Committee on
Publishing

CoP

Documents produced by CoP

Below are documents written by CoP on topics of particular interest (in inverse chronological order). CoPs recommendations as endorsed by the IMU Executive Committee are communicated to the adhering organizations through IMU Circular Letters.

During its existence, CoP has also made further recommendations on copyright and availability of publications in digital form (2001), retrodigitization (2006), and journal prices (2004), but they are not up-to-date anymore and hence not listed here.

2025: How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences

Joint Recommendations and a Report of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) on Fraudulent Publishing.

The IMU and the ICIAM make explicit recommendations for policy makers and institutions on how to encourage good scientific practice and simultaneously detect and combat fraudulent behavior.

For individuals, the recommendations provide a set of possible actions to safeguard research communities from being corrupted by fraud and pure business interests.

These recommendations were formulated by the authors in close collaboration with the IMU Committee on Publishing (chaired by Ilka Agricola) and have been endorsed by the Executive Committee
of the IMU and the Board of the ICIAM in May/June 2025.

Please find the recommendations and the accompanying report below:

2024: Report of the ad hoc Committee on Permissions

The IMU Executive Committee (EC) – on the advice of the CoP – created in 2021 an ad hoc Committee on Permissions with the task of preparing a report regarding the following:

  • A recommendation for IMU policy on the time frame for making papers freely available after publication, together with technical details such as licenses.
  • A concrete proposal for how to implement this recommendation, for example by outreach to publishers, with the particular goal of negotiating access to existing back issues.
  • Any additional considerations that may affect the availability of past papers, such as the demise of publishing companies or issues with archiving.

The Committee on Permissions was chaired by Thomas Brennan (Harvard Law School, US) and submitted its final report to the IMU EC in August 2024. This final report has been endorsed by the IMU EC. 

2021: Best current practices for Mathematics Journals

In the years 2020 and 2021, the CoP worked on an updated edition of best current practices for journals, which were subsequently endorsed by the EC. All previous editions thus lose their validity.

2002: The pioneering days of "doing math digitally"

As a historical document of particular relevance, we include here the booklet “Recommendations on Electronic Information and Communication” published in the pioneering time of CoP (then CEIC) at the end of the first four year term in 2002. It is a document of remarkable foresight and clarity.