Ingrid Daubechies on the IMU blog and journals

This will probably be the last entry of the blog in this format, as the IMU is working to open a more general IMU blog site, at which it hopes members of the mathematical community will still bring up issues of wider concern that they encounter in their interaction with mathematical journals.

 

This first paragraph was also the last one, in this blog entry, in the official voice of the President of the IMU — everything that follows will be my own personal opinion, as one mathematician deeply concerned with the present and future of our journals. In particular, the opinions below are not vetted by the IMU’s Executive Committee, and should not be construed as an official point of view of the IMU, despite my present service as the sitting President of the IMU.

 

The stated goal of this blog at its start was to collect opinions from the mathematical community about a proposal that the IMU and ICIAM start a committee that would produce a rating of mathematical research journals. It has fulfilled that goal; as reported in the July issue of the IMU-Net Newsletter, the IMU has decided not to go forward with the creation of such a committee. Very soon after the opening of this blog, it became a forum where mathematicians also formulated suggestions for possible IMU roles related to various other important issues concerning mathematical journals. The early discussion here led to several prominent members of our community articulating their frustration with the present situation of scholarly publishing in mathematics, and in particular with pricing policies making it very hard for all but the most prominent and wealthy universities to keep up with the cost of subscriptions. This public discussion probably played a role in the later development of thecostofknowledge.com site, where, following Tim Gowers’ lead, many of us very publicly and firmly stated our opposition to these pricing policies. The protest took the form of a boycott of one particular publisher, Elsevier, and was (as of Oct 16, 2012) signed by over 12,801 scientists (the policies we were protesting are not limited to mathematics), including 2,189 mathematicians.

 

As was our intention, this protest elicited many reactions, albeit not all positive. Young researchers felt that, not having tenure yet, or otherwise dependent on evaluations of their record, they could not join a boycott that would cut them off from a considerable number of well regarded journals in their area. Many mathematicians were reluctant to join the movement because they felt a boycott was not an effective or attractive protest tool. Others pointed out that Elsevier, although having a large impact on mathematical library budgets as one of the largest for-profit publishers of mathematical journals (as a result of its having acquired many other publishing companies in the mathematical arena in the last 10 or 15 years), was not the only nor even the most egregious one in practicing the pricing policies that we were protesting, and decided not to join the movement for this reason. That nevertheless so many mathematicians did sign enthusiastically indicates the extent to which many in our community are deeply disturbed by the present situation in mathematical publishing.

 

What is it we find so disturbing?

 

Dissemination of new ideas, as they develop, is the lifeblood of our research community. For a long time, print journals have been a major channel through which this dissemination took place. They have evolved to become the place of record, where new results, or new takes on old results, are put forward, after having been vetted carefully by reviewers and editors. As a result, publication of their work in journals of good reputation is a goal for most mathematicians active in research; their success in achieving this goal is one way to measure their standing within the mathematical research community. At many stages in our careers, we are asked to produce the list of our publications in scholarly journals, and these lists figure prominently in professional evaluations. Good research journals are thus central pillars for our community. This is why we willingly invest our time and effort in them, be it as editors or as reviewers.

 

The publishing landscape has however changed drastically in the last few decades, and continues to do so, in many ways. Two big changes stand out. The internet has made electronic publication possible; most researchers now use the internet to search for, find and retrieve papers of interest to them. And second, journal subscription cost to academic institutions has increased out of proportion with other costs, and is causing serious budget trouble for libraries.

 

This latter evolution is what caused the frustration that led to the creation of thecostofknowledge website. Why?

 

The community of mathematicians provides the source material (as authors of the papers), the quality control (as referees and editors of the journals) and the readership for our journals. To an extent that is greater in mathematics than in other scientific fields, mathematicians provide their reviewing and editorial services to journals almost exclusively on a voluntary basis, with no expectation of remuneration. [Most of us are surprised when offered payment (as occasionally happens) to review for a journal outside the “mathematical core”!] We provide our services for free, even though these tasks take up valuable time and energy, because we are proud of the quality of our journals, and we perceive this service as one given (gladly) to our community. Papers in mathematics have a much longer “life” than in many other fields — it is not uncommon to reference even non-famous papers that were published many decades earlier, or even well over a century. As a result, we have, as a community, much more intellectual capital “vested” in our journals than most other fields.

