Hello everyone,

I thought it would be interesting to know which mathematicians, who do not use MO currently, all MO-users would like to see on MO. I believe a lot of distinguished mathematicians already use it, but I can think of some I haven't seen on this admirable website. Perhaps they notice it, or some other mathematician may point it out to them, which would (hopefully) lead to MO-membership. Do you think this would be an appropriate question?
Please let me know,

Max Muller

My initial instinct is that this question will be subjective and argumentative, and also rather presumptuous. Why should we encourage speculation about who does or doesn't want to spend time on the site?

I don't want to encourage speculation (although it could be an effect of the question), I just thought it would be a way to make some mathematicians aware of this website, which in turn could enrich its content.

@ David, on (1): Some questions about MO on MO were, I think, pretty successful. Look at mister Gowers' question on whether or not MO has led to any breakthroughs in mathematics, for example. I agree with (2), however.
I also guess that a large portion of mathematicians who have heard of MO signed up already.

I have mentioned this sort of thing before in a question I had closed (http://mathoverflow.net/questions/6292/why-is-algebraic-geometry-so-over-represented-on-this-site-closed) before really reading the FAQ: "might it be useful to (say) invite leaders from a cross-section of fields to occasionally post questions appropriate to the site as a way of driving the distribution to uniformity?"

I really don't think that twisting people's arms to post will be effective. Some people like interacting with other people on the internet and others don't. Indeed, there are a large number of prominent mathematicians that don't even post their papers to the arXiv!

@Noah What's wrong about not posting papers on the arxiv? Half the time I can't be bothered. But I do post them on my webpage.

Big Name™

mathematicians

Dear Brian and Felipe,

I also don't post on the arxiv (with the exception of joint papers posted by a coauthor), out of a mixture of laziness and a similar concern to Brian's about not wanting multiple versions to pile up, and I do post on my web-page. However, it has been pointed out to me that for people (mathematicians, but perhaps even more students) who are not in the thick of the action, and so who may not know whose web-sites to look at, the arxiv is a more universal (and so more democratic) place to post. I haven't found this argument compelling enough to change my behaviour (yet), but it has made me feel somewhat guilty about not posting on the arxiv.

@voloch,BCnrd,Emerton.

Hrm, I wasn't actually expecting my claim to be that controversial, which gives me a little pause, perhaps I'm wrong about this. Certainly in the post google scholar world it's not as essential to have papers on the arXiv if you have them on your own webpage. In fact, a quick check shows that google scholar has no trouble finding say papers on BCnrd's webpage by random keywords.

My main arguments for why you should have papers on the arXiv are that:
1) You should strive to have your papers picked up *anywhere* that people search for them. When you search for something it's easy to miss one paper out of a hundred, but if that paper is on the arXiv, google scholar, and mathscinet then you have 3 shots at not missing it. Also in the long run it's a lot of wasted time to have to run many different searches.

2) If you want people to know about your papers in a timely fashion then the arXiv lets you do that, while people do not have an RSS feed to every mathematicians webpage.

3) The arXiv is better for long-term infrastructure reasons than your own webpages. Not to be morbid, but what happens when mathematicians die? Their papers will still be fine on the arXiv, but there's no guarantee that the homepage will stay forever. What happens when pdf stops being used? The arXiv can recompile everything into a new format, but your homepage will become useless.

4) In the long-run it's possible for the arXiv to replace the traditional journal system (yes certain things would need to change, for example "journals" could just become things that attach their name to papers on the arXiv) while people's homepages are never going to replace journals.

@Mariano: I was under the impression that if people could update their printed papers with the same ease they can update their electronic papers, many of them would.

Noah :
> 3) The arXiv is better for long-term infrastructure reasons than your own
> webpages. Not to be morbid, but what happens when mathematicians die?
> Their papers will still be fine on the arXiv, but there's no guarantee that
> the
> homepage will stay forever. What happens when pdf stops being used? The
> arXiv can recompile everything into a new format, but your homepage will
> become useless.

That's why we publish papers in journals! The printed word has survived the rise and fall of empires, the collapse of civilizations, etc. I have faith that the arXiv will still be around in 10 years, but much less faith that it will be around in 100 years.

Now, I still post papers to the arXiv, but I do that strictly for advertising purposes. I'm not well-known enough that people will periodically check my homepage to see what I've been up to!

I should also remark that the arXiv is a terrible medium for searching for something. Mathscinet and google scholar are infinitely superior.

I must admit that I'm a bit surprised that there are people who know about the arxiv and yet don't use it. Don't you want people to know about your work?

arXiv versus google scholar: I must admit that I don't use google scholar, I've yet to need to. MathSciNet, the arXiv, and just plain old google have done me fine so far. One reason that I hesitate about using Google Scholar is that I know nothing about how it indexes stuff. At least on the arXiv, the author of the paper has chosen how it should be indexed and what searches should find it. So I prefer the arXiv because I presume that the author of the paper knows who ought to be reading it. (It's worth pointing out that the arXiv now has full text searches as well)

arXiv versus MathSciNet: Of course, if I want a really good idea of what you were working on five years' ago, I'll use MathSciNet. If I want to know about current research, well, it's not so good.

arXiv versus journals: No contest. If journals actually served a useful purpose internal to academia then there might be an argument to answer here. But they don't, so there isn't.

arXiv versus archive: I find Andy's argument astonishing. Firstly, the idea that someone might actually be interested in what I wrote in 100 years' time is a strange one. Very few people read the actual originals except for historical interest. We've largely subsumed the maths of 100 years' ago and we have new books and articles summarising stuff. Secondly, although paper as a technology might have survived that long, for actual bits of paper the survival process is a lot more haphazard and random. We tend to rely on bits of paper that have been used for other purposes, stuffed down the back of a mattress for 50 years, and then not quite used as a fire-starter! If a journal actually has an archival policy, then great, but I've yet to hear of any journal that does that (which isn't to say that they don't, just that they don't make a big fuss about it). A far better strategy would be to have a central body with responsibility for this, in which case they could just print out stuff from the arXiv as well. Thirdly, I certainly don't publish in journals for archival purposes. It's never crossed my mind and I'd be astonished to hear that I was in a minority here. I publish in journals because I'm told to. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.

