Usually MSRI puts videos of lectures online after some time anyway, usually a couple of months later (as far as I remember from about 2001, they had a system manager who was a very kind and sympathetic person, but unusually slow and laisy in updating things any near to the real time).
]]>Oh, sad, I’d love to go to that workshop but I don’t think my schedule can handle it.
]]>@Andrew #50: Excellent! That's one more piece in place.
]]>Yes, given that I am the de facto publisher, I may as well become the de jure one as well! As you say, we still need to finalise the name. Also, it looks as though we need to mock up the main page. We could try styling it a little to make it look more attractive!
I think that we should seriously think about setting up a proper group to manage all the various stuff, but that needn’t hold us up now.
Wish I could go to that workshop …
]]>So Andrew, given what Susan says, any more thoughts on whether you're willing to be named as publisher? Short of getting advice from a Norwegian lawyer, we're probably about as well-informed now as we're likely to get. On the other hand, there's no hurry: apart from anything else, we can't apply for an ISSN until we've decided on the publication's name.
]]>There have been some interesting discussion on the journal practices during the ICM meetings in Bangalore preceeding the congress in Hyderabad. A couple of links to ICM conclusions are at my page citations (zoranskoda).
]]>MSRI: Workshop on Mathematics Journals - February 14, 2011 to February 16, 2011 (Berkeley)
]]>… The workshop will discuss what is important and unique to the publishing of mathematical research articles and how we can best ensure that publishing practices support peer reviewed research in the long term. Much of the current discussion is taking place between funders and publishers, including learned societies, but not directly with mathematicians. A second goal is to see if we can find a consensus of opinion on what is important about journal publishing to mathematicians; i.e. where the balance lies between the desire for profits from publishing and the broader dissemination of research.
I got an incredibly helpful and detailed reply from Susan Hezlet. Here are some excerpts:
the pitfalls are all about claiming ownership, which is effectively what happens when you declare this body of work to be a journal
in stating that some parts of the site are now a journal, you are making a better defined statement that you are responsible for the content and you have taken some trouble to check that you have the right to publish this stuff, the authors are genuine originators etc, and the content isn't just a rip-off of someone else's IP
I would say that the guy who is hosting, assuming he is also responsible for editorial choices, is already legally responsible and effectively the publisher of the wiki
(It should be added that she isn't AFAIK a lawyer, etc etc... but she's very experienced.)
Separately, she also wrote:
Might anyone go?
]]>I like it too.
]]>Perfect.
]]>Sounds good to me.
]]>Let me try to sum up the consensus conclusion to my original question in this thread, and see if everyone agrees. Publication in the nJournal does not preclude publication elsewhere. Initially, at least, we expect that publications in the nJournal will also be published elsewhere (either before or after) for bean-counter points, and we rely on the author to count them as only “one publication” on their CV with both places of publication listed. The advantages to the author of also publishing in the nJournal include transparent refereeing, community input and potential branching, wide exposure, and availability of hypertext. Eventually, we hope that the nJournal will become respected enough that articles published there will be counted by bean-counters without the need for republication elsewhere. Does that accord with what people are thinking?
]]>Interesting that you mention the IT side of things. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while: that mathematics is very like open-source computing. In the immortal words of the Stone Soup Group: “Don’t want money: got money. Want fame.” Apart from the “got money”, that’s how I feel about my mathematics. I don’t want to protect it, I want it out there! If someone wants to develop it further, please do! I’d like to know about it, and to be given the chance to work alongside, but I don’t want to hinder someone taking my ideas and developing them further.
Of course, I don’t want someone plagiarising my text words inappropriately, and I’d rather my mathematical ideas were linked back to their source, but on the whole I’d rather they were used unattributed than not at all! To quote perhaps the most famous mathematician of all time: “I knew I’d written a true folk song when [The Irish Ballard] appeared in a collection of such songs attributed to ’anonymous’.”.
But that’s slightly orthogonal (can something be slightly orthogonal?) to why Urs invoked OSS. Certainly branching occurs in OSS, and is encouraged. But the author of the main trunk always has control of that trunk and can decide to accept or reject others’ modifications.
To be really radical, I’d propose that the “author-publisher contract” do the following:
I know that the fourth is understood within the mathematical community, but I think that if we make it explicit then it would really show up as nonsense the whole issue of copyrighting mathematical works for their protection. We could even go one step further and develop the Maths Public License, modelled on the GNU Public License, that would require anyone who developed the ideas further to release them under the same type of license. But perhaps this is a pipe dream …
]]>Right, we should maybe say this more explicitly. I think the keyword here is “branching”, as in open source software development: everybody is working on his personal version, but if anyone feels like joining in without actually collaborating he can “branch off” a copy and work on that independently.
Andrew will know more about how this is handled in detail in the IT community.
]]>Tom,
don’t worry, I think you misunderstood what I or other people said. Your article is submitted in the version that you specify, and if that’s supposed to be the original version with nobody else’s edits, then that’s how it will be done.
But if somebody else feels inspired later on to write, based on the Lab version of your article, a 200 page opus A very detailed introduction to topos theory , he may then also ask the Journal editors for peer-review of his additions.
]]>Okay, I put something like comment #29 into Proceedings preparation (nlabmeta). In the new section Transparent refereeing. Feel free to expand and improve.
]]>Absolutely agree with Urs in #29 (and it’s one of the things I suggested in the original thread on this). Refereeing should be transparent in that everyone should know exactly what it means to say “This has been refereed”. I suggest that we think of some statements, like the ones that Urs says, which could be used. Exactly as Urs says, the purpose should be that the statements would be of maximum use to someone reading the article.
Of course, for articles exactly in my field then I ignore the refereed/not-refereed status because I’m fully able to judge the quality of the article myself and don’t need anyone else saying what’s good or not. But once I get out of my own area of expertise - which I do quite often - then I do, at least initially, need to have some guidance on what is good and what not. It might be something like, “This has errors, but is very good on explaining the ideas” or “This is very precise, but very hard to read”, stuff like that would make it easier for a newcomer, or even a fringe-dweller, to get to know the field more quickly.
]]>Like for 29 :) nice ideas!
]]>