 

Many of us feel that we, the mathematical community, “own” these journals to which we contribute (almost) everything that makes them worthwhile to us. From a practical, legal or financial point of view, this is not the case, however — the majority of mathematical research journals are the legal property of commercial publishers. Some of these have a longstanding association with mathematical researchers; for others, the connection is much more recent, the result (for instance) of the acquisition of small publishers with a larger presence in the mathematics literature by a larger house with much less prior mathematics exposure. That journals are legally owned by publishers is not new, of course; few mathematical researchers have an appetite for getting involved with the practical aspects of publishing, and for many very distinguished and well established journals published by a commercial house, a de facto symbiosis had developed between the (possibly specialized) mathematical community serviced by the journal and its publisher. [There are journals that are owned and published by societies that have their own publication branch, such as AMS, SIAM, EMS or ASA; others that are owned by societies that contract with a publishing house, commercial or not, to ensure publication, such as Foundations of Computational Mathematics. These are not the topic of this blog entry.] Mathematicians provided their services to the journals; publishing houses ensured that the successive (printed) issues of the journal appeared on a regular schedule, were of consistent physical quality, and took care of the distribution to its subscribers, mostly libraries in research institutions. The subscription revenue covered the price of publication and provided a modest profit to publishing houses. [In other fields, subscriptions often provided only part of the revenue. In the other natural sciences, for instance, it was common for research grants to have a budget item that covered publication costs, including page charges; many journals did ask such page charge contributions from authors of papers accepted for publication. In some journals the page charges were mandatory. Others would waive these charges at the request of authors who had no grant source from which to pay them; a slightly slower publications schedule could be adopted for papers benefiting from such a waiver. This was the policy followed by some journals at the interface between mathematics and other fields, such as the Journal of Mathematical Physics. Journals that were squarely within mathematics, whether pure or applied, typically did not request page charges from authors or authors’ institutions.]

 

The situation started changing in the 1970s and 80s. Journals, with their steady subscriber base, provided a much more secure source of funding for publishers than books. (Very few advanced mathematics books become really profitable.) Increasingly aware of this, many publishers aggressively started new journals — the number of such new starts is in itself an indication that journal publication was increasingly viewed as a lucrative business. A steady policy of raising journal prices, including guaranteed annual percentage increases that far exceed academic budget increases, made journals (or bundles of journals) increasingly expensive. [It is ironic that simultaneously mathematical authors were taking over tasks that used to be the responsibility of the publishers (e.g. mathematical typesetting); this did not lead to a decrease in prices, however.] By now, matters have gone so far that even distinguished departments decide wholesale cancellations of journals from particular publishers rather than cutting even more academic positions to keep their journal subscriptions intact (see http://www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier).

 

Electronic publishing is potentially a great game changer.

 

Many speculations have been made as to how the scientific publication world will be radically different 5 or 10 years from now. For those among us who view the most important function of a trusted, respected journal as bringing together papers that are more or less focused in a special subfield, carefully checked and processed through a rigorous reviewing system, a new incarnation journal could be as simple as a list of paper+version numbers from the ArXiv or some other permanent repository, periodically posted on a website. Others suggest that a return to a word-of-mouth system will prevail, albeit in a more modern, electronic version, in which established mathematicians spread the word, via their web postings, comments and pointers, about interesting new results they have learned about. Many other models are being proposed, discussed, tried out. Publishing houses have themselves been very active in working on electronic versions of their journals. It is not my goal here to propose yet another model, or to discuss which model I think is best or most suitable for our community. I expect that different journals may opt for variations of these models; in addition my age and limited information-technological fluency make my instincts in this matter less than trustworthy.

 

But whatever happens, it is clear that great change can lead to great upsets. Our whole community would benefit from orderly transitions for our journals to the new publication model(s). The best possible transition will happen if there is broad community support for the journals. With present pricing policies, publishing companies are undermining the  possibility of a truly community-wide support. I personally know of several editorial boards of high profile journals where many members are torn: on the one hand, they agree with many of the issues raised by the statement of purpose at thecostofknowledge.com, on the other hand they don’t want to cause mayhem for the excellent journals to which they have devoted considerable amounts of energy and time, in service to their mathematical communities. I have also been asked for advice by young people who are offered positions on Editorial Boards, and are tempted by this recognition of their rising status in their community, but who resonate as well with the Statement of Purpose of thecostofknowledge.com .

