Tag Archives: NZMS newsletter

Cybermath column NZMS Newsletter 2019/Aug

When writing the last column I expected that the topic of this one would be the relaunch of the New Zealand Journal of Mathematics, but unusual circumstances have delayed the relaunch, which is still expected to happen by the end of 2019. The NZJM is a classic example of a scholar-run journal with almost zero budget, subsidised easily by universities and the NZMS because its costs are so low. An argument often made by vested interests in the publishing industry is that high quality journals are expensive (many journals make income of thousands of dollars per published paper). A recent study (fittingly published as a PeerJ preprint) shows that US$200 per paper should be an upper bound. ​

I have spent some time on Twitter recently, but not for mathematical purposes (I run the accounts @oa_math and @freejournalnet). A substantial number of mathematicians have Twitter accounts, although many seem to use them more for political purposes than to discuss mathematics (for example, Ian Stewart (@JoatStewart) and even Timothy Gowers (@wtgowers) who has been using it for less than a year, after the demise of Google+ necessitated another forum.) This list of mathematicians on Twitter is a useful starting point.

Of course there is a large representation of experts in public outreach, such as Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz), Hannah Fry (@FryRsquared​), Marcus du Sautoy (@marcusdusautoy). Interesting feeds relating to the politics of academia include those by Izabella Laba @ilaba.

Some other accounts that caught my eye and focus more on mathematics include: Numberphile (@numberphile) from MSRI (there is also a Youtube channel and other resources at https://www.numberphile.com/​) and Fermat’s Library (@fermatslibrary). These channels are focused more at the undergraduate level. Research-level mathematics is not as well represented. The first mathematical blogger John Carlos Baez has a nice feed at @johncarlosbaez.

The American Mathematical Society (and also London Mathematical Society @LondMathSoc​ and Australian Mathematical Society ​@AustMS) are there, but not the New Zealand Mathematical Society yet. The University of Auckland Department of Mathematics is there: @mathsmatter – are any other departments? Antipodean mathematicians I found include ​Nalini Joshi (@monsoon0) and our own Steven Galbraith (@EllipticKiwi).

Twitter of course has its downsides. The pace at which tweets appear requires a lot of discipline in whom to follow and how to read – at times it is like looking at a library of newspapers but only reading the headlines. This goes against the traditions of mathematics. The 140 (now 280) character limit favours concision. LaTeX is not yet supported; mathematical formulae can be embedded as pictures if necessary. Perhaps the medium is simply not (yet) well adapted for mathematicians. Will we ever see Terence Tao on Twitter? Somehow I doubt it. But overall I think it is worth exploring, and I welcome feedback from readers (if I have any – at least on Twitter I can get some idea about that).​

We finish with some brief notes that may help to feed your procrastination.

Cybermath column NZMS Newsletter 2019/Apr

A very short column this time, with only two topics, but each of them fairly important and timely.

After my criticism of the state of the New Zealand Journal of Mathematics in the last column, I have been invited to put my money where my mouth is and do something about it, as a member of the editorial board and the oversight board (the journal is owned jointly by NZMS and the University of Auckland Mathematics Department – I will represent the former). Expect substantial changes in the website (among other things) by the end of 2019. The domain name (not yet live) will change to nzjmath.org.

Not long before the deadline for this column, news came that the University of California had ended negotiations with Elsevier and cancelled all journal subscriptions. UC had been trying for months to achieve a “publish and read” deal by which papers written by their researchers would be made open access. I (and many others) feel that such deals (which have been struck with several publishers by national consortia in the last few years) are far too generous to the large commercial publishers, but apparently Elsevier wanted even more. According to UC, the final straw was that Elsevier communicated directly with UC researchers, omitting key points about he negotiation, in an attempt to influence the negotiations. See https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-negotiations/uc-and-elsevier/ for more information.

It is very clear that large and profit-hungry corporations of this type are simply incompatible with scholarly publishing. My prediction is that after a short transition period no one will miss, or even notice, that they are not subscribed. UC has several contingency plans in place involving fancy inter-library loans. I hope that the money saved (in the tens of millions of dollars per year) will be put to good use, for example by supporting community-controlled infrastructure such as arXiv.org and free journals of the NZ J. Math. type.