That's not to say that the arxiv is perfect. It's not, far from it. But it's the best system we have by a long way.

It's easy to say what is wrong with it. It tries to do two things: it tries to be both sourceforge and freshmeat. Sourceforge (for those that don't know) is where programmers can host their programs while they develop them. You can track a program, keep downloading updates, and so forth. Freshmeat is for announcing and indexing programs. You can announce a particular release of a program, keep up to date with latest stable versions of programs that you're interested in, and so forth. Of course, there's overlap, but as with such things keeping distinct roles in distinct places helps with "mission creep".

Of the two, I think that the announcing and indexing part is the key one. I suspect that the arXivers do too, since (to counter BCnrd's argument), updates are announced separately to new papers, and only 5 updates are announced - after that, new versions don't get on to the list. I check the "What's new" page each day and bookmark what look like interesting papers to go back and read at leisure. If someone just puts something on their web page, how am I supposed to know it's there? Okay, I can do a google search but I can only do that if I know what to look for! This is particularly important for someone like me who works on a bit of a boundary. I'm a topologist, but I use quite a bit of functional analysis. Because I don't actually do research in functional analysis, I don't really know what goes on there, or who the major people are. But I want to know of any results that might be useful to me, so I need to keep an eye on what's being done. The arXiv is invaluable to me in that.

So please, please, please go back and put everything you've ever done on the arXiv. Of course you don't have to update every time you correct a spelling. You can even put a link in the 'abstract' field to your webpage saying, "For the most recent version, see my webpage". At least then someone will know to look for it!

Go on. Do it now. You weren't doing anything particularly important right now, were you, otherwise you wouldn't have been reading this forum.

Right, my point was that not posting to the arXiv is something you should feel a little guilty about (unlike MO, people who don't use MO shouldn't feel even a little bit guilty despite MO being something I like) but not necessarily that it's the worst moral shortcoming ever.

Surely an ultimate goal would be for the arXiv, mathscinet, and electronic versions of everything published in journals to be all completely managed together in one nice cohesive whole. One place to see all the papers, all reviews of those papers, updated versions and errata, as well as the papers currently being worked on.

Laudable, but I can't help recalling a simile I once heard used by a statistician: trying to get mathematicians to do anything concertedly was supposed to be "like herding cats".

(I am also instinctively worried about quality control, but am aware that other people have different opinions on just what journals do and don't provide here.)

It boggles the mind exactly why people still put up with signing away all of their rights to a journal publisher. Publishers used to make money by selling Journals. Nowadays, they make money by extorting people and institutions by abusing those copyrights.

What kinds of operating costs do journals have? Do they pay referees and editors? If not, why does the community even deal with them? It seems like the journals are profiting from publishing other people's work without paying the people doing all of the work at their own firms! It seems like the only thing they do anymore is print and bind the print edition. Surely the community could organize to put together a free online journal and contract out the printing, no?

As for the difficulty of setting up such a site, I agree that the only way would be for the people who run the existing sites such as mathscinet and the arXiv to decide to work towards some such goal.

Shevek, something similar happened to Topology - see the wikipedia page for some details.

For all the doom and gloom expressed by many here, my impression is that mathematics is far closer to being able to do without the big publishers than many other fields. (Spend some time reading what the medics have to say on blogs like Bad Science if you want to see how bad it could be.)

For one thing, (almost) all mathematicians use latex, which has the potential to bring typesetting expenses right down. There are also some good examples of journals run essentially 'by the community'. It may not be actually open access, but Geometry & Topology is run not for profit, by mathematicians, and is of a very high standard.

Perhaps an academic who sold rights to a journal before the copyright extension laws went into effect could sue someone for changing how long it would take for the work to become public domain.

Many fields have largely moved away from journals owned by private corporations. Most of the top journals in topology are of that form: J.Topology, G&T, A&GT, etc.. These are all run by universities or they're small not-for-profit groups run largely by their editorial boards. This was largely due to the initiative of people like Birman and Kirby, back in the 90's although the Topology -> J.Topology change was more recent.

Answering a question from above: You don't have to sign your copyright over to the publisher. Ask them for a form you can sign which gives them a licence to publish the article, while you retain the copyright. They all have such a form (ok all the journals I've dealt with) but they don't advertise it.

I'll just point out that the journal or you owning the copyright are somewhat equivalent. If I want to reprint your paper, or translate it, or quote a significant portion of it, or turn it into a play... I still have to go to the time and expense of contacting somebody and getting a licence.

As far as mathematical articles are concerned, I am firmly convinced that the final, published version should be in the public domain. Just ask the publisher to replace the copyright line by the phrase "This work is in the public domain." I would estimate that 50% of the publishers I've dealt with eventually did this (or the equivalent). Not all publishers "get it" and with the remainder I've retained the copyright of the published version, and the arXiv version is in the public domain (click the last button when you grant the arXiv redistribution rights).