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The Gaia mission will have a profound impact on our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way. Gaia is providing an exhaustive census of stellar parallaxes, proper motions, positions, colors and radial velocities, but also leaves some glaring holes in an otherwise complete data set. The radial velocities measured with the on-board highresolution spectrograph will only reach some 10 % of the full sample of stars with astrometry and photometry from the mission, and detailed chemical information will be obtained for less than 1 %. Teams all over the world are organizing large-scale projects to provide complementary radial velocities and chemistry, since this can now be done very efficiently from the ground thanks to large and mid-size telescopes with a wide field-of-view and multi-object spectrographs. As a result, automated data processing is taking an ever increasing relevance, and the concept is applying to many more areas, from targeting to analysis. In this paper, I provide a quick overview of recent, ongoing, and upcoming spectroscopic surveys, and the strategies adopted in their automated analysis pipelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gaia SpectroPhotometric Standard Stars (SPSS) survey started in 2006, was awarded almost 450 observing nights and accumulated almost 100000 raw data frames with both photometric and spectroscopic observations. Such large observational effort requires careful, homogeneous, and automatic data reduction and quality control procedures. In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate instrumental effects that might have a significant (i.e., ≥1 %) impact on the Gaia SPSS flux calibration. The measurements involve six different instruments, monitored over the eight years of observations dedicated to the Gaia flux standards campaigns: DOLORES@TNG in La Palma, EFOSC2@NTT and ROSS@REM in La Silla, CAFOS@2.2m in Calar Alto, BFOSC@Cassini in Loiano, and LaRuca@1.5m in San Pedro Mártir. We examine and quantitatively evaluate the following effects: CCD linearity and shutter times, calibration frames stability, lamp flexures, second order contamination, light polarization, and fringing. We present methods to correct for the relevant effects which can be applied to a wide range of observational projects at similar instruments. (© 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]