Here’s some mathematical news we didn’t otherwise cover this month.
You're reading: Posts Tagged: open access
Algebraic Combinatorics ditches Springer
The editorial board of the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics have announced they’re leaving Springer and setting up a new journal called Algebraic Combinatorics. The new journal will follow the principles of Fair OA – the key points are that the journal will be free to read, fees will be low, and acceptance won’t depend on ability to pay.
Hugh Thomas, one of the editors of Algebraic Combinatorics, said of the move,
“There wasn’t a particular crisis. It has been becoming more and more clear that commercial journal publishers are charging high subscription fees and high Article Processing Charges (APCs), profiting from the volunteer labour of the academic community, and adding little value. It is getting easier and easier to automate the things that they once took care of. The actual printing and distribution of paper copies is also much less important than it has been in the past; this is something which we have decided we can do without.”
Another victory for fair and sensible maths publishing, brought about by a small group of OA advocates set up by Mark Wilson and including Timothy Gowers. There’s much more about what’s happened and why you should support the new journal on Gowers’s weblog.
Algebraic Combinatorics lives at algebraic-combinatorics.org (can you believe that was available?!)
Maths Journals for an engaged Sixth Former
Maths legend Colin Wright posed this question on Twitter:
Q for my maths tweeps – recommendations wanted for Maths Journals suitable for a bright and engaged Sixth Form student. Suggestions?
— Colin Wright (@ColinTheMathmo) November 24, 2016
It led to a flurry of interesting replies, and here’s some of them.
The arXiv overlay journal Discrete Analysis has launched
Discrete Analysis, a new open-access journal for articles which are “analytical in flavour but that also have an impact on the study of discrete structures”, launched this week. What’s interesting about it is that it’s an arXiv overlay journal founded by, among others, Timothy Gowers.
Timothy Gowers has launched a new arXiv overlay journal
Sir Timothy Gowers has announced on his blog a new journal, Discrete Analysis, of which he will be the managing editor. Rather than a traditional journal, this will be an open-access ‘arXiv overlay’.
Elsevier maths journals up to 2009 are available for free, and in a convenient format
A year and a bit ago, we posted about Elsevier’s possibly-generous, possibly-cynical move to make all papers in its maths journals free to access four years after their publication. I lamented at the time that the only way to access the free papers was through Elsevier’s sanity-sapping ScienceDirect portal.
Well, not any more! The Mathematics Literature Project (which we never got round to posting about when it started, sorry) has collected together all the content that’s been made available and collected it into nice BitTorrent packages for anyone to download. The MLP page on Elsevier open access journals has links to torrents of the complete back-catalogues of 39 journals, going up to 2009. They intend to update the torrents yearly, as more papers become available under the permissive licence.
The MLP was set up by Scott Morrison, who deserves a big pat on the back for putting in so much tedious work downloading papers and compiling the torrents. The project is also analysing journals to get an idea of how beneficial Elsevier’s licence is – if papers are available on the arXiv anyway, it doesn’t matter too much what Elsevier does with their copies. So far, at least in the journals the project is concentrating on, the vast majority of papers are on the arXiv or authors’ webpages anyway.
More information
Elsevier open access mathematics torrents at the Mathematics Literature Project
The Mathematics Literature Project
Mathematics Literature Project progress at the Secret Blogging Seminar
Scott Morrison’s academic homepage
Previously: Elsevier has made lots more articles free to access
via David Roberts on Google+
Open Problems in Mathematics, a new open access journal
Here’s a nice idea: a journal for people to write about open problems, with the aim of inspiring someone to have a go at solving them. Open Problems in Mathematics is a new open-access journal set up by Krzysztof Burdzy and a few others, and it’s online now.