I am not holding my breath, but I really hope that the NZ university libraries (who pay tens of millions annually for subscriptions) can follow UC’s lead. Such cancellations are becoming increasingly common – see SPARC’s list.

Cybermath column NZ Math Society Newsletter Dec 2018

I have been writing this column for the last few years. Here is the upcoming column – if I have time I will include the older ones here, although some may be only of historical interest now.

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Having failed to make the last issue, this column is probably too late to say anything interesting about the Fields medallists for 2018. The best general description of the medallists and their work that I saw was in Quanta magazine – there is a wealth of interesting information there. This free online resource backed by the Simons Foundation (itself created by the world’s richest mathematician) has many excellent articles written for the thinking layperson. For a completely different perspective, see Doron Zeilberger’s opinion.

I have started using Twitter (but only as representative of professional organisations MathOA and Free Journal Network) and have been looking for interesting mathematical content there. Twitter is best used to advertise links to other content, and formulae are not easy to include there. It might be fun to try to present a nontrivial proof in 140 (or 280) characters! A recent tweet by Clifford Pickover presented a 1966 paper from Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society  that was only two sentences long, with no abstract, which is presumably a record. If any readers have interesting links to mathematics on Twitter, please let this column(ist) know.

So, as usual, back to academic publishing. The big news since the last column is the advent of Plan S, stemming from a decision by several national European science funders to accelerate the change to open access publication that has been seen by many as inevitable since the internet became widely used on the late 1990s. After all, publication mean making public, and not using modern technology to do that seems very weird. Plan S, which has already been revised once and which has a feedback deadline of 1 Feb 2018, has attracted support from charitable funders (such as the Gates Foundation) and non-European government funders – including several from China, which many outsiders had seen as uninterested in open access. If it is implemented as expected, within 2 years all grant-funded research will have to be published under stringent open access rules. This is a major incentive for “prestigious” journals to change their way of operating. I recently had a conversation with the Editor-in-Chief of perhaps the most highly-reputed mathematics journal, who is concerned about this issue (but apparently not yet concerned enough to make major changes in the journal’s antiquated processes!)

As usual when the status quo is threatened, there has been resistance. An open letter by researchers mainly in the field of chemistry has circulated. And support: a letter supporting funder mandates of the Plan S type has circulated more recently. Each has 1000-2000 signatories, a  tiny fraction of researchers worldwide (I have signed the second but not the first). The main concerns of the former letter are academic freedom (which I consider to be barely relevant here) and the impact on scholarly societies, which often subsidise their operations via journal subscriptions.

The NZ Journal of Mathematics, supported by the NZ Math Society and the University of Auckland Maths Department,  is freely available online with no authors charges, which is excellent. However it has been allowed to stagnate in some ways, and is not up to the standard of similar journals. I am not discussing the editorial and refereeing standards, but the website, licence information, ethics statement, and other things expected from a serious publisher (see the criteria for membership of the Free Journal Network, satisfied by the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics and Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, for example). I hope that some much-needed modernisation can occur and this journal can take its rightful place in the journal ecosystem.

It is not hard to imagine a much better system than the current one. Universal open access, with publication costs paid for by libraries and research funders without authors having to consider payment, would save perhaps 80% of current costs worldwide (now paid mostly by libraries via subscriptions). To keep costs even lower, a widespread use of the arXiv overlay model used by, for example Tim Gowers’ recently established Discrete Analysis and Advances in Combinatorics would be a substantial improvement. One of the features of the current system that every researcher knows about but is rarely mentioned in policy discussions is that (at least in fields like mathematics) commercial publishers very often subtract value from an arXiv version by making typesetting and proofreading errors. In fact, the published version has not really been peer reviewed, because changes can be made by the author after acceptance and usually only non-researcher publisher staff see them.
Conversion to a better system has been much slower than everyone expected. My opinion is that there is plenty of blame to go around and that big commercial publishers must share some of it, but universities, learned societies and researchers have had the ability to fix the situation and have largely abdicated their responsibility.​ I urge all readers to at least support those of us who are working hard to bring about a better system, even if you can’t spare any effort to help. A simple discussion with colleagues and administrators at your own institution can often be surprisingly fruitful. And make your voice heard by signing relevant petitions, or explicitly state that you are apathetic and I can have your proxy vote! And those happy few readers who are in a position to influence policy, please doing it, or ask me how. For example, the RSNZ/Marsden Fund could sign up to Plan S right away if they chose.
 
