Discussion journal of the Mössbauer Community

["Nagy, Denes Lajos" <nagy.denes AT wigner.mta.hu>]

Dear Colleagues,

since 1993, the main rule of delegating members by a national Mössbauer 
community to IBAME, the International Board on the Applications of the 
Mössbauer Effect has been that the number of IBAME members elected in a 
country were determined by the participation figures by that national 
Mössbauer community at the last three International Conferences on the 
Application of the Mössbauer Effect (ICAME). However, after two decades of 
this practice we had to realize that this approach became outdated. 
Indeed, results achieved by Mössbauer spectroscopy are more and more 
presented at topical conferences and also the role of regional Mössbauer 
conferences increased significantly. As a consequence of this fact, 
national communities having very important contribution to Mössbauer 
spectroscopy became underrepresented in IBAME or, in some cases, have 
completely lost their representation in the Board.

Therefore, in September 2013, IBAME decided to suspend the old 
Constitution and charged the Structure Committee to elaborate a new 
Constitution that is expected to be adopted by the Board at its upcoming 
meetings in September 2015 in Hamburg. However, in order to increase the 
legitimacy of the new Constitution, a provisional Constitution was adopted 
by IBAME to open the way to elections in countries with significant 
contribution to Mössbauer spectroscopy but presently not represented in 
the Board. The provisional Constitution took effect on 25 January 2015.

According to the provisional rules, should a country have no elected 
member to the Board according to the rules of the old Constitution, that 
country shall be eligible to elect one member to the Board provided that 
country has at least 5 active Mössbauer spectroscopists (AMS). An AMS is 
defined as a living person who has published at least 5 Mössbauer papers 
during the last 10 years or published at least 100 Mössbauer papers since 
1958. A Mössbauer paper is regarded as a paper to which a researcher has 
made a significant contribution based on his/her expertise in laboratory 
Mössbauer spectroscopy and/or nuclear resonant scattering of synchrotron 
radiation.

Prof. Michael Reissner, the IBAME Secretary has recently contacted 
representatives of national Mössbauer communities which, according to the 
statistics deduced from the publication database of the Mössbauer Effect 
Data Center (MEDC), fulfil the above criteria and, therefore, became 
eligible for electing a new member to IBAME. Nevertheless, it may happen 
that some eligible countries have been overlooked in the AMS database and, 
consequently, have not been contacted. Therefore, with this call, IBAME 
asks all national Mössbauer communities to let us know should they feel to 
be eligible to elect a new member to IBAME. In this case we ask to submit 
the list of at least 5 AMSs along with the list of their at least 
Mössbauer papers from the last 10 years as an attachment to the e-mail 
sent to the Executive Committee, i.e. to the Secretary 
(reissner AT ifp.tuwien.ac.at) with Cc to the Chair 
(nagy.denes AT wigner.mta.hu) and the Vice Chair 
(jean-marc.greneche AT univ-lemans.fr).

Elections shall be carried out amongst the AMSs affiliated with 
institutions in the given country, preferably by secret ballot and, if 
possible, not later than 31 May 2015. Elected members may join IBAME 
immediately and will have voting right in IBAME written procedures 
preparing the draft of the new Constitution. This also holds for new 
members elected after the above date, however, the mandate of all members 
elected in 2015 will expire on 31 December 2020.

As a special courtesy, MEDC (http://www.medc.dicp.ac.cn/) made available 
its publication database for the public and will keep it open until 30 
September 2015 for free by logging in with the username guest and password 
guest. During this period all Mössbauer spectroscopists may wish to check 
whether all of their Mössbauer publications are properly included in the 
database. Should this not be the case, please contact MEDC at the address 
medc AT dicp.ac.cn so that they may update the database and so the next AMS 
database contains more accurate data both of individuals and national 
Mössbauer communities.

This call was published at the IBAME website http://ibame.org/ on 5 April 
2015.

With best regards,

               Dénes L. Nagy
                IBAME Chair