The n-Category Café

The polymath page, by the way, is a public wiki, so if you have any additional relevant links to contribute to that site, please feel free to do so.

Here are some outrageous ideas I posted to the categories mailing list and on Google+. I have no idea if any of these are practical, but they sort of tickle my fancy. Apologies for multiple postings.

One thing that people can do is be creatively subversive. For example, when publishing in a journal owned by someone you would rather boycott, but can’t for various reasons, place the paper on the arXiv in a generic style (e.g. amsart.sty instead of elsevier_generic.sty if such a thing exists), as you are allowed to do (yes, you are), and then put in a sentence “A[n essentially identical] copy of this paper is available [for free] from arxiv.org” at the end of your abstract.

Or perhaps one can thank, in the acknowledgements, “Tim Gowers [1] and Terry Tao [2] for their interesting remarks”, and reference their recent blog posts:

[1] http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/httpthecostofknowledge-com/

[2] http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-cost-of-knowledge/

This might need to be followed up with a sentence expressing agreement with their views, but the impracticality of following through on their suggestions at present. Nice, neutral sentences: if one doesn’t look at the actual blog posts.

If one wanted to try something really interesting, how about this for a thought experiment (assuming the paper is accepted):

* Place paper on arXiv and on own web page

* Submit paper to Journal of A, owned by a big commercial publisher.

* Receive referee reports. If allowed, post these on your web page, removing trivial stuff like “page 3, line 24, missing ‘an’, insert comma” (or not!)

* Make changes (if needed)

* Receive acceptance email/letter from Journal and place on website

* Receive contract

* Decline to sign contract and withdraw paper, with explanatory letter about publisher’s practices (make this nice to the handling editor, they have done some work for you after all)

* Update arXiv version with note ‘accepted by Journal of A, but withdrawn by author for [personal reasons here], referee reports, acceptance letter and withdrawal letter available from [website]’

* (Optional) - resubmit to an open access journal, together with supporting material (acceptance letter, referee reports, withdrawal letter)

Now one has simultaneously: a paper accepted to the journal one ‘must’ publish in, and a letter to prove it, referee reports stating the quality of the work and a commitment to not use Journal of A.

Now this is a perhaps a complete fantasy, and may not work in real life, and someone who needs publications to get a job, and timely ones at that, is not going to do this. Or perhaps one can use the scholastica platform or similar (http://www.scholasticahq.com/ ) to set up something similar to Rejecta Mathematica, but only accepting papers that have been accepted in other journals - Accepta Mathematica? - and then withdrawn by authors because of “moral outrage at publishers”, “dislike of anti-open source journals” or such like. (The reasons are complete hyperbole: I just mean that the paper is not withdrawn for reasons of errors). Papers would need to be supplied along with acceptance letters and referee reports, along with original submission and final accepted copy.

In any case, those with established careers with ‘nothing to fear’ should stop publishing in the journals in question so that their quality drops, and publish in other venues (open source/society- or university-published journals) so that their quality rises, and more junior mathematicians can safely jump ship.

In other news, not all eminent British mathematicians are quite as admirable as Tim Gowers. Guess what this refers to?

“When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by a multinational to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be a work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”

Answer here.

Does anyone know what’s happened to the Banff Protocol? My immediate thought on reading about the Elsevier petition was that everything in it was already covered by the Banff Protocol, but I wanted to check as it’s been a while since I read it. However, I can’t find it! Top search hit is John’s post here a few years back, but the link that it links to is dead.

One way to erode the predatory journal strangle hold is to move more and more science (pre) publishing to open source. I just saw this discussion: An arXiv for all of science? F1000 launches new immediate publication journal. Contra the title, the target appears to be mainly bio-medicine. Doing this for bio-medicine is quite important because research there is the most richly funded and bio-medicine journals are the cash cows for publishers.