Berkeley mathematician Jim Pitman has written a comprehensive proposal for open access to mathematical knowledge. His summary: "This is a proposal to construct a new means of organizing, communicating and archiving mathematical knowledge, by a faithful representation of that knowledge in cyberspace. The purpose is first of all to provide a peer-reviewed survey of all of mathematics, professionally organized, fully searchable, navigable and retrievable, continuously archived and updated, and available free online to anyone with Internet access, in perpetutity. This is to be achieved by creation of an electronic journal, The Mathematics Survey (or MathSurvey for short), which would be a multi-layered network of richly interlinked electronic survey journals, one in each branch of mathematics."
Pitman and others are already taking steps to realize the proposal and create the distributed network of cooperating journals. If you are a mathematician and would like to participate or simply make a public endorsement, then you can add your name to Pitman's page of supporters.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