 

Let me formulate here a very simple proposal that, if implemented, would not upset the identity of the existing journals, that would enable commercial publishing houses to continue to make a living while servicing the publication needs of the mathematical community, but that nevertheless would make a real difference to the mathematical community:

 

     EMANCIPATION of our journals : set our journals free!

 

In other words, I propose that from their present disenfranchised situation, our existing journals be allowed to incorporate, and become independent societies. Most journals already function as a small society: they have a Board (of Editors), with (in a well-run journal) a mechanism of regular replacement of the members, in a way that represents well the interests of its community (e.g. paying attention to emergence of new subfields, or subsiding of others); there is a Managing or Chief Editor and possibly a small board of core Editors that functions like an Executive Committee. Having official society status would not change the effective functioning of the journals. (There could be some small changes: for instance, it would be natural to have an Executive Committee for the journal that appoints the editorial board and managing editors, and also handles publishing, legal and other issues related to the journal, but of which not all members need be Editors themselves.) For the administrative duties, marketing and distribution, each journal society would have a contract with a publishing house, which would, to begin with, be most naturally the present publisher. But the journals would be able to review this contract on a regular basis, starting a few years after emancipation. [Such contracts would also govern the changing nature of journal content over time: truly electronic publishing will involve much more beyond just digitizing the traditional journal: it will include nonlinear formats, different platforms (iPhone, iPad, etc.), active hyperlinks both internally and externally, video, audio, manipulable graphs, runnable code, crowdsourcing, etc. All this and more (that we can’t imagine yet) will probably play a major role in future electronic publishing — but that is for the interaction between journals and publishing houses to figure out, in the future, and not the subject of this blog entry.]

 

I have been told this is a very naive proposal. Maybe. But I think it is less naive than might seem at first glance. One isolated editorial board might not be able to obtain its enfranchisement if it asked its publisher, however nicely. But if the editorial boards of several journals acted in concert, the chances of success would be higher. Moreover, if some publishing house, truly providing a service to its journals as excellent as it claims, and thus risking very little in emancipating its journals, were to set the example, what a coup this would be with respect to other publishers — what recognition among the community! And others might well have to file suit …

 

Emancipation of the math journals would not solve the challenge of identifying the best model for electronic publication for each journal. It would keep publishing houses involved in the publication of journals they now publish. But it would, in one fell swoop, put the mathematical community and the publication channels on a footing of partners, seeking sustainable solutions in a changing environment, together.

 

Messires Publishers, wouldn’t you prefer dealing with us, members of the mathematical community, as partners rather than spending all this energy on trying to convince us (not very successfully) that we are much better off in our present disenfranchised situation?

 

          Ingrid Daubechies

More reasons to support the Elsevier boycott

Tim Gowers’s excellent blog posting focused the long-standing discontent of the search community with Elsevier and nucleated a boycott which may prove to be a historic moment in scholarly publishing. I urge others to join the thousands of researchers who have signed on at the website Tyler Neylon created at thecostofknowledge.com. Recent articles in publications like Forbes and The Economist indicate that Elsevier and the rest of the business community are taking note.

The arguments Gowers laid out focus on Elsevier’s high prices, their bundling arrangements and subscription agreements, and their support for new laws that seem aimed at increasing publishers’ profits at the expense of wide dissemination of scholarly research. These are all very convincing reasons for the boycott. The fundamental mechanism of capitalism, that prices are contained by consumers’ choices not to pay high prices for what is available elsewhere more cheaply, is augmented in this case by the fact that the consumers—researchers and their institutions—also freely donate the most crucial ingredients in Elsevier’s products, that is, papers, referees, and editors.

However, there is another reason for researchers to disassociate from Elsevier, which I find even more compelling: their many lapses in ethical and quality publishing practices. Here are some examples:

The Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals published more than 300 papers by the journal’s Editor-In-Chief (58 in a single year). That these papers were not subject to peer review was later confirmed by the EIC’s declaration that “senior people are above this childish, vain practice of peer review.” Although the copious self-publication had begun nearly 20 years earlier, the EIC’s retirement from the journal occurred only in 2009.

Elsevier journals have repeatedly published plagiarized work and duplicate publications. A search turns up over thirty papers in Elsevier mathematics journals published in the last decade which have had to be formally retracted, mostly for these reasons. On more than one occasion, the same paper has been published in two different volumes of the same Elsevier journal (presumably by accident).

