report ftp site. The user name is arincoming. For this year's password please contact Please note that the test script will not work if the tex file and ps figure files have different root names (e.g., acgsfc.tex and fig.ps). Please look at your output postscript file after the test run completes. If a problem occurs with the figures, LaTeX might appear to work perfectly but not produce readable figures.

If you have LaTeX installed at your location, you can test your report without using the LaTeX test form. To do this, download the files in the style file directory into the same directory on your local machine as your .tex and input postscript files. Then run pstex your_file_name.tex L until you have successfully run pstex twice in a row. Running twice is necessary to convert all figure and table numbers from ?? to their final values. Unconverted numbers can prevent you from seeing the final page count and the final arrangement of text and figures.

Final Submission

When you are ready to submit the final version of your report, ftp to the entry level of the IVS Annual Report ftp site at ftp://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/arincoming. The user name is arincoming. For this year's password please contact When you log on, change directory to the "final" sub-directory using the cd final command and then submit the final copies of your tex and input postscript image files for the official submission. The entry level directory is reserved for testing preliminary submissions, and submissions will be ignored until they are placed under final.

If you have already put your tex and input postscript image files on the testing directory, please consider saving space by moving them to the final sub-directory from ftp instead of submitting a new copy. From the entry level testing directory, type:

        rename component.tex final/component.tex
        rename component01.ps final/component01.ps

and so on. If the move succeeds, ftp will report a confirmation that the input file exists (message: 350 File exists, ready for destination name), then confirm the move (message: 250 RNTO command successful). You only need to move the .tex file (e.g., acgsfc.tex) and the input postscript figure files (e.g., acgsfc01.ps). The output postscript file (e.g., acgsfc.ps) and any LaTeX work files do not need to be moved.

View Reports

You can browse the submitted reports on the IVS Annual Report Web site.

Problems?

If you have problems or questions about the process, please contact