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Where do old issues of MSOR Connections live online these days?

Christian Lawson-Perfect asks:

It’s complicated, but here is what I know.

Volumes 1-12 (actually 0-12, if you include the ‘Maths, Stats and OR’ newsletter published in 2000 as volume 0) were published by the Maths, Stats and OR Network, which I worked for in its dying days. At that point, the website previously at mathstore.ac.uk was archived by the Plymouth International Centre for Statistical Education at icse.xyz/mathstore. It’s still there, so you can still get volumes 1-12 (published 2001-2012) via its Newsletter archive, which acts as a by-issue index of individual PDFs.

MSOR Connections was relaunched as a peer-reviewed journal by the Higher Education Academy in 2013. These were online at journals.heacademy.ac.uk, and indeed that is currently still where the DOI links direct you, but that site was taken down earlier this year in favour of the Knowledge Hub. So if you know the name of an article, you can find it there – though I’m not sure there is a contents listing of issues.

However, there’s a catch. When I spent some time earlier this year comparing the online archives with my printed copies, I found that not every article is available. Volume 13 appears entirely available in the Knowledge Hub. For volumes 1-12, my fairly blunt approach was basically to look at the articles on mathstore and then, if the number of PDFs differs from the number of articles in my print copy of that issue, investigate why. Mostly that happened because articles were combined in the same PDF, but there were a few times (to my surprise) where the mathstore version missed some articles. In such cases, I was able to find most of the missing articles in the HEA Knowledge Hub. (There are also articles not in the Knowledge Hub that do appear on mathstore; it’s a mess.) Most frustratingly, I couldn’t find the following articles in PDF on either archive:

  • ‘The False Revival of the Logarithm’ by Colin Steele 7(1):17-19 (I have found an author pre-print);
  • ‘PowerPoint Accessibility within MSOR Teaching and Learning’ by Sidney Tyrrell 7(1):26-29;
  • ‘Have You Seen This? RExcel – An interface between R and Excel’ by John Marriott 7(1):43;
  • ‘Book Review – SPSS for Dummies’ by Arthur Griffin by Sidney Tyrrell 8(4):38-39.

These are not on the mathstore site or the Hub, but appear in my print copies. If you can locate electronic copies of any of these I would be pleased to hear it.

Volume 13 was the only volume published before the HEA finished publishing MSOR Connections and agreed to release the title back to a group coordinated by sigma and the University of Greenwich. I am one of the editors of MSOR Connections in its current form, and you should find volume 14 (published in 2015) onwards indexed on the Greenwich journals website.

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