Elsevier math journals have published a number of papers that make me doubt that they were subject to any peer-review whatever. An egregious example is the 2-page paper “A computer application in mathematics” in Computers and Mathematics with Applications, vol. 59 (2010) pp. 296-297, which purports to prove the parallel postulate (!) with no formulas, no references to other published works except for two papers by the same authors, and, as best as I can tell, no meaningful content whatever. This paper remains unretracted and available for sale on the Elsevier web site.

On several occasions, entire editorial boards have collectively resigned from Elsevier, usually citing discontent with their pricing. In 1999, the entire 50 person editorial board of the Journal of Logic Programming resigned after 16 months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier over pricing, and created a new journal with a different publisher. In 2003, the entire board of Journal of Algorithms did likewise. A well known-case is that of the journal Topology, whose distinguished editorial board resigned en masse in 2006, again to found a different, less expensive, journal. Elsevier has continued to publish Topology since then, even though the web page for the journal gives no indication of its editorial board or even that the journal has an editorial board!

From 2000 to 2005 Elsevier published six phony biomedical journals, with titles such as the Australasian Journal of Cardiology, in return for an undisclosed sum from a large pharmaceutical company. The journals’ contents were provided by the pharmaceutical company and published without further review, mostly reporting data favorable to their products. In 2009, after the practice came to light in a law suit against the pharmaceutical company and was reported in the press, Elsevier admitted that they had “published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosure” and expressed regret.

In 1998, the Elsevier journal Lancet published one of the most significant examples of fraudulent scientific research in recent times, in which evidence was fabricated to link autism to measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, thereby setting off a health scare that led to deaths and severe injuries and which continues to this day. Brian Deer, the award-winning investigative reporter whose articles in the Times of London and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) exposed the fraud and led to the inquiry by the UK General Medical Council which struck Wakefield from the UK medical register, also published a detailed and damning article in BMJ about the response of the Lancet editorial staff when confronted with the evidence of fraud. Deer describes how the Lancet responded to his carefully documented accusations, not with a formal investigation, but rather with a “5000 word avalanche of denials” and “a scramble to discredit my claims”. Lancet’s retraction of the paper did not come until 2010, 12 years after the original publication and for reasons that a British Medical Journal editorial describes as “far narrower misconduct than is now apparent.”

Of course, Elsevier produces many journals. Without a doubt they publish good articles, as well as bad, and include excellent scientists in their editorial boards, as well as others. But the number and the nature of the incidents like those listed, cause me to doubt their commitment to and/or ability to achieve the quality and ethical standards that I believe crucial. There are many other publishers, including especially scholarly society publishers and university presses, but also some commercial publishers, that have earned my confidence and respect.  I will happily dedicate my efforts of authorship and editorial work to them and not to Elsevier.

Doug Arnold

Beyond Journals

The electronic era of publishing presents an opportunity to move far beyond merely adapting the current journal model.  In my September, 2011 column in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, I noted that, of the four original benefits offered by traditional journals — enhancement, dissemination,archiving, and validation — in the electronic era only the last remains: validation of the correctness, originality, and status of papers, thereby validation of its authors’ status for hiring, promotion, grant funding, salary, etc.  However, not all fields remain in thrall to the journal system, and status in areas such as computer vision, cryptography, and computer algebra relies nowadays primarily on prestigious conference proceedings.
In the column, I propose, as a possible alternative to journal validation, establishing a “Michelin Guide” to mathematical works on the internet.  Thus, one’s vita might contain 5 one-star, 3 two-star, and one very rare three-star “Mathelin” rated paper, as evaluated by the Guide’s referees.  Moreover, unlike journals, Mathelin ratings can well be time-varying.  One can even envision a variety of general purpose Guides, with competing ratings, as well as specialized Guides that convey status within a particular field.  What is less clear is how such a system could be practically instituted, although it is worth noting that a large amount of money is now being fed to commercial publishers from libraries and institutions worldwide, and even diverting even a small fraction would easily support the running and compensated refereeing of such a Guide.
Related proposals include Stefan Müller’s that internet-based journals be overlays of the arXiv, where posted preprints can be submitted and refereed.  Once accepted, no additional publication would be required, but the paper would then carry the imprimatur of the overlay journal and be listed therein.   Timothy Gowers, in an earlier (12.12.2011) comment on this blog, points to his proposal to implement a system “something like a cross between the arXiv, a social networking site, Amazon book reviews, and Mathoverflow”, detailing its advantages over traditional validation based on unpublished, anonymous referee reports.  As I state in my column: “The time is ripe for a radical rethinking of the traditional academic model for scholarly communication within mathematics.  …  If we are not properly engaged, the future will be decided for us and, almost certainly, will not be to our liking.”

