Category Archives: Publishing

Interesting figure

academia, politics in math, Publishing, ,

I found an interesting figure in the March 2014 issue of the EMS newsletter, from the article by H. Mihaljevic´ -Brandt and O. Teschke, Journal Profiles and Beyond: What Makes a Mathematics Journal “General”?

See the right column on page 56 in this link. (God help me, I have no idea how to embed that figure in the post. Anyway, maybe it is illegal, so I don’t bother learning.) One can see the “subject bias” of Acta, Annals and Inventiones.

On the left column, there is a graph showing the percentage of papers devoted to different MSC subjects in what the authors call “generalist” math journals (note carefully that these journals are only a small subclass of all journals, chosen by a method that is loosely described in the article). On the right column there is the interesting figure, showing the subject bias. If I understand correctly, the Y-axis is the MSC number and the X-axis represents the corresponding deviation from the average percentage given in the left figure. So, for example, Operator Theory (MSC 47) is the subject of about 5 percent of the papers in a generalist journal, but in the Annals there is a deviation of minus 4 from the average, so if I understand this figure correctly, that means that about 1 percent of papers in the Annals are classified under MSC 47. Another example: Algebraic Geometry (MSC 14), takes up a significant portion of Inventiones papers, much more than it does in an average “generalist” journal.

(I am not making any claims, this could mean a lot of things and it could mean nothing. But it is definitely interesting to note.)

Another interesting point is that the authors say that of the above three super-journals, Acta “is closest to the average distribution, though it is sometimes considered as a journal with a focus on analysis”. That’s interesting in several ways.

 

Some links and announcements

Advanced Analysis, 20125401, Conference, Publishing
  • The course “Advanced Analysis” is over. The lecture notes (the part that I prepared) are available here. Comments are very welcome. I hope to teach this course again in the not too far future and complete the lecture notes (add notes on Banach and C*-algebras, spectral theory and Fredholm theory). The homework exercises are available here, at the bottom of the page (the webpage is in Hebrew but the exercises are in English). 
  • In April Ken Davidson will be visiting our department at BGU. On this occasion we will hold a short conference, dates: April 9-10. Here is the conference page. Contact me for more details.
  • There are some interesting discussions going on in Gowers’s Weblog (see “Why I’ve joined the bad guys” and “Why I’ve joined the good guys” and some of the comments), regarding journals, publishing, new ideas, APCs, and so forth. The big news is that Gowers (after he kind of admits that being an editor of Forum of Mathematics makes him one of the bad guys) is now connected to another publishing adventure, that of epijournals, or arxiv overlay journals, which makes him one of the good guys (Just to set things straight: I think Gowers is a good guy). BTW: Gowers makes it clear that the credit for this initiative does not belong to him but to others, see his post.
  • I promised myself to stop writing about this topic, but I guess I am still allowed to put a link to something that I wrote about this in the past. So here is a link to a letter (also other letters) I sent to Letters to the Editor of the Notices. It is a response to this article by Rob Kirby.

Worse than Elsevier, worse than …

politics in math, Publishing

I recently received the following email from Cambridge University Press:

Submit your article online now

Dear Dr Shalit
We are delighted to announce that the online submission systems forForum of Mathematics, Pi and Forum of Mathematics, Sigma are now live. Forum of Mathematics offers fully open access publication combined with peer-review standards set by an international editorial board of the highestcalibre, and all backed by Cambridge University Press and our commitment to quality.
Don’t forget:
  • For the first three years Cambridge University Press will waive the publication charges
  • After this, a publication charge for authors will be set at £500/$750, this charge being based on real publishing costs and overheads
etc., …,
Authors benefit from:• Peer-review by experts

• Free, permanent, worldwide access to your article
• High editorial and production service
• The author will hold the copyright of published papers via a Creative Commons license
• State-of-the-art online hosting, including forward reference linking and extensive content alerts
• Free online colour
• Global dissemination of your paper
Kind regards,
*************
Cambridge Journals

To which I replied:

Dear ************,

I will not submit a journal to FOM because I strongly object to author processing charges, and your journal endorses this practice.

Kind regards,
Orr Shalit

I blogged on this subject before. I just want to add here that in my opinion, the fact that FOM does no collect money from authors for the first three years does not make it better than other predatory journals, it makes it worse. Cambridge University Press uses its prestige to endorse the practice of author charges, and it uses its money to make it look sustainable, to get us used to the idea.

I really hope that mathematicians will not flock behind the leaders of this initiative. The overall impression I get is that my hopes are hopeless. So here is one last cry: you are going in the wrong direction! Even if dpearments change so much that everybody gets a fair budget for publishing (which I find hard to believe), do we really need another item in our academic lives where we have to fill in a form to get $750 for a simple academic activity? And how can one possibly consider submitting a paper to FOM when one can submit to some other journal for free and save one’s department $750?

 Here is an example of how to do it right.

Reflections on the New York Journal of Mathematics

politics in math, Publishing

As I have just announced in a previous post, Matt Kennedy and I have just published a paper in the New York Journal of Mathematics.

The New York Journal of Mathematics is a nonprofit electronic journal, which posts papers openly online so that anyone can read them without any subscription fee. And of course (funny that this has to be noted) it does not require that authors pay for having their papers published. It exists simply for the benefit of mathematical research and the mathematical community. This is how journals should be. There are others like it: there is the BJMA in which I have published in once. See also the list of free online math journals here.

The NYJM is more than a community project – it is a good general math journal. How do I know? The same way I know that other good journals are good: first, I take a look at the editorial board, and I see that there are distinguished mathematicians among the editors (and most importantly for me, I check that there is an editor who is close to my field so he/she will know what to do with my submission); second, I check to see if mathematicians whom I know and highly respect have published there; third, just to be on the safe side, I can browse the index and see if any famous mathematicians which I have heard of have published there too; fourth, I check to see if the journal is on MathSciNet’s Citation Database Reference List (it is); after that I may or may not decide to submit (and this of course also depends on what my coauthor thinks), and if I submit I also get an impression of how professional, smooth and fast the publishing process is. My impression from my recent experience is that the publishing process in NYJM is as professional, smooth and fast as I could hope for.

Unfortunately, some committees which make decisions regarding tenure and promotion also need to decide if the journals in which candidates publish are good journals. There are several “bibliometrical” tools which help committees and administrators figure out if journals are any good. Here at BGU the tool usually used is something called ISI Web of Knowledge. Now guess what ISIWoK says about NYJM. Seriously, guess: do you think that ISIWoK says that NYJM is a good journal or an OK journal or a bad journal?

HA! Trick question! According to ISIWoK, the New York Journal of Math doesn’t exist. There is no such journal. Now, the NYJM has been coming out since 1994, so somebody at ISIWoK hasn’t been doing a very good job. Or maybe they have?

Well: luckily my university has decided to treat NYJM as a real journal (I am sorry to admit that I probably would not have published there otherwise). Unfortunately, there is still a way to go: my university still uses ISIWoK to count citations, so for this paper of mine there will be no data. I hope that this will change before I am up for promotion.

 

UPDATE February 5, 2013: Mark Steinberger commented below that NYJM is now covered by Thomson-Reuters Web of Science, and that this is retroactive to Volume 16 (2010).