News

Nine Editors Resign from "Topology"

Friday, September 22 2006 @ 19:33:12 ADT
Submitted by Jon Borwein

In CEIC Best Practice no. 8 we wrote

"8. Journal Price and Policy. Libraries have limited budgets, which often grow more slowly than the prices of journals, forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. The cumulative effect of cancellations goes beyond individual institutions because it shifts costs to an ever smaller number of subscribers, accelerating the process of price increase and cancellation. Journal prices matter to all mathematicians. When deciding where to submit a paper an author may choose to be aware of a journal's standing and impact, but an author also should take account of a journal's price (as well as its general policies, including archiving). In addition, one might consider a journal's price and policies when considering whether to referee or serve on an editorial board."

Pricing issues of the type refered to in our recommendation have lead nine editors to resign from the editorial board of Topology. CEIC wishes to make the arguments employed by these editors known to the mathematical community. (Resignation letter to Elsevier Science (in PDF))

Harvard University's New Project

Tuesday, December 14 2004 @ 10:33:12 AST
Submitted by Sidney Verba

I am writing today with news of an exciting new project within the Harvard libraries. As all of us know, Harvard's is the world's preeminent university library. Its holdings of over 15 million volumes are the result of nearly four centuries of thoughtful and comprehensive collecting. While those holdings are of primary importance to Harvard students and faculty, we have, for several years, been considering ways to make the collections more useful and accessible to scholars around the world. Now we are about to begin a project that can further that global goal-and, at the same time, can greatly enhance access to Harvard's vast library resources for our students and faculty.

We have agreed to a pilot project that will result in the digitization of a substantial number of volumes from the Harvard libraries. The pilot will give the University a great deal of important data on a possible future large-scale digitization program for most of the books in the Harvard collections. The pilot is a small but extremely significant first step that can ultimately provide both the Harvard community and the larger public with a revolutionary new information location tool to find materials available in libraries.

The pilot project will be done in collaboration with Google. The project will link Harvard's library collections with Google's resources and its cutting-edge technology. The pilot project, which will be announced officially tomorrow, is the result of more than a year of careful consultation at many levels of the University. We could not have achieved a meaningful pilot project without the efforts of the Harvard Corporation; the President, Provost, Chief Information Officer, and Office of General Counsel; the University Library Council; and senior managers within the College Library and the University Library.

A full description of the pilot program follows, with further materials available on the Harvard home page tomorrow.

Project Description

Harvard's Pilot Project with Google

Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could harness Google's search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program with Google will be available at hul.harvard.edu.

The Harvard pilot will provide the information and experience on which the University can base a decision to launch a large-scale digitization program. Any such decision will reflect the fact that Harvard's library holdings are among the University's core assets, that the magnitude of those holdings is unique among university libraries anywhere in the world, and that the stewardship of these holdings is of paramount importance. If the pilot is deemed successful, Harvard will explore a long-term program with Google through which the vast majority of the University's library books would be digitized and included in Google's searchable database. Google will bear the direct costs of digitization in the pilot project.

By combining the skills and library collections of Harvard University with the innovative search skills and capacity of Google, a long-term program has the potential to create an important public good. According to Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, "Harvard has the greatest university library in the world. If this experiment is successful, we have the potential to provide the world's greatest system for dissemination as well."

In addition, there would be special benefits to the Harvard community. Plans call for the eventual development of a link allowing Google users at Harvard to connect directly to the online HOLLIS (Harvard Online Library Information System) catalog for information on the location and availability at Harvard of works identified through a Google search. This would merge the search capacity of the Internet with the deep research collections at Harvard into one seamless resource-a development especially important for undergraduates who often see the library and the Internet as alternative and perhaps rival sources of information.

Eventually, Harvard users would benefit from far better access to the 5 million books located at the Harvard Depository (HD). If the University undertakes the long-term program, Harvard users would gain online access to the full text of out-of-copyright books stored at HD. For books still in copyright, Harvard users could gain the ability to search for small snippets of text and, possibly, to view tables of contents. In short, the Harvard student or faculty member would gain some of the advantages of browsing that remote storage of books at HD cannot currently provide.

According to Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, "The possibility of a large-scale digitization of Harvard's library books does not in any way diminish the University's commitment to the collection and preservation of books as physical objects. The digital copy will not be a substitute for the books themselves. We will continue actively to acquire materials in all formats and we will continue to conserve them. In fact, as part of the pilot we are developing criteria for identifying books that are too fragile for digitizing and for selecting them out of the project.

"It is clear," Verba continued, "that the new century presents unparalleled challenges and opportunities to Harvard's libraries. Our pilot program with Google can prove to be a vital and revealing first step in a lengthy and rewarding process that will benefit generations of scholars and others."

