SRP 2006: Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Board

NOTES SRP Board Meeting
Thursday October 12thth 2006

1. Welcome and overview of meeting – Michael Green

2. Secretary’s report (including election results) – Deanna Barch

Scott Monroe – President Elect 2006-2007
Michael Young – Treasurer 2006-2008
Tom Oltmanns – Board Member 2006-2009
Sheri Johnson – Board Member 2006-2009

Deanna reminded the board of the guidelines developed for the use of the SRP-LIST list-serve. The issue was raised as to whether it was appropriate to use the list-serve to remind people to vote in things like APA elections. The board agreed that it was appropriate to use the list-serve to remind people of such elections and of the importance of making an educated vote on candidates representing psychology as a science.. However, it was agreed that lobbying for particular candidates should be avoided in the list-serve message, and that members should be referred to a website or to email the person for further discussion of individual candidates.

The board decided to remove the option for members to post directly to the list-serve to ensure that messages are vetted by the SRP secretary. It was agreed that we would send out a reminder to the membership about the list-serve policy and uses. We can plan to send a yearly reminder about the list serve and to highlight any policy changes that have occurred during the year.

3. Treasurer’s report (including discussion of investments) – Michael Young

Michael raised the yearly issue of how to remind members to pay their dues. It was agreed that the registration form would include an option of paying dues plus registration by clicking on one item.

• Meeting Registration: 211 advance registrations + 4 free Smadar Levine awardees. We had 81 advance banquet registrations.
• One grant from last year carried forward; two others were resubmitted and awarded.
• We cashed out our Oppenheimer funds and reinvestigated in Fidelity mutual funds to broaden the base of the investments and to take advantage of the diversity of options within the Fidelity funds. These funds are being managed by Marty Harrow. We made a significant amount on our investments in the past year.

Michael reported on the income and expenditures for the past year. Our meeting now works out well financially if we include the grant funds. However, if we had no grant funds, we would need to eliminate certain aspects of the meeting (lunches, etc.), raise registration costs, or a combination of both.

Marty Harrow commented on the management of the SRP investment funds. Our investments are diverse, but moderately so. We are doing well.

4. Membership – Jack Blanchard
Jack presented Thursday instead of Sunday as he had to leave before the Sunday Board meeting. We had 25 applications, 15 from associate members and 10 for full members. All completed applications were found to meet the required criteria.

We reminded ourselves that we have already have a plan for individuals who wanted to present the year they had a pending membership and for dealing with meeting registration fees for pending members. We also clarified that the allowance for a member to serve as a sponsor for a nonmember’s submission without being an author applies to posters, but not to talks. For oral presentations, the person must be member, unless they are a non-member invited as part of a symposium.

5. By-laws – Lee Anna Clark
Lee Anna reviewed the bylaw changes. We have to do a final vote by snail mail. The ballot will simply ask member to approve or not approve the by-law changes. We agreed that the ballot will have two options, one I approve the changes listed below (with separate boxes for each change) or I approve all the changes.

6. Publication Committee – what to do?
Neither Craig Neumann nor Diane Gooding wishes to continue as a co-editor of the newsletter. The by-laws present the Publication Committee with a large number of options beyond a newsletter. Lee Anna recommend that we populate the membership of the Publication Committee and let them consider this problem That committee would then make recommendations to the Board as to the future of the newsletter and/or publishing on the website. We will ask them to respond to the Board within six months. Volunteering for the committee does not require being willing to fulfill whatever role the temporary committee recommends for the newsletter/publishing.

Reports

1. Program – Scott Sponheim
Scott presented on the program. We had 3 symposia submitted and all 3 were from last year. All 3 were accepted (2 affective disorders and 1 personality and psychopathology). We had 13 oral presentation submissions: 10 of which were accepted (2 rejected and 1 disqualified for non-membership). One of rejected talks was accepted a poster. 19 poster or talks were submitted: 9 were accepted as talks and 10 as posters, but 2 were disqualified as talks due to non-membership. One hundred sixty-five posters were submitted and, after review, all were accepted. Seventy-two Smadar Levin Award initial applications were submitted, but only 42 followed through with long submissions. Sixteen poster submissions did not contain any results. It may be that in future years, such posters will need to be rejected if we do not have sufficient poster space. However, the program chair should make clear in the solicitation of submissions if this will be an issue.

2. Local host – Eric Granholm
Eric provided a report on the F&B plans, room, etc. Extra costs were adding the extra rooms for the dual sessions, extra AV costs for the dual session, and a larger room (and more poster boards) for the poster sessions. They used binders instead of staples for the program as this was cheaper, though it required more work time. Also had to rent Macintosh computers for the talks, which was approximately 500 dollars extra. Eric requested that we have a society credit card. Michael said that we have one that can be used for deposits. Member surveys will be passed out at Michael Green’s talk, and members will be asked to turn them in at the registration table on Saturday. Eric noted that it took approximately 6 hours of labor to set up the CE credits. The fee at UCSD was only $200. These are American Psychological Association continuing education credits.

3. Website –Angus MacDonald
Yue Chen is taking over leadership of the website committee, but could not be at this meeting. Angus MacDonald reported on the website committee. The web development and oversight committee was created two years ago to help the website take on take on more functions beyond meeting planning. The website has taken on new functions, including abstract, submission, registration, online membership applications, a space for posting job opportunities and other shared information. Angus noted that the online registration had a few glitches, including differences between the name of the credit card holder and name of the person being registered in some cases. It is also the case the online registration did not cut off at the time we thought it would. We have received four membership applications through the online system. Deanna noted that the online membership application did not make clear how the letter writer submitted their letters of recommendation. The website opened a section called Resources this month, which is a place for member to add and obtain content relevant to research, teaching and clinical work. We will need to send an announcement to the membership list-serve, and announce this new feature at the conference. The web committee has been working with Aaron Burke to enhance our control over the website and our ability to change things ourselves without Aaron’s intervention. Some website things remain out of our control, and the web committee continues to work with Aaron on these things. The board had a discussion of how responsive Aaron Burke has been and whether we think we need to make a change in terms of website development.

4. NIMH R13 grant submission – Stuart Steinhauer
Stu Steinhauer took the lead in drafting and submitting and R13 application to NIMH, but unfortunately it was not funded. The meetings were viewed as not being innovative and interdisciplinary enough for the purposes of an R13 grant. It was decided that we would have to change the nature of the meeting too much in order to be competitive for the R13.

5. Federation – (impact on dues)
Barbara Cornblatt strongly recommends that we continue our membership in the Federation. She thinks that the Federation is doing good advocacy work. However, this costs money and the board discussed what impact this would have on the dues. Ian Gotlib recommended that we step up the dues over several year periods. However, Lee Anna recommended that we just do one big jump. Michael Young suggested that we increase dues from $40 to $50 to cover the Federation dues costs. The Board recommended that we not tie it directly to the Federation, but that we point out that it has not increased in many years and that various costs have increased. However, it is not clear that we would need to raise the membership fees if it were not for the costs of the Federation. We should also link it to the costs of web site development. The Board decided to recommend to the membership that we become full members of the Federation, and that we raise the dues to $50 to cover the increased costs of membership and the increased web site development/maintenance costs. We will vote on this at the members’ business meeting.

Dates / locations of future meetings
– 2007 Iowa City, IA (October 4th – 7th, 2007)
– 2008 Pittsburgh, PA
– 2009 Minneapolis, MN