Subject: reply to John Klein for alg top list From: David Roberts Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:10:25 +0930 On 23/09/2005, at 1:51 AM, John Klein wrote: > What is the actual function of the published paper nowadays? It seems that > what we mostly care about in our journals is the peer review aspect and the prestige, > but not so much the access to information which the journal provides. Unfortunately, research funding depends very much or will soon depend very much, at least in Australia, on the number of papers published in refereed journals, with I gather a weighting depending on how "important" the journal is seen to be. New inexpensive journals started by disgruntled mathematicians will not be seen as influential, but it is up to us to change that! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- David Roberts School of Mathematical Sciences University of Adelaide SA 5005 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- droberts@maths.adelaide.edu.au www.maths.adelaide.edu.au/~droberts ________________________________________________________________________ Subject: Re: three postings From: Bill Richter Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:25:44 -0500 Joan Birman wrote: To Claude Schochet, I respond: It is up to the senior members of our profession to educate their deans about current excellent journals. This discussion is not aimed at vulnerable junior members of the profession. A journal that has existed for 50 years is only as good as its present editorial board and the papers that are submitted to it. That's too glib a response to Claude. The only way to phase out these overpriced journals is to, as a community, refuse to publish in them. In particular, the `vulnerable junior members' must refuse to submit papers there. That's hard to arrange. These overpriced journals provide a crucial service, even if they make `enormous profits' unrelated to `real costs': accrediting the junior members. Now let's suppose Nick Kuhn (who wrote a very interesting post, I thought) can organize the homotopy theorists to only submit in G&T and other non-price-gouging journals. Will the young homotopy theorists be able to find jobs? Maybe the 3-manifold theorists on the hiring committee will say, "They're just publishing in the conference proceedings of Podunk U!" to use Claude's great phrase. So maybe the entire mathematical community must refuse to use these price-gouging *-ers, to use John Baez's great phrase. That won't happen, will it?