Will Open Access Result in Higher or Lower Prices?

Friday, August 20 2004 @ 07:39:42 ADT
Submitted by Martin Grötschel

Joseph J. Esposito, The devil you don't know: The unexpected future of Open Access publishing, First Monday, August 2004.

Abstract

"With the advent of the Internet and online publishing, the notion has arisen that access to the worlds research publications could be made available to one and all for free, presumably by shifting the costs to other places in the value chain and disintermediating publishers, a circumstance called Open Access (OA) publishing. While there are many hopes embedded in this view (lower costs, wider access, etc.), it appears more likely that Open Access will come about not through a revolution in the world of legacy publishing, but through upstart media."

Bertelsmann AG selling BertelsmannSpringer

Tuesday, May 13 2003 @ 11:46 AM PDT
(AFX-Focus) 2003-05-13 08:18 GMT

GUETERSLOH, Germany (AFX) – Bertelsmann AG said it agreed to sell its scientific publishing unit, BertelsmannSpringer, to UK private equity firms Cinven and Candover for 1.05 bln eur.

The transaction is subject to antitrust approval, Bertelsmann said.

It remains to be decided whether Cinven and Candover will take over BertelsmannSpringer's activities in France, which account for 4.5 pct of total revenue, Bertelsmann said.

BertelsmannSpringer is headquartered in Berlin and Heidelberg, with sales in 2002 of 731 mln eur and EBITDA of 102.4 mln eur, Candover and Cinven said in a separate statement.

With 70 publishing houses, it publishes more than 700 journals and trade magazines and over 4,000 new book titles each year. It employs over 5,000 people in 16 countries, they said.

Cinven and Candover will hold equal equity stakes in BertelsmannSpringer, they said.

Candover and Cinven also said they want to merge BertelsmannSpringer with Kluwer Academic Publishers (KAP) to create an STM publisher with total combined revenues of about 880 mln eur and EBITDA of 155 mln eur.

Netherlands-based KAP was acquired by Candover and Cinven in January.

The newly merged KAP and BertelsmannSpringer will be re-named Springer, and will be the world's second largest academic publisher behind Elsevier Science, Candover and Cinven said.

Candover and Cinven were advised by Goldman Sachs and UBS Warburg.

daniel.smith@afxnews.com

Opinion

Communicating Mathematics in the Digital Era: an extensive (PDF) review of Digital Mathematics in 2006 by E.M. Rocha and J.F. Rodriques.

Monday, March 20 2006 @ 15:05:32 AST
Submitted by Jonathan Borwein

World Summit on the Information Society Session

Thursday, November 11 2004 @ 21:53:37 AST
Submitted by Martin Grötschel

By request of John Ball I attended (representing IMU) yesterday the "World Summit on the Information Society Session" that took place as a special event of the 19th International CODATA Conference "The Information Society: New Horizons for Science" (Berlin, November 7-10, 2004).

The main issue of this special session was to bring an international community together to prepare the World Summit on the Information Society that will take place in Tunis, Tunisia, November 16-18, 2005. The main discussion was on the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action, for both see www.itu.int/wsis/documents/doc_multi-en-1161%7C1160.asp.

I have sent to some of you a copy of this Declaration and the Plan of Action, which is a typical UN document containing almost everything you can think of. Nevertheless, I think that this is an important activity that will lead to documents signed by major representatives of many countries that we can use in our political discussions within IMU and within and for the benefit of mathematics in the IMU member countries.

The WSIS session consisted of several speeches by representatives of UNESCO, ICSU, ministries of education, etc. It is my impression that almost everything leads into the direction that we have been promoting for years. Our "Best current practices" recommendations can be viewed as a brief and concise summary of the most important parts of what this world summit tries to achieve.

One problem with such a meeting (at least for me) is the "diplomatic speak" that is not easy to digest for mathematicians who tend to talk in much more concise form. If you hear the third ambassador of some third world country praising a "major step towards a society of shared knowledge …" you wonder whether you really want to spend time in such meetings.

But I have a clear recommendation. ICSU is very strongly involved in the whole issue and trying to push for documents to be signed at the world summit next year, that are along the lines IMU and CEIC think. I discussed this issue with one of the ICSU representatives who attended the meeting and gave a lecture. I believe that IMU or CEIC should not really get involved in the preparations of the summit and all the additional extra regional conferences that are happening around the world. We should simply support ICSU to strengthen its mandate and let the ICSU people work on all the available diplomatic channels. It is hard for me to imagine someone in our community who would be willing to act in this diplomatic environment and spend an enormous amount of time to get half a sentence in some document changed. I do believe, though, that ICSU plays a good role. A simple cost benefit analysis shows that additional input from our side would not change much. Thus, we should keep in touch with ICSU on this matter and praise ICSU's work for the scientific community.

