Fields medallists’ open-access track | News | Times Higher Education

"If universities are so concerned about the subscription prices and article fees charged by publishers, why don’t they disseminate their research for free via their own repositories? One answer to this question is that researchers want to target their papers at others in their field, but some disciplines have their own subject-wide repositories. The most celebrated is arXiv.org, which covers an ever-expanding range of fields within physics and mathematics. Many researchers in those areas - such as former Royal Society president Lord Rees of Ludlow and Sir Timothy Gowers, the Fields medal-winning mathematician based at the University of Cambridge - already do most of their reading on arXiv. Yet even mathematicians and physicists still feel the need to publish their papers in standard journals, too. The reason is that the established pecking order of journals confers academically vital prestige on the papers they publish. Even Sir Tim admits to 'taking note' of where a paper was published when he is sitting on a hiring committee. But might it be possible at least to reduce the cost of journal publishing by taking it out of the hands of commercial publishers and using arXiv itself as the publishing platform? This is precisely what the Episciences Project aims to achieve by establishing a series of “epijournals” in maths. The project, expected to launch soon, has been developed by the Fourier Institute’s mathematics laboratory, part of France’s Joseph Fourier University (Grenoble 1), with support from French open-access facilitators the Centre for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD). According to Sir Tim, who broke the news of the project in a January blog post, 'the idea is that the parts of the publication process that academics do voluntarily - editing and refereeing - are just as they are for traditional journals, and we do without the parts that cost money, such as copy-editing and typesetting'. The project’s leader, Grenoble 1 professor of mathematics Jean-Pierre Demailly, said that publishers 'do not offer substantial added value considering the high price they charge' and represent a 'barrier to the development of modern tools for indexing and searching data' ..."