Subject: journals From: Joan Birman Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:02:15 -0400 (EDT) This responds to Dev Sinha's letter and a few of the rapidly increasing number of responses to it! My basic message is that those of us who have tenure and established reputations have a moral obligation to the profession to address the problems that Dev has noticed and articulated. 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. Dev wrote about the budget problems encountered by his library, and asked: "I wonder where people think all this is going?" These budget issues have essentially nothing to do with real costs, which have dropped sharply as a result of electronics. (I know the actual numbers well from my 9 years of work on the Executive Committee of GT Publications and Math Sciences Publishing). Is it possible to publish high quality low cost journals ourselves? Yes. The G&T guys (and others) have done it. To be sure, the AMS's Executive Director John Ewing says repeatedly that those who start such journals will tire of the job and then costs will go up. But he ignores the built in rewards of serving the profession in this way, and the existence of colleagues who are eager to take over the job when the incumbent is ready to move on. If you do the work and do it well others will want to do it too because it is highly respected work! Why have prices gone up? Simply because there are enormous profits to be made, and if in the process the mathematical literature is destroyed those who are making the profits do not care. To think otherwise is to walk with blinders before your eyes. Is there anyone left to even remember the corner pharmacy that went out of business 10 years ago when CVS put it out of business? And who will now win, CVS or Duane Reade or Harmon, and will that matter to the former owner of that pharmacy? To Neil Strickland, I respond: Sure it's convenient to have electronic access to the literature. Go to the Project Euclid home page for free access to back issues of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics, starting with 1951. They were put there because the consortium of (Pacific Rim) math departments who own that journal care about the profession. For those who work in the academic community, computer access goes with the job. An example is worth a thousand words. The arXiv was started by Physicist Paul Ginzparg on his desk computer as a free service to the profession. It has continued because others were willing to take over when he tired of the work involved to maintain this robust and excellent instrument of communication. To Neil again: While bundling may look attractive initially, so did the 40% discounts that Barnes and Noble offered on all books when it set out to destroy the corner bookstores. Those discounts are now essentially gone. John Baez made several brief and succinct suggestions. I repeat them, because I think they are very important: 1. Don't publish in overpriced journals. 2. Don't do free work (refereeing, editing) for overpriced journals. 3. Put your articles on the arXiv before publishing them. 4. Only publish in journals that allow you to keep your articles on the arXiv. 5. Support free journals by publishing in them, refereeing for them, editing for them ... even starting your own. to which I add: 6. If you are now working on the EB of a high-priced journal, take the lead and, as a group, resign and take your business elsewhere. Math Sciences Publishing has 2 new journals -- one which was started, very recently, to compete with an existing journal and a second which was the result of a resignation. It can be done. Joan Birman ___________________________________________________________________ Subject: Re: posting about journal prices From: "John R. Klein" Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 09:51:03 -0400 This following is merely a side remark to the current discussion: I've noticed from my own downloading behavior that I am now usually obtaining a preprint (rather than the published) version of many of the more recent papers. Either the paper I seek is on the arXiv, or I can get it via google on the author(s)' homepage. For older papers, I make use of jstor and emis. Some authors are even so kind as to make _all_ of their papers available (including the published ones). For example, I know of one author who has scanned-in every paper he has written, dating back to the 1970s. 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. I'm just wondering: was the situation the different, say, 20 years ago? That is, did the information content role of a journal play a more imporant role then? -jk -- John R. Klein, Professor Department of Mathematics Wayne State University Room 1213 FAB, 656 W. Kirby voice: (313) 577-3174 fax: (313) 577-7596