The Council of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) has decided to deposit all the articles from its four journals arXiv. Quoting from the new policy (November, 2004): 'Won't IMS lose subscriptions by placing all its journal articles on arXiv? After talking with many librarians responsible for subscription decisions (including those at U. C. Berkeley, Courant Institute, U. of Minnesota, and U. of Washington) we believe the answer to this question is not many. Librarians are telling us they want to subscribe to journals in a traditional journal structure as provided by Project Euclid, with more advanced searches than Google, and a pleasant means of browsing issues. Such facilities are not provided by arXiv. IMS plans to continue to work with Euclid to improve the quality and attractiveness of Euclid's offering, and to maintain the identity of Euclid as the primary source of IMS journal content which should be supported by institutional subscriptions....What should authors do next? If you aren't familiar with arXiv, visit arXiv and learn how to post your preprints there. Make a habit of doing so whenever you submit to a journal, and when a final version is accepted by a journal, update your preprint to incorporate changes made in the refereeing process, so a post-refereed pre-press version of your article is also available on arXiv. As far as we know, no journals in mathematics or statistics forbid posting of preprints on arXiv, though some journals in other fields of science and medicine do forbid it. For papers you are publishing with IMS, let us know if there is an arXiv version so we can update it with the published version as soon as that is available.'
At the same time the Council of the IMS agreed to submit the following paragraph to the NIH as a comment in support of its OA plan: 'IMS has recently adopted a policy of open access to its publications....IMS executives believe the public interest is well served by open access to peer-reviewed scientific publications, and that scholarly societies such as IMS can continue to flourish, with support from library and membership subscriptions, even if all of the content they publish becomes available on public digital repositories.' (Thanks to an 11/11/04 posting to the SSP list from Elyse Gustafson, Executive Director of the IMS.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/11/2004 10:32:00 PM.
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.