For those interested in control by researchers of scholarly publishing (which is the first principle of Fair Open Access and without which, in my view, no good sustainable alternative system can function), there will be an online event on 7 February 2019 with which Free Journals Network is involved, among several other organisations. Check out Academic-Led Publishing Day. 
 
Some other big news since the last column concerns the Ted Hill affair. This is an enormously controversial issue, and I will give some selected links for those who have not already followed it. Briefly, a paper studying a model of evolution with possible implications that support the general view that differences in participation in research mathematics by men and women may not be due solely to deficient social organization was accepted by Mathematical Intelligencer, then rejected for political reasons. It was then accepted in New York Journal of Mathematics and swiftly removed after complaints by its editorial board. The Editor-in-Chief died very soon after and the accepting editor is no longer an editor there. My opinion is that very few people came out of this looking better than when they went in, and it shows the need for high ethical standards in all aspects of research. When the basic standards of liberal democracy are under heavy assault by authoritarian leaders and their helpers worldwide, we must hold the line and not allow science to be polluted. And we should strive to improve our standards – several years of being interested in academic publishing have shown me that there are many dodgy practices still out there!
 
Some links:
 

Cybermath column NZ Math Society Newsletter Apr 2018

 

We focus (yet again) on a few developments in scholarly publishing, with a strong mathematical flavour. One is the establishment in late January 2018 (by me, with help from Jonathan Klawitter and Dmitri Zaitsev) of the Free Journal Network. We are all familiar with “diamond” open access journals, with no author fees, typically run by volunteer academic labour. Examples include Electronic J. Combinatorics, Australasian J. Combinatorics, New York J. Math., NZ J. Math.. Such journals are often of a very good standard as far as editorial processes go, but sometimes lack a few desirable features (e.g. DOIs, mobile-readable websites), can be seen as wasteful of researcher time, and are run on very low budgets (typically zero, with subsidy from a university providing the website). The FJN has been established to help promote such journals, attract small amounts of funding to fund luxuries such as those described above ($\varepsilon > > 0$ in this case), and allow sharing of best practices. We intend it to act as a whitelist for people searching for well run, ethically acceptable journals with reasonably high standards. So far there are 22 member journals of which 14 are in mathematics. Many of the latter were mentioned in the August 2017 column. One of these is Algebraic Combinatorics, the thriving new incarnation of J. Algebraic Combinatorics (see more on this below).
Of course, there are hundreds of mathematics journals that fall under the “diamond” label (many but certainly not all can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals). However FJN has some formal requirements, namely that members satisfy the Fair Open Access Principles. These recently formulated principles are intended to formalise the intuitive idea of journals that run like those mentioned above, with no financial barriers to authors or readers, and community control of the journal. Some diamond journals (for example Annales de l’Institut Fourier and Acta Mathematica) have copyright transfer agreements that are inconsistent with FOAP, but are otherwise fine. Many diamond journals are very small, regional or otherwise not high priority for FJN to invest effort into. The ultimate aim of FJN is to build a portfolio of open access journals that is strong enough that libraries will pay to support them by redirecting subscription funding, so we can compete head-on with Elsevier, Springer, et al.
Readers having suggestions for journals to consider for membership should contact info@freejournals.org.
Another  recent project is the establishment (with Dmitri Zaitsev) of an online forum Publishing Reform (there is also a private strategy forum). The idea is to centralize discussions and collaborate on useful documents and concrete actions to improve journal publishing. Mathematicians are again well represented here, including G\”{u}nter Ziegler,  negotiator with Elsevier for DEAL in Germany; Martin Gr\”{o}tschel, President of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities; Timothy Gowers, Fields Medallist and Elsevier boycott initiator.
I recommend that readers check out the discussion site above and contribute as they see fit. More details about the ecosystem of community-controlled journals can be found in an article I recently wrote, to appear in August 2018 Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Speaking of Elsevier, negotiations in Germany are dragging on, with no end in sight. The slightly bizarre spectacle of institutions agreeing to cancel access to journals and refusing to pay, but Elsevier providing access for free (presumably for fear of researchers working out just how easily they can cope without a subscription)  shows just how dysfunctional the journal publishing market is. I have heard rumours that the Australia/NZ negotiations with Elsevier have also stalled, over the issue of nondisclosure agreements.
In Europe in particular there is substantial government support for the idea of open access, but almost without exception the wrong choices are being made over and over, and legacy publishers (presumably because they can pay lobbyists) are being given unfair advantages.The latest missteps are a Call for Tenders for the European Open Research   Publishing Platform, which excludes organisations not already having a turnover of at least 1 million euros, and the EU Open Science Monitor giving Elsevier a contract to monitor the progress of open science.
Finally, the flipped journal Algebraic Combinatorics, published by Centre Mersenne, is thriving, having published 12 papers since January and having had 140 submissions at time of writing (anecdotal evidence from one editor-in-chief is that the quality has risen since the breakaway from Springer). An analysis of the board of the zombie  Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics shows exactly what is going on. Springer apparently intends to capitalise on the reputation of the journal, built up over 25 years by the editorial board that has departed, by using new editors and ignoring what they do. A systematic look at MathSciNet shows that the editor-in-chief, advisory editors and editorial board of JACo (14 people in total) altogether have fewer papers published in the field of algebraic combinatorics (AMS classification 05E primary/secondary) than does almost any one individual editor of AlCo, and about one-third as many as just one of those editors.
As Marcus Tullius Cicero apparently apparently ended his speeches in the Roman Senate by calling for he destruction of Carthage, I call here for zombie JACo to die, and the big publishers to be abandoned until they actually provide service at reasonable price, and start to care about quality. These issues are too important to ignore – do something about it (ask me how if you don’t know)!

