Applied Categorical Structures

[Michael Barr <barr@math.mcgill.ca>]

Dear colleagues:

After thinking about it, I cannot restrain myself from responding to
Ross's message that the procedings of CT07 will be published by Applied
Categorical Structures.  What I say here is what I would do.  I cannot
recommend what other people should do (especially people without tenure,
who are in a peculiar position).

I am not going to CT07 (I cannot face crossing the pond in sardine class)
nor am I planning to publish a paper in the proceedings.  But if I were, I
would certainly not publish it in ACS.  The proceedings of the Kleislifest
in 2000 were published by ACS but my paper went into TAC.

ACS is published by Kluwer (now a subsidary of Springer).  Kluwer is one
of the "gang of five"  publishers that are sucking all the life (not to
mention money) out of mathematical publication.  The journal is not
subscribed to by McGill nor by any other university in Montreal.  I would
actually be surprised if any university in Canada or more than a small
handful in the US subscribe.  It is no wonder since they charge, as far as
I can tell, in the neighbourhood of $3 a page so that the annual
subscription of nearly 100 pages costs nearly $3000.  The author of a
paper published there is legally enjoined from posting it on his own web
site.  What a perversion of the whole idea of intellectual property (a
somewhat dubious concept in any case, especially the way it is practiced
today).  Imagine, we do all the work, they make all the profit, and then
tell us we cannot distribute it freely.

When I publish, my interests are served best by the widest possible
distribution.  If it is category theory, that means TAC.  (Unfortunately,
my most recent work has been in point-set topology, which has no such
alternative.)  TAC is freely (in both senses) available and leaves the
intellectual property where it belongs, with the author.  But even if TAC
is unsuitable for your work, there are reasonable alternatives.  Two of my
recent papers have been published in the Canadian Journal and one in an
inexpensive Japanese journal.  Even tenure committees might be impressed
by those places.  Of course, nothing I do would ever be acceptable in
"prestige" journals, but that gets into issues that Ronnie Brown has
recently expressed better than I can.

Michael