Math 2.0

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

Building on the Elsevier boycott, a lot of people are working on positive steps to make expensive journals obsolete. My email is flooded with discussions, different groups making different plans. Email is great, but not for everything. So Andrew Stacey (the technical mastermind behind the nLab, Azimuth Wiki and Azimuth Forum): and Scott Morrison (one of the brains behind MathOverflow, an important math question-and-answer website):have started a forum to talk about the many issues involved: Math 2.0. That’s good, because these guys actually do stuff, not just talk! Andrew describes the idea here: ‘The purpose of Math 2.0 is to provide a forum for discussion of the future of mathematical publishing... The name, Math2.0, is intended to signify two things: that it’s time for an upgrade of the mathematical environment and that I think we can learn a lot from looking at how software—particularly open source software—works. By “mathematical environment”, I don’t mean how we actually do the mathematics but what happens next, particularly communicating the ideas that we create...’ Andrew Stacey has also emphasized a principle that’s good for reducing chat about starry-eyed visions and focusing on what we can do now: ‘In all these discussions, there is one point that I would like to make at the start and which I think is relevant to any proposal to set up something new for mathematicians (or more generally, for academics). That is that whatever system is set up it must be: Useful at the point of use...’ So: if you’re a mathematician or programmer interested in revolutionizing the future of math publishing, go to Math 2.0, register, and join the conversation! You’ll see there are a number of concrete proposals on the table, including one by Chris Lee, and Marc Harper and myself... I want to add a principle of my own to Andrew’s ‘useful at the point of use’. The goal is not to get a universal consensus on the future of math publishing! Instead, we need a healthy dissensus in which different groups of people develop different systems—so we can see which ones work...”

Link:

http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/math-2-0/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.green oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.mathematics oa.repositories oa.journals

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 15:01

Date published:

02/17/2012, 17:48