Guide to the Perplexed about today's UK Government Response to the recommendations of the UK Select Committee on Science and Technology

Tuesday, November 9 2004 @ 17:16:08 AST
by Stevan Harnad submitted via Martin Grötschel

More analysis later, but here is a (relatively) quick Guide to the Perplexed about today's UK Government Response to the recommendations of the UK Select Committee on Science and Technology:
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/1200/120002.htm and www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/1200/1200.pdf.

Two steps forward, one step back: The first response of the UK government to the recommendations of its own Select Committee were quite predictable, and will of course be reconsidered (but this will take a little more time).

Meanwhile, though, the UK Research Councils are free to act on the Committee's recommendations anyway, and they wisely will. (This is rather similar to what is happening in the US, where NIH is going ahead with implementing the House Appropriations Committee recommendation while the government's formal legislation is still being debated in the Senate.)

Here is a synopsis of what has transpired in the UK so far:

1. The UK Committee on Science and Technology began in 2003 with a rather vaguely formulated mission to do something to solve the problem of access to scientific publications by reforming scientific publishing because it was so expensive and unaffordable.
   www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_and_technology_
   committee/scitech111203a.cfm.
2. During the course of the deliberations it began to become clearer that the problem of access to scientific publications (articles in peer-reviewed journals) and the problem of reforming scientific publishing were not quite the same thing.
   users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm.
3. The Committee's formal report in 2004 accordingly only recommended one mandatory step and that was that all UK funded researchers should be required by their funders to self-archive all their published journal articles on their own institution's websites, thereby making them free for all users, worldwide. This part of the Report was very definite:
   "This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way."
   www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm.
4. The Committee also recommended "further experimentation with" (but not "mandating"!) the "Open Access Journal" model in order to study its impact on journal publication. (An Open Access Journal makes all of its articles accessible online for free, and the author's institution or funder pays the publication costs.) Funding was recommended for authors who wished to try publishing in such journals. This part of the report was highly tentative:
   "Institutional repositories will help to improve access to journals but a more radical solution may be required in the long term. Early indications suggest that the author-pays publishing model could be viable. We remain unconvinced by many of the arguments mounted against it. Nonetheless, this Report concludes that further experimentation is necessary, particularly to establish the impact that a change of publishing models would have on learned societies and in respect of the "free rider" problem. In order to encourage such experimentation the Report recommends that the Research Councils each establish a fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish."
   www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm.
   So the Report, although it originally set out to reform publishing, only recommended "further experimentation" with possible eventual publishing reform, whereas it recommended mandating immediate institutional self-archiving of all published articles reporting UK-funded research.
5. Nevertheless, much of the (lengthy) report went on to discuss (informally, not by way of formal recommendations) problems associated with journal publishing, affordability, pricing and accessibility.
   www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm.
6. The result was that many who read the Report – including the press that reported on it – missed its essence completely (the self-archiving mandate) and focussed almost exclusively on publishing reform.
   users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3871.html.
7. The present government response – which comes mainly from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) – likewise focusses on the hypothetical future publishing reform model and its hypothetical effects (as if the Report had recommended mandating Open Access Publishing, rather than just author self-archiving), and rejects of the Select Committee's recommendations on those grounds (though it does respond positively, in passing, to the idea of self-archiving!).
8. The present government response (no doubt influenced somewhat by lobbying publishers who likewise misunderstood the report) is accordingly based on the very same misunderstanding that
   1. had made the Committee's original terms of reference focus on publishing reform rather than access-provision (subsequently remedied in its actual formal Report's recommendations), that
   2. had made the press and general public (and most others) read the Report as mandating publishing reform rather than access-provision, and that
   3. has now made the government reject the Report's recommendation on the grounds that they mandate publishing reform (rather than access-provision).
9. The misunderstanding will be corrected (don't worry!), but it will again take time.
10. It will become clear that the Report did not (and could not) mandate publishing reform, nor that publishers must become Open Access publishers, nor adopt the "author pays" model!
11. UK research funders can only mandate that their fundees should publish their findings, so they can be used by others – as they are already mandated to do, as a condition for receiving funding – and this publishing mandate is now merely being naturally extended to requiring authors to self-archive those published findings, so that all their potential users can access and use them, even those whose institutions may not be able to afford access to the journal in which they were published.
12. Ninety-two percent of journals have already given their green light to author self-archiving, so that is not the sticking point either.
    romeo.eprints.org/stats.php.
13. The sticking point is the persistent mixing up of the problem of access-provision with the problem of publishing reform. The first can and will be solved without the need to take any position on the latter, one way or the other.

