Re: What is needed for an online journal

["Ronnie Brown" <Ronnie@LL319dg.fsnet.co.uk>]

Mike Barr has put his finger on the key points: papers are needed not just as a contribution to the advancement of knowledge but also for career prospects and the awarding of research grants, which are also related to career prospects. Further there are the notions of `impact factor' of various journals, and that of citation indices. 

On the last,  some Governments  take the line that a journal to be rated for research promotion has to be on the list of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI: http://scientific.thomson.com/). It is possible that the UK Government, in moving to using `metrics' for research impact, will take this line.  A search of the ISI list shows that it has of course journals of major publishers and of national academic institutions, and that it claims to  have a procedure for adding journals to their list. But the operation of the listing is based on the idea that not all journals need to be listed, in order to assess significance. TAC is not on the list, and I think neither is NYJM, Cahier. It is also difficult to get on the list, as evidence from editors shows, and there is no evidence of an academic input to the ISI  procedures. The organisation is a commercial organisation, which has some control of scientific information. 

Eugene Garfield writes in 2004: 
Garfield, Eugene] ARE YOU SUGGESTING ISI COVER THE LOWEST IMPACT JOURNALS AND PASS LESS ATTENTION TO THE HIGHEST? 
[Garfield, Eugene]  WE CANNOT CONTROL HOW THE DATA IS USED. I HAVE DONE MY BEST TO PREVENT ITS ABUSE BUT I HAVE NO POWER TO CONTROL IT. 

Perhaps also mathematicians in research assessment forget the long time scale of the impact of new ideas. It is very easy to rate work which is related to famous problems. It is less easy to rate work which opens a new range of ideas, as has category theory, for example. I am grateful to David Corfield for pointing out a quotation from Rota's `Indiscrete thoughts' p.48: 

 ``What can you prove with exterior algebra that you cannot prove
without  it?" Whenever you hear this question raised about some new
piece of  mathematics, be assured that you are likely to be in the
presence of something important. In my time, I have heard it
repeated for random  variables, Laurent Schwartz' theory of
distributions, ideles and Grothendieck's schemes, to mention only a
few. A proper retort might be: ``You are right. There is nothing in
yesterday's mathematics that could not also be proved without it.
Exterior algebra is not meant to prove old facts, it is meant to
disclose a new world. Disclosing new worlds is as worthwhile a
mathematical enterprise as proving old conjectures.

There is a discussion of ISI and related issues of impact factors etc in 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Scientific_Information



Ronnie Brown
www.bangor.ac.uk/r.brown