Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A editorial board quits; forms Diamond Open Access replacement

Good news for Open Access fans and non-fans of publishing giant Elsevier: another editorial board of an Elsevier-published journal (well, “most” of the editors) have quit and set up a replacement journal. The new journal is called Combinatorial Theory, and will be published starting the second quarter 2021 on the University of California’s eScholarship platform.

The new journal’s logo

Like a number of other good mathematics journals, it charges no publication fees and is free to read; the journal will publish articles under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC By 4.0) license. The Editorial Board of Comb. Theory is top-notch (including, I note, recent George Szekeres Medal winner Ole Warnaar).

Added, since Andrés Caicedo pointed out Ardila’s tweet thread on the matter:

https://twitter.com/FedericoArdila/status/1337437332983595009

The entire University of California system ditches Elsevier

You can read the press release here. I didn’t know that the UC system produces “nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output”. Another quote from the press release:

“Make no mistake: The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the U.S. — not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution — can afford to subscribe to them all,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC Berkeley, and co-chair of UC’s negotiation team. “Publishing our scholarship behind a paywall deprives people of the access to and benefits of publicly funded research. That is terrible for society.”

Added 3 Mar: This long Twitter thread from Michael Nielsen is an excellent, in-depth commentary on the deeper issues in this space.

Encouraged by the University of California's widely-discussed decision to push back against Elsevier: https://t.co/fqI8TSFn02

— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) March 3, 2019

Some (serious) open access journals in mathematics

The following list was originally compiled by Thomas Sauvaget on his blog, Episodic Thoughts, now in stasis. He gave me permission to now host it here and update it as I see fit. If you feel that there is a respectable open access maths journal missing, preferably one that does not charge APCs, then let me know in the comments. Please search in the comments at Thomas’ post to see if it hadn’t already been suggested. I will edit this post as needed, and note that at present I haven’t gone through the list to double check all of these. I will place the checked list under an Creative Commons license at some point.

Call to All Mathematicians to Make Publications Electronically Available

This was the title of a recommendation endorsed by the International Mathematical Union Executive Committee in 2001. Pretty much the whole text is as follows:

Open access to the mathematical literature is an important goal. Each of us can contribute to that goal by making available electronically as much of our own work as feasible.
Our recent work is likely already in computer readable form and should be made available variously in TeX source, dvi, pdf (Adobe Acrobat), or PostScript form. Publications from the preTeX era can be scanned and/or digitally photographed. Retyping in TeX is not as unthinkable as first appears.
Our action will have greatly enlarged the reservoir of freely available primary mathematical material, particularly helping scientists working without adequate library access.

“Call to All Mathematicians to Make Publications Electronically Available”, IMU Committee on Electronic Information and Communication

Needless to say I heartily endorse this position.

Gowers on Scholastica

Timothy Gowers, as many would know is a Fields medallist and has become somewhat of a spokesperson, or at the least a figurehead, for open access issues in mathematics publishing. He spearheaded the Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier, helped found the open access journals Forum of Mathematics: Pi and Sigma and more recently, Discrete Analysis and the new Advances in Combinatorics. The difference between the former two and the latter is that the FoM journals are published by a commercial publisher and have non-zero article processing charges (APCs), typically paid for out of research funds, or library OA funds etc, whereas DA and AinC is an ‘arXiv-overlay’ journal: the final versions of articles are stored on the arXiv, and the cost to the journal for each article is O($10), which is covered by a grant/donated funding. Needless to say, these journals are part of the Free Journal Network, the aim of which is to be a loose confederation of open access journals that are free to publish in and meet modern standards of ‘openness’. The journal websites for DA and AinC are hosted by Scholastica, and Tim recently did an interesting interview with Scholastica about the whole business.

 

 

 

A new ethical mathematics journal

Tim Gowers has posted about a new journal, Advances in Combinatorics, that is a) open access, b) free to publish in for authors. It is aimed at good (but not absolute, Acta/Annals top-tier papers). I heartily endorse this new journal.