Jim Stasheff wrote:
One of Elsevier's motives (and other publishers) is close to trying to corner the market or at least squeeze out all the profit possible
we now have several ways to resist 1. choice of journal to which we submit papers B. choice of journal for which we will perform slave labor (editing) III. advice in re the above to our mentees
I quit serving as an editor for Advances in Mathematics when it was bought by Elsevier. When I learned how bad the situation was, I also quit refereeing for all Elsevier-run journals. People can read the rest of my rant here: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/journals.html Best, jb
I read John's manifesto, which was interesting. One thing I do not understand is the reluctance of libraries and universities to get involved in this. While TAC runs without any funding at all (except for the trivial storage cost that Mt. Alison contributes), a journal publishing a more typical 2000 pages a year would need at least a minimum of some clerical support. A donation of $50/year by 100 universities would go a long way. Several years ago one of my colleagues suggested starting a free journal to be called McGill J. Math. But there were so many naysayers in the department that the idea never got off the ground. As far as I can tell, I was the only one to support the idea (and volunteer to help). Pity. Michael
Dear Michael,
Several years ago one of my colleagues suggested starting a free journal to be called McGill J. Math. But there were so many naysayers in the department that the idea never got off the ground. As far as I can tell, I was the only one to support the idea (and volunteer to help). Pity.
I never heard of such an initiative or else I would have supported it and volunteered to help. You may (or may not) recall that during many years I sole-handedly edited the Reports of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, after Willie Moser stepped down from this job. It was a lot of work for me, but I am afraid that it served little purpose. Had I known of such an initiative (for a proper journal), I would have devoted my energy to it rather than to the Reports. In the end it was the Department itself which decided that there was no need for the Reports (and thus for me) any longer. Just to set the record straight, Marta _________________________________________________________________ Off to school, going on a trip, or moving? Windows Live (MSN) Messenger lets you stay in touch with friends and family wherever you go. Click here to find out how to sign up! http://www.live.com/?mkt=en-ca
Michael Barr wrote:
I read John's manifesto, which was interesting. One thing I do not understand is the reluctance of libraries and universities to get involved in this. While TAC runs without any funding at all (except for the trivial storage cost that Mt. Alison contributes), a journal publishing a more typical 2000 pages a year would need at least a minimum of some clerical support. A donation of $50/year by 100 universities would go a long way.
Several years ago one of my colleagues suggested starting a free journal to be called McGill J. Math. But there were so many naysayers in the department that the idea never got off the ground. As far as I can tell, I was the only one to support the idea (and volunteer to help). Pity.
An alternative way how libraries could support electronic publications arises from the following thoughts. What will or should be the role of libraries in the digital age? Certainly, buying and storing hardcopies will play a smaller and smaller role. So libraries should have an interest in finding something else to do, just to survive as institutions themselves. What could that be? I think university libraries could become publishers of electronic journals. Universities should have an interest to host these journals, because they provide prestige for little money. As a conclusion, maybe the libraries could be convinced to DO the `clerical support'. Alexander
I would certainly agree, but in my brief discussions, they are little interested in taking on new responsibilities. I have just discovered that Mathematica Japonica charges page charges. That is a retrograde step that I cannot advise. Michael On Tue, 19 Dec 2006, Alexander Kurz wrote:
Michael Barr wrote:
I read John's manifesto, which was interesting. One thing I do not understand is the reluctance of libraries and universities to get involved in this. While TAC runs without any funding at all (except for the trivial storage cost that Mt. Alison contributes), a journal publishing a more typical 2000 pages a year would need at least a minimum of some clerical support. A donation of $50/year by 100 universities would go a long way.
Several years ago one of my colleagues suggested starting a free journal to be called McGill J. Math. But there were so many naysayers in the department that the idea never got off the ground. As far as I can tell, I was the only one to support the idea (and volunteer to help). Pity.
An alternative way how libraries could support electronic publications arises from the following thoughts.
What will or should be the role of libraries in the digital age?
Certainly, buying and storing hardcopies will play a smaller and smaller role. So libraries should have an interest in finding something else to do, just to survive as institutions themselves. What could that be?
I think university libraries could become publishers of electronic journals. Universities should have an interest to host these journals, because they provide prestige for little money.
As a conclusion, maybe the libraries could be convinced to DO the `clerical support'.
