Dear Lab members. This last year we were all much moved to online seminars in the past year and all wish more of live seminars in future than in past year.
Having said that I think that having an institution of an official online seminar within Lab community and having its occasional instantiation may have some value.
Some of the prominent contributors of Lab have no university affiliation (e.g. Todd) or permanent affiliation and sometimes they may need a support of our community to make some invitation to other people to do a seminar offer attractive to the invited and also supported by some attendance/received within the Lab community, and sometimes we can have our internal topics of interest discussed on zoom or alike rather than with lengthy discussions (of the subject, not the technical issues, I meant) in the forum and so on. In perspective, we can record some of the lectures for youtube or other repository, while keeping informal the others.
I am not talking about some very regular activity, we all are busy anyway, but it just occured to me that having the institution of such seminar (and with a time, tradition) may be beneficial long term and in some special occasions. It may also promote Lab to other mathematicians.
I am aware that some of the past ideas, including the blog part of the Lab did not take off, I am not sure how natural is this idea to this community.
Any thoughts ?
]]>A possibly relevant piece of news: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/
]]>Which is the Publications of the nLab ISSN? (if there is any)
From this thread it appears an ISSN has been requested, but no further news on this seem to be available.
]]>I suggest we try the following (it won’t hurt in any case):
we create a new web
titled “nLab (reviewed)” (or similar)
publically read-only
write-access by a passoword which is shared by the steering committee members
Then we use this as follows:
whenever (possibly never, but let’s see) we have some Lab entry
all whose genuine co-authors agree that it is reasonably stable
for which the steering committee has sought and found a referee who wrote a positive report, just as for a journal article
we put a copy of that article into the web “Lab (reviewed)” and leave at the top of the original article a remark saying
a stable and reviewed version of this article can be found here
(My nature would be to simply create such a web and confront you all with its existence, but maybe luckily for you I am not sure if I still know the password that I need to do that…)
]]>Just thinking about organisation of the nJournal site.
We should, obviously, have a list of articles published in the nJournal, but I thought that once an article has been accepted then it would be reasonable to have a link to it in some form or other. Does this sound reasonable?
]]>Over at a discussion entitled sheafification there was a digression about what sorts of things should be put into the nJournal. Part of the disagreement seems to be about the “standalone-ness” of such things, and part about whether reviewing is author-driven or referee-driven. For concreteness, here’s a list of what I think the various things people have in mind are:
Complete articles, either expository or original research or both, written for the purpose of publication here or elsewhere, by one or a group of people. Tom’s article is in this category.
One or a group of existing complete nLab pages which someone suggests to referee as a submission, and freeze the refereed copy (with potential for re-refereeing and updating later).
An extract from an existing nLab page, such as the statement and proof of one theorem.
Please add, if you have some other possibility in mind.
So, to what degree should “an article/submission/page-group/thingy in the nJournal” stand alone? The first type of submission certainly one expects to stand alone, although we may also hope that the material will be integrated into the corresponding pages on the main nLab. The others are unlikely to be as self-contained. I would, myself, tend towards wanting nJournal publications to be fairly self-contained as is reasonable for their contents. Certainly they can and will be interlinked with the nLab, but (for instance) I would be inclined against publishing “stub pages” (even those containing particular interesting facts) but rather only the sorts of pages which are well-organized, introduce the subject clearly, etc. On the other hand I can see wanting to publish a particular theorem, in which case it wouldn’t matter whether the page that theorem appears on is currently well-organized or not. But it would then be nice, I think, if the published theorem were supplied with a bit of introduction and discussion (with links) to make it into a coherent thing in its own right.
A separate, but related, question is whether reviewing is author-driver or referee-driven. We have talked in the past about wanting a way to mark pages, or parts of pages, as “I think these are correct” or “this looks plausible” and sign our names, which is the same sort of statement that we want to get from “transparent refereeing” for nJournal submissions. However, it’s not a given that we should conflate the two; it sounds like Urs wants to and Zoran doesn’t.
My initial feeling is that the nJournal is a little closer to the world of traditional publishing, in which submissions are sent to editors, who find referees, who at least have the option to remain anonymous, even if they also have the option to be nonymous and their reports are always more transparent than usual. The idea of “referee-driven” sort of “flagging” of pages and parts of pages seems to me like an extra step away, so that it might be good to have both, but separately and not conflated – sort of a “two-step bridge” between the traditional world and the more radical wiki-world.
Urs’ argument seems to be that we don’t seem to be going to get software which will allow referee-driven “flagging” of pages and snippets in the near future, so let’s do that with the nJournal since that at least looks like it’s going to happen. (Is that right?) I’m a little worried that using the nJournal in that way might hinder its mainstream acceptance as a destination for author-driven standalone publications. One possibility might be to have another nJournal-like-thing existing in parallel which is referee-driven, maybe called something like “Extracts of the nLab”.
Thoughts, anyone else?
]]>Does the name have to include “nLab” in it at all?
]]>One of the qualities I’d like the new journal to have is fully transparent refereeing. By that, I mean that a reader who comes across an article on the nJournal should be able to find out exactly what the statement “This paper has been refereed” means. There are various ways to do that and I’d like us to discuss them.
Another aspect that I think is important is to separate the roles of peer review and referee. I think that we’ve actually already seen that in action with the two articles currently in the process. There’s been an announcement of the form “Here’s an article I’m thinking of submitting” whereupon lots of people have read through them and pointed out improvements that could be made (both here and on the cafe). This is great and something that I think we should encourage and possibly formalise. If submissions can be made to go through this preliminary stage then the process of actually refereeing becomes much easier. The referee can then focus on the quality of the contents and not on the presentation.
Several articles in other journals by nAuthors have gone through this preliminary process by virtue of being announced on the nCafe first. One that springs to mind is John and Alex’s paper. After I’d written a load of comments, John replied (emphasis added):
Thanks for the new round of comments, Andrew. I hope that when we submit this paper for publication — where? does anyone have suggestions? — you are the referee. And I hope that when you referee it, you write: “Thanks to the careful vetting this paper has received at the n-Category Café, it needs no further improvements.”
Apart from the suggestion of me being the referee, this sums up exactly what I’m trying to say.
]]>Did we ever resolve the question of whether publication in the nJournal is “orthogonal” to publication in other journals (thereby encouraging resubmission of material published elsewhere) or “counts as” a publication in the traditional sense?
Actually, I don’t see why we need to pick one only — why not allow both types of publication? There is already TAC and TAC Reprints; we could just treat them on a more equal footing.
]]>Jonathan Pridham writes (private email):
]]>Dear Domenico,
I’m definitely interested in being an editor - I’ve often found the nLab a helpful resource. One tentative suggestion I might make is to encourage original research papers by relaxing the initial submission criteria (to allow pdf files or arXiv links, say), on the understanding that final acceptance will be conditional on the author putting the manuscript in nLab format.
Thanks for the invitation,
Jon.