Manifesto

Here is a preliminary version of something I am intending to put on my web page soon. Comments welcome!

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “And your brain has become very slow; Yet the purpose of life is conjecture and proof – Pray how will you put stuff on show?”

(after Lewis Carroll and Paul Erdős)

A large part of the pleasure of mathematics research is communicating it to others, either verbally or by writing interesting papers. This is why I believe in open-access publication.

Unfortunately, now I am retired, I no longer have access to funds to pay the expensive page charges for gold open access in commercial journals. Moreover, “green open access” is not open access at all, but just weasel words of bureaucrats under pressure from big publishers. (At a minimum, open access should mean that the digital object identifier for a paper should lead you to a freely available version of the paper.)

So from now, my protocol for my own papers will be, first to put them on the arXiv, where they are freely available to all; and then, if I want them published, to submit them to one of the growing number of good diamond open-access journals (free to authors and readers).

How does this affect you, other than hopefully making it easier for you to read the papers?

• If you are my coauthor (actual or potential), I will probably suggest publication in a diamond journal. Maybe you have reasons not to publish in such a place: perhaps those who assess your research are prejudiced against diamond journals. In that case, if you have access to funds for APC, I will ask you to be corresponding author; if not, if you insist, then we will have to forgo proper open access and use the so-called “green route”.
• If you are an editor of a commercial OA or hybrid journal, and you want me to submit a paper to your journal, unless you give me a waiver for the APC I will not even consider it. Moreover, I will be reluctant to referee papers for a journal in which I cannot publish myself.

However, circumstances alter cases, and I am not making an irrevocable commitment. For an issue of a journal celebrating a friend of mine, I would certainly try to find alternative arrangements, even considering the “green” route if necessary. And I am not asking anyone else to make a commitment either. But if you approve of my decision, let me know; and if you are in my position, you might even adopt a similar manifesto. I think it is important to let the community know how we feel!

A list of diamond mathematics journals is here. Let me know if there is a better list somewhere!