Greg Kuperberg, Scholarly mathematical communication at a crossroads, a preprint deposited at arXiv on August 26. Excerpt: "Lately many librarians and some mathematicians have warned that academia faces a serials crisis. Ultimately I do not think that scholarly mathematical communication is plagued by a crisis, but rather that it is at a crossroads. Computers and the Internet in general, and tools such as TeX, MathSciNet, and the arXiv in particular, have enormously improved mathematical communication. The question is whether, through leadership, we will greatly extend these gains, or, through complacency, we will only see marginal improvements. In my opinion, the math arXiv is a good foundation for further progress....If a journal is purely an arXiv overlay, then it need not take possession of its papers. So why should it wait for authors to submit to it? It could instead allow anyone to nominate ('submit') any arXiv article for review, whether or not it has been published elsewhere. Let us call such a review service an 'open journal'....Open journals have been tried before, both in connection with the arXiv and elsewhere....But existing experiments lack a crucial feature: They are not designed to substitute for journal names in the author’s list of publications."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/26/2004 09:55:00 AM.
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.
