Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 01:35:08 +0000
From: carlos@picard.ups-tlse.fr (Carlos Simpson)
Subject: Re: news abt xxx archive

Dear Don,
  I am finally breaking down and writing something because there have been so
many interesting things recently about electronic publishing, eprints, the
math archives and so on.  The ones I have seen at least are of course Greg
Kuperberg's messages, also Kirby's letter and an article by Steve Krantz
which one can see by going to the xxx math archives (subject = all) and looking
at january, he has an article in History and Overview.  Before going on I
should say that I am a faithful submitter to the alg-geom (or occasionally
q-alg)
archives and quite happy about this service.  My first reaction therefore
on seeing that Clarence refused to merge with math.AT, was to think that
this was a mistake. Upon further reflection and logical deduction, it seems that
some serious negotiating is called for (and this, somewhat on behalf of the
whole math community); I'll explain below.
  Let me start by reacting to Kirby's letter. The way he presents it, Elsevier
doesn't seem to have much choice at all but to go kerplunk. If my reading of
general corporate culture is correct, what this translates into is to say
that their only choice is court action.  You might think this sounds funny
but it isn't so farfetched. (NB their case for court action as I shall
present it, of course I am 100% against, in case that isn't perfectly clear
just from general principles). In fact Kirby's letter could even constitute
evidence. He remarks that Warwick started an electronic topology journal of
a level equal to or better than Topology; free. He makes the side remark
that of course there are hidden costs in the furnishing of computer
equipment and personnel by Warwick.
This could be construed (specially by the EC, I am more familiar these days
with their actions than with Janet Reno...) as unfair competition or more
particularly unfair government subsidies making for unfair competition.
(Air France generally gets into big problems with the EC commission whenever
the French government tries to give them a subsidy, for example...).
It is concievable that court (or administrative) action could totally shut down
that type of enterprise. (The only ``human right'' which seems to be
universally defended by all governments is the ``right to make money''...
in this case, for Elsevier...).
Of course it is not totally clear that the total amount of their profits
from these things would be sufficient to justify court action, but you
never know...
Taking things one step further, one can vaguely imagine at some time in the
future, the justice department shutting down xxx for antitrust violation or
some such thing. (The headlines might be ``Reno Bombs Los Alamos''
or ``DOJ takes out DOE''). I am exaggerating a bit here. But the point is
if we are all fairly confident in the perennity of electronic media
(Krantz's article notwithstanding) we should be a bit less confident in the
perennity of funding;
and keeping up the whole xxx business indefinitely seems to require funding.
One cannot guarantee that any particular electronic distribution scheme is
immune over the very long run from various sorts of insane administrative
attacks.
It seems to me that the logical answer to this type of problem is DIVERSITY.
By this I mean a diversity of systems for collecting, archiving and
distributing mathematical works.  Of course I am wholly in agreement with
Kirby and I
don't at all mean that this diversity should include horribly overpriced
journals. I am thinking more of electronic diversity, so to speak.
  Perennity is not the only facet of the problem. There is also a basic
question of academic freedom.  Will xxx(Los Alamos) publish, eg on their
Chinese mirror site, an article explaining how to use algebraic cycles and
Hodge theory to construct a public-key cryptography system? This is not
totally clear (I haven't tried it yet).
  Related to the academic freedom question is a question about use of
academic influence in the running of the system, which could eventually
result in favoritism for certain subjects, in some as-yet-unknown
infinitesimal way. Up until now, for xxx at least this has really been
above any reproach as far as I can tell. However, as the set of people in
charge slowly changes, one never knows what would happen in the future. (I
agree that it is pretty hard to imagine any possible action on the part of
the administrators which would
have the slightest influence...however, as an example, one can note that
people in the know seem to have waited until the january launching of the
whole math archives to send out some preprints, whereas I for example sent
in my previous preprint to alg-geom right before christmas, not knowing
that there was much better publicity to be had at the start of january...of
course I am being petty here but just bring this up to show that it is
concievable to have that type of infinitesimal sort of thing happening).
  Sorry about all that rambling!  Now on to the last part of this message:
what to do?  I do feel that the xxx archives have many advantages (most of
them quite clearly detailed by Greg Kuperberg) which it would be a pity for
algebraic topologists to miss out on; and I will continue to submit my
papers there. It looks fairly likely that the sort reserved for competing
archives
such as the algebraic topology one, is fairly close to the sort reserved
for Compaq if it decides not to bundle Internet Explorer 4.0 with its
products.
Thus my conclusion about what Clarence Wilkerson should do, is Negotiate
(Hard).  It seems clear that the math archive people are fairly anxious to
win over the alg. top. archives, so there may be some weight for
negotiating.
What should one ask for? The basic idea would be to maintain a separate
(separately administered) archive of all of the algebraic topology papers.
(I for one would be quite happy if Clarence could negotiate the full math
archive but then again maybe he doesn't have enough disk space for that).
He should also set up  his own algebraic topology front. One possibility
would just be to say that Clarence will send in to math.AT, all papers
which are ftp'd in for submission to the alg top archives, unless the
authors state otherwise.
In return, he should get back the submissions to the math.AT archives, for
archival storage and possibly also for making available via web etc.; it
would also be good to extend this to neighboring fields as well as
everything else if he wants. Thus to recapitulate: the points which seem to
be a basic necessity
as far as ensuring a minimum of diversity are:
(1) archival in a separate way (totally distinct from xxx i.e. DOE etc control)
for not only papers which are submitted through Clarence but also all of the
archives (either all of math.AT or even better, all of math.anything);
(2) a front for submission which is totally outside of the math archive
system, i.e. maintained by Clarence, with the property for example that
publication by Clarence is a day ahead of sending to xxx. As a very limit
case, it should be possible to send in a paper which los alamos would judge
to be a threat to national security, and have it go out over Clarence's
archives, before los alamos gets a hold of it.
(3) publicity at xxx for this alternative submission/archival system
(otherwise it might fall into disuse).

Sorry to clog up the airwaves with all of these thoughts!

---Carlos Simpson

PS for those of you who are wondering: the first guy chooses a curve and
then chooses a surface containing it; he sends the surface off to the
second guy, who takes a (2,0)-form and integrates it over various homology
basis elements then uses these decimal real numbers to mess up his message;
the first guy extracts by knowing which element his curve represents in
homology (knowing that the (2,0)-form integrates to 0 over his curve).