Cybermath column NZ Math Society Newsletter Dec 2017

 

As the deadline for each column approaches,  I hope to write about something other than journal publishing, but lately there has been so much news from that direction that it is hard to ignore.
In 2014 Timothy Gowers and others used Freedom of Information laws  to discover the amounts paid by UK universities for journal subscriptions to Elsevier. The reason they did this was that Elsevier (and SpringerNature, and maybe other publishers) insist very strongly on confidentiality agreements when they sign contracts with universities. The presumed reason for such insistence is that this makes their job of profit maximization much easier by lowering the bargaining ability of the universities.
The UK data showed that not only was each university spending a large amount, these numbers varied substantially even between universities with very similar size and research profile.
Earlier work in the USA and later work in Finland and Netherland  have confirmed this overall picture. In 2014 I wrote toall NZ universities except Lincoln (for no really good reason, and I should rectify this, although it is only 1/4 the size of the next smallest university), requesting information of subscriptions paid to Elsevier, Springer, Taylor \& Francis, and Wiley (the first three are actually divisions of larger companies RELX, SpringerNature, Informa). These are the top 4 publishers in terms of expenditure by most libraries, although they account for considerably less than half of total journal expenditure. The universities concerned have around 8400 EFT academic/research staff and 130000 EFT students.
As expected, all the universities refused, and it was clear from the similarity of their answers that they had help from the publishers. Unlike the situation in UK there was no right of review of these refusals at a university level, so I complained next to the Ombudsman, citing the Official Information Act 1982.
After over 3 years of delays of all types, the Ombudsman’s final report  unambiguously ruled in my favour, and the universities eventually supplied the information. So now we know how much they have spent, and the results are illuminating. Because of the fact that payments were made in various currencies, I have had to make some assumptions on exchange rates based on historical data. The raw data is available on Figshare.
  •  For just these 4 publishers, the 7 universities paid NZ$19.4 million in 2016 in order to rent access to journal articles.
  • This amounts to $2300 per academic/research staff member.
  •  For comparison, the Marsden Fund awarded $84.6 million this year, a big increase on previous years.
  • In the period 2013-2016, the amount paid rose by 17%, whereas CPI inflation in NZ and most other developed countries was around 3% over that period.
Longtime readers of this column will have no doubt about my opinion on these data. A huge waste of public money is occurring – independent estimates of the real cost of production of journal articles by modern publishers put it around US$500 per article, at most, while the current setup yields income 10 times that for the large publishers. These publishers make profits of around 40%, unmatched in any other legal industry.
The big publishers realise that the current subscription model is not sustainable. Although the way they market journal bundles — “Big Deals” — helps to insulate them from cancellations, such cancellations by academic libraries are slowly increasing, because the cost increases year on year re simply too much for budgets to bear. The publishers have seized upon the author-pay open access model as a way to protect their revenue. This model  has serious resistance from researchers in fields such as mathematics.
Readers interested in learning about how we got to such an unpleasant situation should read this article. Readers interested in helping to get us out of the situation could do worse than to contact me at info@mathoa.org.

