unified electronic preprint archive for mathematics

unified electronic preprint archive for mathematics

[categories]

Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 18:56:40 GMT
From: Paul Taylor <pt@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>

An open letter to Jim Stasheff,
re the proposed unified electronic preprint archive for mathematics

Dear Jim,

Last week you published a proposal for a unified electronic preprint
archive in mathematics, at
	http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/math/info
making use of the software at Los Alamos National Laboratory which
was written by Paul Ginsparg, originally for a certain branch of Physics.
Following our extensive semi-private correspondence on this subject,
I think it is time for me to write something to the "categories" list.

First, I want to commend the efforts of yourself and your committee
in taking the initiative to call for a unified archive. Mathematics
is a notoriously parochial subject, and the existence of such a central
resource may in the long term help us to form The Big Picture.

Having said this about the mathematical issues, I am unhappy about
the way in which this proposal has been made in terms of management
and technical issues.  Such a unified archive will immediately acquire
considerable de facto authority, and it creates a monopoly over the
means of publication in mathematics which is potentially far more
significant than the contraints of the existing journal system from
which we are trying to free ourselves.  You have also accepted wholesale
Paul Ginsparg's design decisions, some of which may be accidents of
implementation.  In several respects there are or could be other
paradigms of electronic publishing, which ought to be encouraged to
co-exist with his ways of doing things, so that the community at large
can decide over a period of years which method is to be preferred.

I am worried that you may be making assumptions that things have to be
done in one way when in fact alternatives are possible.
In short, the proposal should have been "put out to tender" for other
software designs and implementations to compete on fair terms on the
basis of the facilities that they provide to authors and readers.

In these respects this issue is analogous to the debate about TeX macros
for commutative diagrams, on which a certain amount of blood was spilt
some years ago.  In that case someone who had used package X proposed
that there be an electronic journal in category theory in TeX source,
standarding on package X for commutative diagrams, without being aware
of the existence of packages Y, Z, ... Actually this is quite different:
in using TeX, or whatever technology they use for their papers, authors
are making a considerable commitment, and some of us have made a far greater
commitment by writing and maintaining macro packages.  In the case of
electronic dissemination (of existing files), papers can easily be copied
to and linked from many different places without any further effort
by the author.

Nevertheless, bad decisions at this stage about the database which says
where everything (and everybody) is could be significant handicaps in the
development of the technology at a later date.

I therefore beg you at least to stay the widespread advertising of the
new archive until its potential competitors have had a chance to
discuss the way in which they should co-operate and compete.

I intend to contact Paul Ginsparg myself to discuss some technical issues.
In particular I have a number of suggestions to make about the process
of registering authors and submitting papers. His collected bibliographical
data should be provided in BibTeX format for processing by other services.
It would also be possible to integrate his author registration with Hypatia's,
which would greatly enhance the usefulness of both systems.  In fact it is
remarkable how closely the strengths of one system coincide with the
shortcomings of the other.

Yours,
Paul Taylor

PS The technical discussion which I have been having with Jim Stasheff,
Bob Rosebrugh, Mike Barr and others has now moved to a new email list
run from Queen Mary and Westfield College.  Details of how to join this,
together with the archive of the discussion and other information, can
be found at
	http://hypatia.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/html/eprint.html

This message is followed by a separate one on the issue of submission
in TeX source form.