It is my pleasure to announce ``Distant EKOs'', an electronic newsletter dedicated to the dissemination of research about the Kuiper belt (Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, KBOs, EKOs, TNOs...pick your favorite flavor).
This type of electronic newsletter has become a very useful conduit for people in specific sub-fields to keep up with each other's work, and provides researchers with easy and rapid access to the latest results as reported in recently accepted papers. With the increasing activity in our field, the time is ripe to establish a newsletter for the Kuiper belt research community.
The trick to the success of such a newsletter is to keep the topic narrow enough so the readers (and editor) aren't overwhelmed. After all, the point is to act as a topic-specific filter for the large number of papers one must sift through in the journals to find papers related to one's area of research. For that reason, this newsletter will focus on the Kuiper belt (observational and theoretical studies) and directly related objects (e.g., Pluto, Centaurs). It will not include general studies of comets or the giant planets (except for those cases where the work is explicitly applied to the Kuiper belt), Trojans and other intra-Neptunian small bodies, nor planetary systems around other stars.
The newsletter will contain:
Modification of these guidelines and the accepted topics may occur in response
to the desires of the readers. Your feedback will mold this newsletter into
the best forum for your uses.
``Distant EKOs'' will be sent to subscribers in LaTeX format. The very simple LaTeX template file will be e-mailed to the subscriber list about a week before each issue as a reminder to send submissions. I encourage the use of the template (you can simply cut-and-paste your abstract into the form, and it will make my job easier too), but plain text submissions will be accepted as well. Subscriptions will eventually be administered by a majordomo. But for the present, if you wish to subscribe to the newsletter, communicate a change of address, or wish to be removed from the master mailing list, please send e-mail to:
ekonews@boulder.swri.edu
To be as successful and complete as possible, the newsletter should reach a large fraction of people doing Kuiper belt research. I merged several mailing lists and it is quite possible that some entries are inappropriate. If you do not wish to be on the distribution list, please let me know so I can remove your entry. Also, if you receive this e-mail twice, let me know which address you prefer that I use. Please let your colleagues know that they are welcome to join the mailing list.
The home page for the ``Distant EKOs'' newsletter is being created and will be announced in one of the first issues. Recent and back issues of the newsletter will be archived there in various formats (LaTeX, PostScript, HTML), in case you prefer reading each issue as, for instance, a web page rather than compiling the e-mailed LaTeX document. The newsletter's web pages also will contain other related information and links. If you have a personal and/or Kuiper belt web page you would like added to the newsletter's pages, please send the URL to me.
If you would like to submit a short editorial or report that includes a figure,
I will incorporate the figure into the web page versions of the newsletter; for
simplicity for the subscribers, I will not send figures with the e-mailed
version of the newsletter. Also, no figures will be included with regular
abstracts since figures usually are available in the preprints.
The first issue of ``Distant EKOs'' is planned for the end of August, and I encourage all of you to e-mail abstracts of your papers and any related news or information to: ekonews@boulder.swri.edu using the LaTeX template that is included at the end of this message. For this first issue, we will also accept abstracts of theses completed within the last year or so.
The frequency for mailing the newsletter will be roughly monthly or bi-monthly, depending upon demand for it. Contributions are welcome at any time.
My motivation is to establish a newsletter for the Kuiper belt community, but not to spend the rest of my life as editor, so I hope to pass the administrative torch to another lucky soul in a couple years.
I look forward to your reactions and further suggestions.
Joel Parker
The LaTeX template for submissions is available here.
Send e-mail to: ekonews@boulder.swri.edu