Cybermath column NZ Math Society Newsletter August 2017

 

This column is focused on a single specialized topic. For almost the last two years I have been  involved with several international collaborators (from Australia, Netherlands, UK, France and Germany) in a project to accelerate the conversion of mathematics journals to a model involving open access with no direct payments by authors (sometimes called “diamond open access”). Some of these activities have been reported on in this Newsletter in the last several columns.

We created a legally constituted non-profit foundation (Stichting) called MathOA in the Netherlands in order to oversee the “flipping” of subscription journals to open access​.  The advisory board for MathOA includes Timothy Gowers, David Mumford, and several strong mathematicians who haven’t won the Fields Medal. MathOA is modelled on LingOA, a foundation in linguistics that organized the defection of the board of Lingua from Elsevier and the re-founding of the journal under the name Glossa, published by Ubiquity Press.

LingOA and MathOA have since been joined by PsyOA (in psychology) and we intend to create a loose organization called Fair Open Access Alliance. We have formulated what we call the Fair Open Access Principles. 

We have also invited existing mathematics journals that (essentially) conform to these principles to join an as yet unnamed network which will become part of FOAA. So far the following have agreed to do so: Australasian Journal of Combinatorics, Discrete Analysis, Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Epijournal de Geometrie Algebraique, INTEGERS: The Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory, Internet Mathematics, Journal de th\’{e}orie des nombres de Bordeaux, Journal of Computational Geometry, Logical Methods in Computer Science, SIGMA. FOAA is in its infancy and we are investigating ways in which we can create synergy between these independent journals, and make them even better (they are already very good or excellent in many respects).​

After the administrative details above, the \textbf{big news} to report is that the editorial board of Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, currently published by Springer, has resigned to create a new journal (which is clearly the re-formation of the old one) under the name Algebraic Combinatorics, published in association with Centre Mersenne. This has been assisted from the start by MathOA.

Conversion of journals to open access is accepted by the large publishers only if it doesn’t negatively affect their profits. Thus if they own the journal title, what usually happens is  a refusal to negotiate seriously and an attempt to find a new editorial board to continue the old title. In my opinion, it is an attack on the mathematical community (and the wider public, and science itself) for a researcher to accept an offer to run such a zombie journal. Almost always, journals losing their entire editorial board in this way do cease publication within a few years (see my blog post)  and the new ones thrive.

​Although this action by the editors is in some sense obviously ethically correct, and is made  easier by legal and practical help from MathOA, it still requires considerable courage from the editors. Leaving aside them having to forego approximately $2^11 annual stipend, they need to deal with pestering by publisher representatives (who suddenly discover how important the journal is after years of taking it for granted), media attention, learning new editorial software, and general uncertainty. So I salute Akihiro Munemasa, Hendrik van Maldeghem, Christos Athanasiadis and Hugh Thomas, who to my knowledge are the first editors-in-chief to flip their mathematics journal from a subscription model to one run according to Fair OA principles. May they be followed by many, and soon!

