Women in math, and the overhaul of the publishing system

... “Think whatever you want about the Cost of Knowledge website, but open access journals have already gained a lot of ground... good luck to any journal that tries to stop authors from placing their articles on publicly available webpages and preprint servers. The better question is: do we still need journals, be it commercial or any other kind, and if not then what will replace them? Among other possibilities, open web-based evaluation systems have been proposed. This post suggests that a web-based evaluation system would be good for women, the idea being that “women don’t ask” and therefore they are less likely to, say, submit a paper to Annals. I see it exactly the other way around... I rather like the idea of “evaluation boards” to which authors could submit arXiv papers for validation, without the boards ever pretending to “publish” or “disseminate” the papers. That, if done right, would preserve the advantages of the current system while losing most of its disadvantages. (And it should work just fine for women... The cornerstone of the journal publishing system is the refereeing process. We all know that it’s slow, inefficient and often inaccurate. Suggestions have been made to divorce the evaluation and ranking of papers in terms of their novelty and significance from the painful dance steps of pointing out the typos, little errors, missing or inaccurate references. The former is mostly independent of the latter and can be done much faster, or so the argument would have us believe. This is where I think the reformers are missing a point. It’s not necessarily the debugging that’s valuable. I’ve found and fixed more bugs in my own papers than the referees ever did. The main thing is, I like that the person who’s being asked to evaluate my paper is also being asked to actually read it. That’s the expectation that the editors have of the referees. Even if the referees only point out a few typos and misspellings, it still prompts them to engage with the content of the paper, or at least to give it a try. That’s much better than, say, summary judgement based on the author’s reputation, institutional affiliation or gender. What if (for example) the arXiv had a discussion page for each paper? Well, I guess any arXiv user would be able to comment on any paper, regardless of whether they’ve read it or have the expertise to judge it. The boundaries between social and professional interactions might get a little bit blurred, for instance an author might get comments and reviews from colleagues who are part of his social network. (His, because a male mathematician is far more likely to have a substantial social network within the profession than a female one.) All this said, submitting a paper for publication to a journal is one situation where “asking” is perfectly normal and acceptable, regardless of gender. Men might be somewhat more likely to overshoot wildly, based on what I’ve seen in my experience with refereeing such papers, but such submissions get rejected anyway. This is one point in the process where I do not see much of a problem.”