Re: Elsevier

[Michael Barr <barr@barrs.org>]

A propos what Vaughan says, conferences in math are not seriously
refereed, often not refereed at all.  This makes conference proceedings
useless for promotions and also for research grants.  Like it or not, this
is one of the main reasons mathematicians tend to ignore conference
proceedings.  But CS conferences are generally carefully refereed with the
results Vaughan mentioned.

There are a number of reasons for this, I suppose but the overwhelming one
is how hard it is to get read a paper in math, with a concomitant
difficulty in getting serious refereeing.  I note that CS journals usually
want two and sometimes three referees to recommend a paper.  With rare
exceptions (Wiles, the Hales's paper on the Kepler conjecture, Perlman,
should he choose to publish) that is almost unheard of in math.  I was on
the committee that chose the papers for last summers conference in Nova
Scotia and only a couple papers were turned down and they were jokes.

How about a journal called J. Topology.  The owners of Topology cannot
object to that.

Yes, Cahiers is a good choice.  And while many thanks must go to Andree
for keeping it going all these many years, first we have to thank Charles
Ehresmann for starting it.

Michael