The ESO Survey of Non-Publishing Programmes

TL;DR

This paper presents the results of the ESO Survey of Non-Publishing Programmes, analyzing why a significant portion of allocated telescope time does not lead to refereed publications, based on responses from targeted surveys.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed survey at ESO on non-publishing programmes, offering insights into the reasons behind the lack of publications.

Findings

Approximately 30-50% of programmes do not produce refereed papers.

Survey responses highlight common barriers to publication.

Results inform strategies to improve publication rates.

Abstract

One of the classic ways to measure the success of a scientific facility is the publication return, which is defined as the number of refereed papers produced per unit of allocated resources (for example, telescope time or proposals). The recent studies by Sterzik et al. (2015, 2016) have shown that 30-50 % of the programmes allocated time at ESO do not produce a refereed publication. While this may be inherent to the scientific process, this finding prompted further investigation. For this purpose, ESO conducted a Survey of Non-Publishing Programmes (SNPP) within the activities of the Time Allocation Working Group, similar to the monitoring campaign that was recently implemented at ALMA (Stoehr et al. 2016). The SNPP targeted 1278 programmes scheduled between ESO Periods 78 and 90 (October 2006 to March 2013) that had not published a refereed paper as of April 2016. The poll was launched on 6 May 2016, remained open for four weeks, and returned 965 valid responses. This article summarises and discusses the results of this survey, the first of its kind at ESO.