Peter J. Olver

What might be done about high prices of journals?

Following the suggestions from Richard Taylor and from Teresa Krick, we would like to gather your statements pertaining to pricing for mathematical journals.

Quoting Richard, “Maybe instead the IMU could consider what if anything it can do about the unreasonable prices of some mathematics journals that are taking badly needed money from our universities? And, Teresa Krick wonders “how to fight against the outrageous rates publishing houses are charging the scientific communities, for a job the scientific community does for them from the beginning to the end.”

This topic has been discussed at great length in librarian circles, and also written about in professional math periodicals. Purchasing journals is nowadays done mostly at the national license level: bigger deals, larger aggregations of content. Are mathematicians having any say on prioritization, or usage of funds in this way? Where will this all lead as time goes on? Please comment on this issue. ?

BLOG on Mathematical Journals

Mathematical journals are an important and precious resource for our community. They embody, to some extent, our joint “intellectual property”. They provide a way for mathematical researchers to distribute the results of their work. The peer reviewing process, when it works well, gives some guarantee to readers that the published papers are worthwhile and (most likely) correct.

Information technology is changing the journal publication landscape in many ways. Some changes are all for the better; for instance, the availability of electronic versions of a paper makes the content much more widely accessible. Other changes are more controversial, or even almost universally condemned. Calls have been made for professional societies to formulate official positions on some of these.

In order to assess the views of the international mathematical community on journal-related issues, IMU and ICIAM have created the BLOG on Mathematical Journals, that will be hosted by the IMU website.

 

An important issue that IMU and ICIAM want to address is JOURNAL RATING.

Publications in journals are a natural basis for the professional regard in which each of us is held. Different journals have different reputations and specializations; these play a role when we pick where to submit our papers.

The past few decades have seen the emergence of “indices” or “factors” that try to quantify this information, by tracking various quantitative statistics. This has resulted in “ratings” of journals, which are then used (and misused) in a variety of ways. Concerns about the methods by which these ratings were computed have led some mathematicians to call for a rating established by mathematicians themselves. In response to this, the General Assembly of the IMU passed in August 2010 the following resolution:

The General Assembly of the IMU asks the EC to create, in cooperation with ICIAM, a Working Group that is charged with considering whether or not a joint ICIAM/IMU method of ranking mathematical journals should be instituted, and what other possible options there may be for protecting against the inappropriate use of impact factors and similar manipulable indices for evaluating research.

The joint Working Group created by the IMU and ICIAM to study this issue has completed its work. The report of the Working Group can be found here. A first public forum on the report, at a minisymposium at the ICIAM conference in July 2011, showed that the issue and the report evoked strong reactions in many different directions. In order to get a wider community response, it was decided to open a blog in which all mathematicians could contribute their views on the recommendations of the report.

We invite the mathematical community to provide their views on the journal rating issue, and on whether IMU and ICIAM should formulate their own rating. Views on how to establish and update this rating would also be welcome.

The blog will be monitored by a group of moderators appointed to this end by the IMU Executive Committee and the ICIAM Board; their names are given below. The moderators will typically limit their intervention to weeding out invective or libelous contributions, as well as contributions that are inappropriate or off topic. Contributors must identify themselves to the moderators, but can request their posting to be anonymous if they wish.

At the launch of this BLOG on Mathematical Journals, only one category has been created (see right column), namely that on Rating. In informal contacts, members of the IMU Executive Committee and the ICIAM Board have found that many mathematicians have concerns about the present practice of journal publishing in mathematics that are not limited to rating. If there is an area that comes up sufficiently often in the community’s comments, the moderating group will create a new category that regroups such comments. Different categories can develop over time.

The Moderating Group (appointed by ICIAM and IMU jointly) consists of Doug Arnold, Carol Hutchins, Nalini Joshi, Peter Olver, Fabrice Planchon and Tao Tang, with Peter Olver as chair.

We invite you to submit your comments below!

Ingrid Daubechies, President, IMU
Barbara Lee Keyfitz, President, ICIAM