Pertinent Prior Threads from the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

• "Written evidence for UK Select Committee's Inquiry into Scientific Publications" (2003)
  users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3263.html.
• "UK Select Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publication" (2004)
  users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3407.html.
• "University policy mandating self-archiving of research output" (2003)
  users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3438.html.
• "Mandating OA around the corner?" (2004)
  users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3829.html.
• "The UK report, press coverage, and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access" (2004)
  users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3871.html.
• "Implementing the US/UK recommendation to mandate OA Self-Archiving" (2004)
  users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3891.html.
• "AAU misinterprets House Appropriations Committee Recommendation" (2004)
  users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3930.html.
• "Victory for the NIH open access plan in the House" (2004)
  users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3959.html.

Bundling and Consortia Purchasing of Journals: some background material

Wednesday, June 26 2002 @ 06:24 PM PDT
by Michael Doob, Department of Mathematics, University of Manitoba

The past few years have seen most major mathematical journals move toward web-based publication; free access to the abstracts and subscription-based access to the articles themselves have become the norm. In some cases, first-rate journals are available at no cost to the viewer [1]. While many of these journals ([2] for example) are web-based only, most are still published concurrently in a printed version.

There are substantial advantages in moving to web-based publication. For the publisher, the costs of printing, binding and mailing, always substantial, can be greatly reduced. For the library, the material is acquired over the net without the delays of mailing, and the journals never need to be sent out for binding (if funds are still actually available for such things). For the reader, the material is available on a 24/7 basis from the convenience of the desktop. All of these reasons enhance the desirablity and ensure the future of web-based publishing. It is clear that the days of going to the library and skimming through printed journals are numbered if not already gone.

This model of delivery clearly is now changing in a very fundamental way from the mailing of a physical journal with paper and ink to the accessing of files of data stored somewhere on the net. Access, then, becomes the commodity. This concept was first implemented by American Mathematical Society for electronic access to Mathematical Reviews; it is now so ingrained that it would be hard to imagine any mathematician wanting to return to the former process of tracing mathematical sources using the big orange volumes in the library, and MathSciNet is now almost invaluable. The change of the delivery model will have many important implications.

One consequence of this is that the marginal expense of giving new customers access to the database of journals is minimal. The idea of bundling a package of journals is a natural further consequence. The first major institution to start purchasing journals in bundles was apparently the University of California; they have bought bundles of journals for every campus in their system, and while doing so have spent over million over the past several years [3]. The process has continued in the same way for other universities. In Canada, all of the major universities in the country formed one grand consortium [4].

At first blush this would seem to be a win-win situation for all involved. For the publisher, many more journals are subscribed to, and the less profitable ones (perhaps mathematical) can be subsidized by the more profitable ones (perhaps medical). For the librarians, the number of journals available becomes much larger with very little extra effort. For the university administrator, more journals are obtained at a lower average cost per journal. For the reader, especially at smaller institutions, many more articles are just a mouse click away. But watch out!

These changes also bring some negative consequences for the mathematical community:

1. Only the largest publishers are capable of bundling more than a thousand journals; this means that that independently published smaller journals will have to be paid for with whatever money is left over after the bundles are purchased. On their own, smaller journal will never get the attention that the large publishers do. Will there be room for the smaller journals? The history of the past two decade bodes ill.
2. Libraries will become homogeneous; the typical method of coping with reduced library budgets in recent years has been for the librarians to ask the local mathematicians which journals they could do without (the slit your own throat method). Specialized workgroups have been able to keep the particular journals they need. In cities with more than one university, it has been possible with just a little coordination to keep most journals at some local institution. If that failed, interlibrary loans have been available. All this may come to an end.
3. The costs of these bundles can be enormous. As a consequence, deciding which journals to purchase moves from the librarians to higher administrative authorities. A vice president of research generally will not have the same contact with local mathematicians as the librarians. Indeed, in California the expenditures were decided in the state legislature [3]. Once a subscription to a bundle of journals has been started (with all the appropriate fanfare), will the funding continue? If so, from whose budget?
4. Learned societies often rely on journal income to carry out a myriad of useful activities. If the bundling of journals removes their income, what will replace it? Perhaps these societies will simply disappear or turn into a shadow of their present structures.

The method of access to journals is obviously in flux at the moment. Due attention must be paid by the mathematical community to ensure a future for all journals, large and small.

References

[1] www.emis.de/journals gives access to 55 journals.
[2] www.combinatorics.org is an example of a first-rate journal available only on the web.
[3] www.cdlib.org/about/faq
[4] www.uottawa.ca/library/cnslp