Dossier Personnel André HECK - Observatoire Astronomique de ...

To Whom It May Concern
Andre Heck realized many years ago that professional scientific communication was changing
rapidly and that organizations, publications, and publishers needed to change or they
would be left out.
He has organized a long series of conferences and workshops to introduce publishers and
organizations to the new methods of communication. For instance, most communication
now is being done digitally and on-line, so if publishers insist on ignoring that and continue
to publish books and journals only on paper, they will be ignored. The statistics verify
that: references to books have declined drastically in recent years and publishers are finally
beginning to make their books available on-line.
Andre has been the leader in seeing that those changes are being made. He also has realized
that extremely large data sets will become available in science and that we need to
have efficient ways to distribute those.
Andre has engineered these changes in a gentle way. Rather than preach himself, he has
persuaded the practitioners of the new methods to attend his workshops and persuaded
the publishers to attend, so that they can convince each other. This has been done on an
international scale, and then his conference proceedings are distributed widely.
This process is not complete yet. On the one hand, we hear that the young people never
go to libraries nor read printed journals and books, whereas some publishers still have not
learned that reality. There are still changes that need to be made, and we need Andre to
lead in making those changes.
Helmut A. Abt, Astronomer
Kitt Peak National Observatory
Tucson, AZ 85726-6732, USA
abt@noao.edu
10 June 2010