From: Greg Kuperberg Subject: Re: Morava on xxx Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 18:44:29 -0700 (PDT) > xxx brings to mind those refitted coal mines in West > Virginia where the government supposedly keeps its old documents: > it's nice to know it's there, I guess, but it's not really that > friendly a place to visit. I don't understand how you have the impression that not many people visit xxx. xxx at Los Alamos gets more than 70000 web hits each weekday, or about one web hit per paper (counting math+physics) per weekday. This is documented at http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/todays_stats That's not counting web hits at the 15 xxx mirror sites around the world. To me that more resembles a freeway than it does a refitted mine. Although it's true that the Front, http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ gets much less traffic than xxx (about 1000 web hits per weekday, or 1/5 of a web hit per math paper each weekday), I've done what I can to make it fun and inviting. (Obviously I think the xxx interface can be improved, widely used though it is.) I encourage you to let me know of any obvious shortcoming --- I'll fix it. The Front also reveals an interesting pattern of use, namely that the 19+22 papers in algebraic topology get a much greater than average amount of attention for papers at xxx. Apparently there are quite a few mathematicians out there who are not algebraic topologists themselves, but who are nonetheless waiting to see algebraic topology at xxx. Of course it depends on whether you want your papers to attract attention from insiders or outsiders. If the former is much more important, possibly the xxx system is not yet very useful for you. > hopf has much more the feeling of a neighborhood bar, where friends > gather to trade the latest gossip. These seem to be very different > ecological niches and there is surely enough room on the net for both... I completely agree with this part. Ideally there will be many on-line resources that complement xxx, including search/browse agents such as the Front, journals, and on-line CV's. In general these resources are much more useful to the mathematical community if they are integrated with xxx rather than separate (or worse, effectively incompatible). Let me briefly describe three ways in which other on-line mathematical sites can cooperate with xxx: o Overlays. An on-line collection of papers such as a journal or conference proceedings can hyperlink to xxx rather than providing the papers itself. One example is the prestigious new journal Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, http://www.intlpress.com/journals/ATMP (Note that ATMP is printed as well as on-line.) Another example is the Banach Space BBS, http://www.math.okstate.edu/~alspach/banach/ Although this archive (which has about 350 papers) merged with xxx in April, the maintainer, Dale Alspach, chose to maintain its old URL as an overlay. o Submission by proxy. Editors of journals and institutional preprint series can submit papers on behalf of other authors. For example, MSRI's preprint series is not implemented as an overlay, but MSRI is maintaing a copy of its preprint series at xxx through submission by proxy. o Direct submission from xxx. The American Physical Society has a web form with which authors can submit a paper to any APS journal just by giving its xxx id number: http://publish.aps.org/esub/xxxsub.html I'm developing a similar web form for uniform submission to many mathematics journals, i.e., for all journals that want to be listed. Greg ______________________________________________ From: Robert Bruner Date: Sun, 12 Jul 98 09:01:45 EDT Subject: Re: Notices article One point seems not to have been addressed in the discussion of electronic archives versus paper archives. I suspect this is because no one sees a way to avoid it. As the electronic literature grows, there will be increasing reluctance to walk to the library to consult the paper literature. As a result, I predict that in 10 to 20 years, the pre-electronic literature will be lost to our attention, not because it is unavailable, but just because it is harder to access. I do not believe that all the pre-electronic literature will be scanned and made available electronically, though the electronic Math Reviews (and Zentrallblatt?) will at least contain a list of the articles in the pre-electronic literature. Unfortunately, it will still be necessary to walk to the library to read those articles, and the ease of accessing the electronic literature will make that walk seem more difficult than it is. As I say, I don't see how we'll avoid this, but it does seem a loss (both of knowledge and exercise, though we can always stop at the 'health club' on the way home to make up for the latter). I would be very happy to be proved wrong about this. Another point is implicit in Morava's comments: ease of publication and large numbers of papers are not necessarily a virtue. Perhaps Krantz' article discusses these issues, but I don't have the paper copy of the Notices at hand (see!). I also don't have access to a PDF viewer at the moment. This makes me wonder if it is really true that electronic literature will continually be updated to take account of changes in media and formats. I don't know about you, but I threw away my trays of punched cards some time ago. I did not convert them to newer formats. The same is true of my old IBM370 tapes, except that I suspect they may still be lurking under that pile of scratch paper and interdepartmental envelopes in the corner of my office. Finally, regarding: > The cost savings of "going electronic" can contribute substantially to > the most essential goal of publication: keeping the entire mathematical > primary literature freely available to scholars everywhere. And insofar > as we mathematicians leave our papers on the LANL e-print archive, > no one will be prevented from accessing them. This is certainly a virtue and will probably swamp all other considerations Not quite the luddite I may seem, Bob Bruner