Cybermath column NZ Math Society Newsletter April 2017

This column takes a break from its recent heavy focus on publication reform to list a few interesting links more related to mathematical research and other professional issues. It is a partially fenced stream of consciousness, but may be useful all the same.

Laci Babai made a bold claim, which generated substantial publicity, that determining whether two graphs are isomorphic can be solved in quasipolynomial time. Harald Helfgott found a flaw while reading the paper deeply in order to present it to S\'{e}minaire Bourbaki, which I had no idea still existed. Babai retracted the claim on 4 January 2017, and reasserted it after fixing the proof on 7 January 2017. How long would this process have taken under the current journal system — would the error have been spotted at all? (sorry, couldn’t resist that). This is an important theoretical breakthrough and shows how well mathematics can work in the internet age.

Speaking of internet mathematics, there is a  journal of that name, devoted really to the mathematics of complex networks (what we used to call graphs before the marketers took over). Not only is the journal interesting and apparently well run, it uses the new platform  Scholastica (as does Tim Gowers’  Discrete Analysis). Another interesting fact is that the journal was formerly published by one of the traditional publishers (Taylor \& Francis), and they gave it up to the editors (not, however, before charging them for the back issues).

Getting back to mathematics on the internet, Polymath is still active, although generating less publicity than a few years ago. They are currently focusing on Rota’s basis conjecture:  if $B_1, B_2, \dots, B_n$ are disjoint bases of an $n$-dimensional vector space $V$  then there exists disjoint bases $C_1, \dots, C_n$ such that each $C_j$ contains one element from each $B_i$.

The arXiv has become very important to mathematicians. At my urging my university will become a financial supporter. I challenge other readers to get their institutions to do the same, rather than freeload as seems to be NZ policy in so many areas in recent years. Although it is cheap to run per paper, the total cost is nontrivial because there are so many papers. It is a challenge to keep up with new postings, so if you trust recommendation algorithms, try  arXivist (“your personal guide to the arXiv”) or Scirate to navigate it. An alternative is to visualise its million-plus papers as a complex network using Paperscape.

The arXiv idea has recently spread to disciplines with very little preprint tradition. The Center for Open Science has developed a preprint platform used by psychology, engineering, sociology and other fields. Maybe journals will change radically soon, after all.

Springer made many old volumes in its Graduate Texts in Mathematics series available for free download in late 2015. The direct links can be found easily by searching although they have apparently revoked the free deal. If they were serious, presumably they would remove the links.

If you want to attend a mathematical meeting in person rather than do everything via the internet, try MathMeetings.Net which aims to be a complete list.

I recently read (much of — far too many letters and namedropping for my taste to finish all of it) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. A controversial figure but certainly a mathematician (for part of his life) who followed his conscience wherever it took him. The American Mathematical Society is awarding the Bertrand Russell Prize every 3 years from 2018, for “research or service contributions of mathematicians or related professionals to promoting good in the world and recognizes (sic) the various ways that mathematics furthers human values.” Thomas Hales has apparently funded the prize. It would be good to see nominations (which close 30 June 2017) from this part of the world.

Of course, political activity by mathematicians can cause problems and muddy reputations, as the recently deceased great mathematician Igor Shafarevich found out. Other nonagenarians who have left us recently, in mathematics or related fields, include Kenneth Arrow, Joseph Keller, Howard Raiffa and Thomas Schelling. Going back a year, there is also Christopher Zeeman (whom I am sure visited NZ sometime), Fields Medallist Klaus Roth, while Felix Browder made it to 89. Best wishes to all readers aiming to make 100 while still doing mathematics! The longest-lived mathematician that I am aware of is Leopold Vietoris who not only lived during three centuries, has quite a few concepts named after him.

NZ Mathematical Society Newsletter

I have accepted the job of Editor of the New Zealand Mathematical Society Newsletter. This publication has been going since 1974, and has fallen on hard times lately. It is time for a shakeup, but this will start slowly.

Some of the old issues make very interesting reading. The very first one shows that although times have certainly changed, many features of the NZ mathematical scene remain the same. At least now we don’t have to produce the newsletter with a typewriter and cyclostyle machine!