Instructions for the Author

General Instructions

  1. The MPA expects that all those with salaries paid from institute funds will give the MPA as primary affiliation on all publications submitted (and for which a significant fraction of the work was done) during the period of employment. If only a small amount of the work was done here, MPA should be given as secondary affiliation. Long term visitors should list MPA as secondary affiliation on papers for which a substantial fraction of the work is done here.
  2. All papers submitted with the MPA as affiliation must first go through our internal refereeing procedure. In practice, this currently means that papers must be read and approved by a senior staff member (= one with a permanent MPA post) who is not one of the authors.
  3. More and more papers are now being submitted without a Green Report being made - most are just posted on the preprint server. The problem with this is that the institute then has no record of the paper. In future, once the internal refereeing process is complete, please submit a SINGLE postscript file containing the final version of the paper to Maria Depner to be attached to our MPA web site. All such papers will be numbered in sequence regardless of whether or not a printed Green Report is made. If you do want a printed GR then request this at the same time and follow the procedure described below. You can post reports at submission or after acceptance, as you wish. You should not, however, post anything on the preprint server without also putting it on the MPA site. We will print the title and abstract pages of all new papers on the site and send them out to the library address list at regular intervals.
  4. Please send Maria a postscript file of anything posted on the preprint server (or accepted and not previously posted) since 1/1/99. Note that for completeness we should post collaborative papers where the first author is not at MPA even though these are usually submitted from elsewhere and they do not need to go through the internal refereeing.


Ordering of a green report
If you think you have a manuscript ready for the production of a green report, i.e. an official preprint of the MPA, please observe the following rules:

  1. Have your manuscript seen by an internal referee who is competent in your field of work, i.e. either one of our scientific members (Hillebrandt, Kudritzki, Sunyaev, White), or one of our retired scientific members (F. Meyer, Schmidt), if he is willing to do the job, or another senior scientist (Anzer, Börner, Diercksen, Janka, Kafka, Kraemer, E. Meyer, Müller, Ritter, Schneider, Spruit, Thomas, Wegmann, Weiss).
  2. Go to see Maria Depner and ask for the sequential number of your future green report. (At that occasion you will be asked who has seen your manuscript and agreed with its publication as a green report!)
  3. Produce the title page of the green report. For this you have to use the following linkPfeil.gifTeX-template. (Here is an example of the resulting dokument.gifPostSript file.)
  4. Send the PostScript file of your manuscript to Maria Depner in order to be put onto the MPA Publications Web page.
  5. Produce a one-sided printout of your manuscript.
  6. Figure out how many green reports you wish to order for your personal mailing list (not counting the copies required by the institute). Let us remind you that sending hardcopies of green reports to private recipients is increasingly discouraged, because preprints can also be downloaded from the MPA Publications Web page at linkPfeil.gifhttp://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/publications/preprints.
  7. Having your manuscript ready (including the title page) and knowing how many green reports you need, take your manuscript to Mrs. Depner and order the green reports.
  8. While the green reports are being printed, you should produce a list of addresses of those individuals to whom you wish to send your preprint. Using linkPfeil.gifxlabel you yourself can produce the address labels very easily. (If neccessary, ask Mrs. Depner for assistance.) Note: The complete path of the xlabel application is: /afs/mpa/common/pdsoft/bin/xlabel
  9. Now hand the address labels down to Mrs. Depner. If you fail to produce your address lables in time, the mailing of the green reports will either be delayed or have to be done entirely by yourself.

© 2003, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, München