From: kirby@math.berkeley.edu (Rob Kirby) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:29:42 -0800 (PST) Subject: Geometry & Topology journal Dear Colleagues: This letter concerns the free electronic journal, Geometry & Topology, and three issues I want to bring to your attention: 1. G&T is offering a printed version at a low cost. 2. Background and financing of G&T. 3. The future. 1. The second volume (1998) of G&T is being printed with soft cover by International Press. It will have about 350 pages (with a month and a half to go, the exact number of pages is not yet clear), and will sell for $35 plus handling and insured mailing ($6.50 in the US). I hope you will strongly encourage your library to not only buy this volume, but to subscribe yearly (the first volume, about 110 pages at $12 plus handling is also available from IP). The tables of contents for both volumes are appended below, and can be found on the journal web site: http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/ The subscription to G&T and back copies can be ordered through International Press at journals@descartes.intlpress.com or through the journal at gtorders@maths.warwick.ac.uk. Please let me know how your library responded. If necessary I will follow this up by contacting them, and then it would be useful to have an email address for the right person to contact at your library. 2. As befits a journal which is formally owned by its editors and is run for the benefit of the geometry/topology community, weP should be open and candid about financing. At the moment, all editorial work, including formatting and other TeX work, is done gratis by the editors with some help from the departments at Warwick and Berkeley. In the long run, some of this should be paid by the journal out of subscriptions, as this is the only source of revenue. The community can help by providing manuscripts which are in good TeX shape, and by encouraging their libraries, and even individuals, to subscribe. International Press has given us good terms for printing and fulfillment. We are able to offer both volumes at about 10 cents/page, even though we have, as yet, few economies of scale. This can be compared with the average cost per page of over 50 cents/page for most of the large commercial journals (Elsevier's Topology is priced at about 80 cents/page) (see http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~kirby/journals.html for prices of journals). We have invested in 200 copies of volume 2 at $5000, plus a modest charge for fulfillment (handling subscriptions and mailing). We hope to get over 100 subscriptions in the next few months, and to recover the investment before the end of 1999. 3. G&T is now established as a high quality journal. The price for the printed version is lower than essentially any paper math journal. With increased subscriptions and more pages, the price should only go lower with economies of scale. Thus it seems reasonable to expect an eventual subscription base of over 500, perhaps in the ballpark of 1000. The principal unknown is the fact that the electronic version of G&T is free. It is not clear how that will cut into sales of the paper version, but if the cost is low enough (as it is), libraries are likely to want a paper version on their shelves. We have usually felt that our math journals are "ours", and they have been in the sense that we write the papers, referee, and choose which papers to accept. However, the fact that the big commercial publishers often charge our libraries high prices, ask for the copyright, and often prefer that we do not make our papers permanently electronically available at, for example, xxx.lanl.gov, makes some of our journals NOT "ours". So the goal of G&T is to be a high quality journal without the minuses just mentioned. We ask for your support in submitting papers to G&T and in subscriptions by your library. Yours, Rob Geometry and Topology : Cumulative Index of Papers =================================================== Volume 1 (1997) =============== 1 pages 1--7 Graham Niblo, Lawrence Reeves, Groups acting on CAT(0) cube complexes 2 pages 9--20 Christopher Anand Ward's Solitons 3 pages 21--40 Walter D Neumamm, Gadde A Swarup Canonical decompositions of 3-maniolfds 4 pages 41--50 Robert E Gompf Spin^c structures and homotopy equivalences 5 pages 51--69 Vyacheslav S Krushkal, Peter Teichner Alexander duality, gropes and link homotopy 6 pages 71--89 Lawerence R Taylor An invariant of smooth 4-manifolds 7 pages 91--109 Allen Hatcher, Darryl McCullough Finiteness of Classifying Spaces of Relative Diffeomorphism Groups of 3-Manifolds Volume 2 (1998) =============== 1 pages 1-10 D Kotschick Einstein metrics and smooth structures 2 pages 11-29 Peter Scott The Symmetry of Intersection Numbers in Group Theory 3 pages 31-64 Michael T Greene, Bert Wiest A natural framing of knots 4 pages 65-77 David Gabai, William H Kazez Group negative curvature for 3-manifolds with genuine laminations 5 pages 79-101 Victor M Buchstaber, Nigel Ray Flag Manifolds and the Landweber-Novikov Algebra 6 pages 103-116 Paolo Lisca Symplectic fillings and positive scalar curvature 7 pages 117-144 Igor Belegradek Intersections in hyperbolic manifolds 8 pages 145-174 Matthew Ando, Jack Morava, Hal Sadofsky Completions of Z/(p)-Tate cohomology of periodic spectra