Open-access maths journals #2
Jan. 22nd, 2013 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
An ArXiv-only journal
The process for publishing an acadmic paper goes something like:
1. Do lots of hard thinking no-one in the history of the world has ever done before
2. Write it up neatly
3. Submit it to a journal, which will have someone check it's (a) new and (b) interesting
4. Wait a long, long time
5. Profit.
OK, I was lying about step 5. The point is, mathematicians, possibly even more nerdy than most academics, having got through step 1 and some of step 2, sort of get fed up at the point where they have to talk to someone and don't want to bother with it any more.
A sort-of short-circuit in the process is arXiv, an online repository where, when your paper is going to be published, you can post a preliminary copy, so people can see roughly what's going to be in it without having to wait for the journal to be actually printed.
At this point, a cynic might start asking, do we actually have to do steps 3-4?
In fact, one of the recent big breakthroughs in mathematics, Grigori Perelman's outline proof of the Poincare conjecture, one of the Millennium problems, for which he was awarded (and rejected) a Fields Medal, was published entirely on arXiv. There's some controversy whether the "proof" owes to Perelman's outline, to the people who published a complete proof, or some combination, but everyone accepts that Perelman's contribution was very important.
However, Perelman's proof was clearly an important and serious effort. For other papers, there's still a value in peer-reviewing, editing, sorting, collating, etc.
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/
Gowers is also involved with a completely free journal which has done what many people wonder about, doing the bit of collating unpublished papers into a "journal", but leaving off all the other bits, so you just get a list of "these papers on arXiv are true and useful," but they're just as available to read as anything else on arXiv.
It remains to be seen how successful this will be. We'll probably end up with some compromise with different sorts of journal for different purposes, but hopefully a further improvement over the current system. But its good to see a fairly high-profile attempt.
I think PLOS in biology is something similar, but I don't know how similar?
The process for publishing an acadmic paper goes something like:
1. Do lots of hard thinking no-one in the history of the world has ever done before
2. Write it up neatly
3. Submit it to a journal, which will have someone check it's (a) new and (b) interesting
4. Wait a long, long time
5. Profit.
OK, I was lying about step 5. The point is, mathematicians, possibly even more nerdy than most academics, having got through step 1 and some of step 2, sort of get fed up at the point where they have to talk to someone and don't want to bother with it any more.
A sort-of short-circuit in the process is arXiv, an online repository where, when your paper is going to be published, you can post a preliminary copy, so people can see roughly what's going to be in it without having to wait for the journal to be actually printed.
At this point, a cynic might start asking, do we actually have to do steps 3-4?
In fact, one of the recent big breakthroughs in mathematics, Grigori Perelman's outline proof of the Poincare conjecture, one of the Millennium problems, for which he was awarded (and rejected) a Fields Medal, was published entirely on arXiv. There's some controversy whether the "proof" owes to Perelman's outline, to the people who published a complete proof, or some combination, but everyone accepts that Perelman's contribution was very important.
However, Perelman's proof was clearly an important and serious effort. For other papers, there's still a value in peer-reviewing, editing, sorting, collating, etc.
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/
Gowers is also involved with a completely free journal which has done what many people wonder about, doing the bit of collating unpublished papers into a "journal", but leaving off all the other bits, so you just get a list of "these papers on arXiv are true and useful," but they're just as available to read as anything else on arXiv.
It remains to be seen how successful this will be. We'll probably end up with some compromise with different sorts of journal for different purposes, but hopefully a further improvement over the current system. But its good to see a fairly high-profile attempt.
I think PLOS in biology is something similar, but I don't know how similar?
no subject
Date: 2013-01-22 06:44 pm (UTC)I just wrote a long comment outlining what was needed in this area, then saw that Gowers' initiative is doing most of it. So I'll save your eyes and delete it.
I do think institutional backing is the tricky bit. It's only a matter of time until we get there, but we should expect a few high-profile failures on the way.