Dear Martin, Alvaro, Reva, All three of you have made a great effort - and risked being labelled as "troublemakers not interested in science" - by publishing your experiences in present-day astronomy, especially cosmology/relativistic astronomy.

You may already know me, or if not, a quick search on astro-ph for "Roukema" will tell you more about my cosmo stuff. Just like you, i also would prefer just to do pure science and not have to worry about all this meta-stuff of how we organise and communicate, and now that i have a faculty position here at the Toruń Centre for Astronomy (TCfA), Nicolas Copernicus University, Poland (observationally we're working on the OCRA project which will hopefully soon be able to do a Sunyaev-Zeldovich survey), i no longer have a Damocles sword hanging over me regarding having to find my next job. :) (But trying to get the younger students up to speed is taking quite a bit of time...)

IMHO people like us, who are willing to speak out openly and honestly in the interests of our common sense of scientific ethics, should find ways of coordinating our thoughts and maybe generating suggestions for making things better.

At the moment i'm spamming (sorry) our general cosmo-torun mailing list because i don't think this sort of discussion should be secret, but i think that further discussion should go off to a discussion forum which will not bother people on the main list.

IMHO, a wiki is one of the best ways of communicating on this sort of stuff - it's more structured than a mailing list - anyone can reorganise the pages and make them clearer - but it's much less formal than posting articles on arxiv.org.

Anyway, i've put links to all three of your articles here:

http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Cosmo/AstroPolitics

and it would be great if you could add your comments on the page, reorganise it, (or even rename it if you don't think "AstroPolitics" is the best name for the page), or put in a link to an electronic place where you think these sorts of questions can best be discussed.

Hoping to hear from you (maybe on the twiki?), and keep doing good science :) boud