Alexander
One institution that hasn't been mentioned is conference proceedings. I don't know why but mathematics generally seems to take a more casual approach to these than engineering. Whereas mathematics conferences tend to expect the talks to ripen into carefully refereed publications afterwards, whether together in a proceedings or separately in various journals, engineering conferences tend to insist on issuing a bound proceedings with 4-10 pages per paper, leaving it up to the authors to decide whether they want to submit a more polished version to a journal later. For both mathematics and engineering a conference may invite a subset of the papers for a special issue of a suitable journal. This difference is sensitive to the needs and circumstances of publication. Ostensibly the primary purpose of publication is dissemination, with author kudos supposedly secondary. Lately the latter has been badly skewing the former, with conferences seemingly worrying as much about appointments and promotions as about dissemination. This may well be a side effect of the web, whose search engines support associative retrieval of polished articles and daily blogs alike, solving the access problem without addressing the evaluation problem. This technological revolution is transforming the publication world faster than universities, libraries, and publishers can follow in real time. Appointments and promotions have until recently been mired in the tradition of relying on refereed journal publications in strong preference to conference publications. Libraries continue to follow the taste of deans in preferring to archive journals over conference proceedings, with the result that at least pre-web articles in conference proceedings are inaccessible to the clients of many libraries. And publishers seem to have a certain inertia that makes them slow to adapt their processes to the outgoing tide of publication costs, an inertia that strands them on the rocks of their expensive old methods. This is all changing, slowly but inevitably. Engineering deans are becoming more willing to equate at least flagship conference publications with journals. Search engines are making libraries less relevant for current material, while the ongoing digitization of older material is starting to make basement stacks less relevant. And authors, editors, referees, and libraries are forcing the collective hand of the publishers by avoiding the most expensive. In this disruptive scenario the potential exists for conferences to assume more of the role of journals. The effect of journal refereeing by itself is achieved for conferences with two mechanisms: refereeing (supposedly quicker and less careful than for journals), and limited capacity at the top---flagship conferences have acceptance rates of 20-40%, forcing the overflow into lesser conferences. Whereas in the past appointments and promotions were judged on the fact of journal acceptance in combination with the assessment of their quality by peers and seniors, these two criteria are now joined by a third: the quality of the conferences that accepted the candidate's papers. Historically journal quality while a factor took a back seat to mere acceptance; today it is made more important by the need to justify the supposedly less careful refereeing and certainly hastier preparation of conference papers. If this trend towards attaching more importance to conference publication is where we're all headed, it will happen in engineering before it happens in mathematics for the simple reason that engineering promotes conference publication more strenuously than does mathematics. Vaughan
Alexander Kurz wrote:
An alternative way how libraries could support electronic publications arises from the following thoughts.
What will or should be the role of libraries in the digital age?
Certainly, buying and storing hardcopies will play a smaller and smaller role. So libraries should have an interest in finding something else to do, just to survive as institutions themselves. What could that be?
I think university libraries could become publishers of electronic journals. Universities should have an interest to host these journals, because they provide prestige for little money.
As a conclusion, maybe the libraries could be convinced to DO the `clerical support'.
Alexander
This would seem to involve libraries in the business of system administration. The CUNY Graduate Center hosts a few online academic journals (e.g., http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/ http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/lljournal ) using the Open Journal Systems journal open source management and publishing system ( URL: http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs ). The library here is not involved in either site administration, which the IT department handles; or the management of the journals--the IT department delegates this function to the journal editors. FL -- Florian Lengyel, Ph.D. Assistant Director for Research Computing Department of Information Technology and Adjunct Professor Ph.D. Program in Computer Science Graduate School and University Center The City University of New York 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 4420 New York, NY 10016 email: flengyel@gc.cuny.edu VOX: (212) 817-7374 FAX: (212) 817-1615 WWW: http://research.gc.cuny.edu
A propos what Vaughan says, conferences in math are not seriously refereed, often not refereed at all. This makes conference proceedings useless for promotions and also for research grants. Like it or not, this is one of the main reasons mathematicians tend to ignore conference proceedings. But CS conferences are generally carefully refereed with the results Vaughan mentioned. There are a number of reasons for this, I suppose but the overwhelming one is how hard it is to get read a paper in math, with a concomitant difficulty in getting serious refereeing. I note that CS journals usually want two and sometimes three referees to recommend a paper. With rare exceptions (Wiles, the Hales's paper on the Kepler conjecture, Perlman, should he choose to publish) that is almost unheard of in math. I was on the committee that chose the papers for last summers conference in Nova Scotia and only a couple papers were turned down and they were jokes. How about a journal called J. Topology. The owners of Topology cannot object to that. Yes, Cahiers is a good choice. And while many thanks must go to Andree for keeping it going all these many years, first we have to thank Charles Ehresmann for starting it. Michael
I have found that what mathematicians call a "conference" is similar to what computer scientists usually call a "workshop" - almost everybody who submits an on-topic abstract can talk, modulo basic sanity checks, and sometimes on a first-come-first-served basis. What computer scientists call a "conference" often involves fairly careful refereeing (by multiple referees) and doesn't seem to exist in mathematics. The refereeing is often to check for originality, timeliness, and interest, rather than correctness. What mathematicians call a "workshop" is often an affair where the organizers invite their friends to give talks. Sometimes a few short contributed talks may be accepted if there are empty slots, but usually there is no (or only a token) public call for contributions. This type of workshop also exists in computer science, although it is less common. And some mathematics workshops follow the first pattern above. -- Peter Michael Barr wrote:
A propos what Vaughan says, conferences in math are not seriously refereed, often not refereed at all. This makes conference proceedings useless for promotions and also for research grants. Like it or not, this is one of the main reasons mathematicians tend to ignore conference proceedings. But CS conferences are generally carefully refereed with the results Vaughan mentioned.
