Re: What is needed for an online journal

[Michael Barr <barr@barrs.org>]

I guess reality will have to intervene.  Young people need refereed
journal publications if they hope to get tenure and promotion.  Canadians,
and doubtless others, require them in order to get research grants.  If
you are going through the process of refereeing them for ArXiv, you may as
well start a journal; it costs no more.  TAC is a good model and I am
about to find out about the NY J. Math. since I am a coauthor on a paper
that has no category theory in it.

I have probably published as many papers in TAC as anyone else and have so
far managed to convince NSERC that these are genuinely refereed papers.
I recently had a paper turned down for TAC, incidentally, so the
refereeing is real.  I had my doubts whether the paper was publishable and
now I am sure.  On ArXiv, there would have been no judgment.

However, I do not believe that this model of totally cost-free publication
is viable in the long run.  Since the universities will be the main
beneficiaries of the eventual demise (I hope) of the commercial journals,
they ought to be giving us the modest help we need.

Michael

On Sun, 31 Dec 2006, Bill Rowan wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We have the arxiv preprint server, and other preprint servers.  Why is
> this not sufficient?  Because the papers are not refereed and subject to
> being made better through the work of editors (not that they always
> improve things).
>
> What about having an editorial board, which would look at papers on the
> arxiv, say, have them reviewed and revised, and then put them back on the
> arxiv in final form, and listed elsewhere as having been through that
> process and "blessed" so to speak by the editorial board?
>
> What we would all like to have is more prestige for having our papers
> blessed, and hopefully, read by somebody.  In this proposal, the quality
> of the editorial board's work and the usability of its published listings
> would be the most important thing.  They could even give a negative
> recommendation for someone's paper, although authors might hope for the
> opportunity to withdraw their paper if they didn't appreciate the final
> recommendation.
>
> The pulbished listings could include more information than just an up- or
> down- recommendation to read the paper, it could include comments by other
> mathematicians.
>
> Bill Rowan
>
>
>