There are a number of reasons for this, I suppose but the overwhelming one is how hard it is to get read a paper in math, with a concomitant difficulty in getting serious refereeing. I note that CS journals usually want two and sometimes three referees to recommend a paper. With rare exceptions (Wiles, the Hales's paper on the Kepler conjecture, Perlman, should he choose to publish) that is almost unheard of in math. I was on the committee that chose the papers for last summers conference in Nova Scotia and only a couple papers were turned down and they were jokes.
How about a journal called J. Topology. The owners of Topology cannot object to that.
Yes, Cahiers is a good choice. And while many thanks must go to Andree for keeping it going all these many years, first we have to thank Charles Ehresmann for starting it.
Michael
Sometimes (often?) the distinctionbetween conference and workshop in math is that a conference is wall to wall talks while a workshop should have some down time for informal discussions. cf. what AIM wants jim Peter Selinger wrote:
I have found that what mathematicians call a "conference" is similar to what computer scientists usually call a "workshop" - almost everybody who submits an on-topic abstract can talk, modulo basic sanity checks, and sometimes on a first-come-first-served basis.
What computer scientists call a "conference" often involves fairly careful refereeing (by multiple referees) and doesn't seem to exist in mathematics. The refereeing is often to check for originality, timeliness, and interest, rather than correctness.
What mathematicians call a "workshop" is often an affair where the organizers invite their friends to give talks. Sometimes a few short contributed talks may be accepted if there are empty slots, but usually there is no (or only a token) public call for contributions. This type of workshop also exists in computer science, although it is less common. And some mathematics workshops follow the first pattern above.
-- Peter
Michael Barr wrote:
A propos what Vaughan says, conferences in math are not seriously refereed, often not refereed at all. This makes conference proceedings useless for promotions and also for research grants. Like it or not, this is one of the main reasons mathematicians tend to ignore conference proceedings. But CS conferences are generally carefully refereed with the results Vaughan mentioned.
There are a number of reasons for this, I suppose but the overwhelming one is how hard it is to get read a paper in math, with a concomitant difficulty in getting serious refereeing. I note that CS journals usually want two and sometimes three referees to recommend a paper. With rare exceptions (Wiles, the Hales's paper on the Kepler conjecture, Perlman, should he choose to publish) that is almost unheard of in math. I was on the committee that chose the papers for last summers conference in Nova Scotia and only a couple papers were turned down and they were jokes.
How about a journal called J. Topology. The owners of Topology cannot object to that.
Yes, Cahiers is a good choice. And while many thanks must go to Andree for keeping it going all these many years, first we have to thank Charles Ehresmann for starting it.
Michael
I have found that what mathematicians call a "conference" is similar what computer scientists usually call a "workshop" - almost everybody who submits an on-topic abstract can talk, modulo basic sanity checks, and sometimes on a first-come-first-served basis. What computer scientists call a "conference" often involves fairly careful refereeing (by multiple referees) and doesn't seem to exist in mathematics. The refereeing is often to check for originality, timeliness, and interest, rather than correctness. What mathematicians call a "workshop" is often an affair where the organizers invite their friends to give talks. Sometimes a few short contributed talks may be accepted if there are empty slots, but usually there is no (or only a token) public call for contributions. This type of workshop also exists in computer science, although it is less common. And some mathematics workshops follow the first pattern above. -- Peter Michael Barr wrote:
A propos what Vaughan says, conferences in math are not seriously refereed, often not refereed at all. This makes conference proceedings useless for promotions and also for research grants. Like it or not, this is one of the main reasons mathematicians tend to ignore conference proceedings. But CS conferences are generally carefully refereed with the results Vaughan mentioned.
There are a number of reasons for this, I suppose but the overwhelming one is how hard it is to get read a paper in math, with a concomitant difficulty in getting serious refereeing. I note that CS journals usually want two and sometimes three referees to recommend a paper. With rare exceptions (Wiles, the Hales's paper on the Kepler conjecture, Perlman, should he choose to publish) that is almost unheard of in math. I was on the committee that chose the papers for last summers conference in Nova Scotia and only a couple papers were turned down and they were jokes.
How about a journal called J. Topology. The owners of Topology cannot object to that.
Yes, Cahiers is a good choice. And while many thanks must go to Andree for keeping it going all these many years, first we have to thank Charles Ehresmann for starting it.
Michael
participants (9)
-
Alexander Kurz -
jim stasheff -
John Baez -
Lengyel, Florian -
Marta Bunge -
Michael Barr -
selinger -
selinger＠mathstat.dal.ca -
Vaughan Pratt