Mathematics Roundtable Linda Yamamoto, Stanford University This year's Roundtable had three presentations, plus a brief group discussion on obtaining access to Current Index to Statistics. [More complete notes will be made available on the PAM website, http://www.sla.org/division/dpam/.] Thanks go to CISTI for sponsoring this session, and Martha Tucker (University of Washington) and Deborah Kegel (University of California, San Diego) for acting as note takers. Thirty-nine people filled out evaluation forms, and more were probably in attendance. The presenters and their topics were: Project Euclid Zsuzsa Koltay described Project Euclid, whose aim is to provide
effective and affordable electronic publishing for independent mathematics
and statistics journals. It has been funded for 3 years (through 2002) by
the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Development partners include: the Rocky
Mountain Math Consortium, Institute for Mathematical Statistics, Applied
Probability Trust, and AK Peters. Most independent publishers have only 1 to 5 titles, with 300-500
subscribers. Their average price is $100-$150/year for about 1000 pages.
Project Euclid will act as an aggregation site, and assist these
publishers in the transition to the Web in the following ways: Project Euclid will begin making journals available in 2001 and hopes
to switch to a cost recovery model in 2003. An economic study was
conducted for Project Euclid by Bruce Kingma, School of Information
Science and Policy at SUNY Albany, and the Syracuse Library School. It has
not been decided which economic model the project will adopt: allow
subscription to individual titles, or require a subscription to all
Project Euclid titles. Project Euclid may eventually launch new
journals. The project web site is at http://library6.library.cornell.edu/project/. JSTOR Bob Seeds presented results of an informal study of the impact of JSTOR
on the paging of print materials from storage at Penn State University.
The Mathematics Library has so little space that 55% of the collection is
in remote storage. Pre-1973, ceased, and cancelled journals are in
storage. Only 10 years of computer science serials titles are kept in the
collection. Copies of journal articles in remote storage are provided free
of charge if the article's length is less than 15 pages. Penn State is largest user of JSTOR (which they've had since 1997), and
5% of that use was the mathematics journals. There are 80 mathematicians
on site, and 80 more around the state. Studying the number of requests
from remote storage from 1997-99, Bob noticed an 18% drop in requests from
1998 to 1999. Is the drop due to JSTOR? Users at Penn State are alerted to JSTOR's availability on the
library's web page, in the catalog, on the shelf, via JSTOR promotional
materials, and other PR methods. The library charges for printing from its
workstations. Bob listed selected titles of journals available via JSTOR with the
number of requests from remote storage from 1997-99. In all cases, there
were significant declines in requests over time. His results prompted many questions from the audience and launched a
more general discussion on JSTOR's impact on collections. Gary Davidoff (Argonne National Laboratory) noted that they keep only
the 5 most current years of JSTOR journals and discard earlier years. Old
issues not available electronically are kept on the shelf. Issues are not
bound. Vassar is replacing print subscriptions with electronic ones. Penn
State shrink-wraps paper copies instead of binding before sending to
storage. Some universities that participate in consortia may decide to
discard all but one archival copy in print. However, one needs to be
cautious, as the JSTOR versions of some issues of Mathematics of
Computation were not complete. Mary Rose Muccie (SIAM) mentioned that SIAM plans to sell access to
three SIAM/JSTOR titles to individual members. However, the math journals
are getting relatively little use in JSTOR. The statistics journals are
being used more. A quick poll of the audience revealed that a number of libraries have
stopped getting Mathematical Reviews in print. Current Index to Statistics Before Prof. Bruynooghe's presentation, the Roundtable briefly
discussed as a group the question: Have people experienced problems obtaining access to Current Index
to Statistics (CIS)? People have found the American Statistical Association's web site on
obtaining online access to Current Index of Statistics, http://query.statindex.org:9673/CIS,
to be confusing. It appears that you must still purchase the CD-ROM
product in order to get the web version. However, even though purchase is
required, one doesn't actually need the CD-ROM in order to use the web
product. Prepayment is also required, but at least one institution is
having trouble obtaining an invoice, which is required by the institution.
Other institutions have reported problems with authentication via domain
name only. Dealing with the society requires persistence and patience, but
eventually many have been able to successfully subscribe to the product,
and are generally satisfied once online access is established. Its content
is not any different than the print version, so like the print copy it is
unfortunately still 2 years behind. Other Topics Other topics of interest to PAM members include: Alas, time was too short to discuss these topics. However, it is the
moderator's hope that members won't wait until next year's Roundtable to
discuss these topics, and begin discussing them on PAMnet during the
coming year. Journal of Logic Programming The session ended with Prof. Bruynooghe's presentation of the history
of the Journal of Logic Programming (JLP), http://www.elsevier.nl/inca/publications/store/5/0/5/7/3/1/index.htt,
published by Elsevier, and its transition to Theory and Practice of
Logic Programming (TPLP), which will be published by Cambridge
University Press starting in 2001. Prof. Bruynooghe was Editor-in-Chief of
JLP until this year, when he and the entire Editorial Board resigned from
that publication and started TPLP, http://www.cwi.nl/projects/alp/Welcome/appeal.html.
The Association for Logic Programming, http://www.cwi.nl/projects/alp/
has adopted the new publication as its official journal.
linday@stanford.edu
Logic programming as a discipline began in 1972-74. JLP began in 1984 with Elsevier as publisher. In 1986 the Association of Logic Programming (ALP) supported JLP as its primary journal, but had no say in JLP matters. Prof. Bruynooghe began as Editor-in-Chief in 1991.
In 1998 the library committee at CWI (National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, Netherlands) found that the price per page for JLP had doubled in 6 years. Concerned about its high library subscription rate, the editorial board tried various strategies to convince Elsevier to reduce the price of the journal. When they were unable to reach agreement, the board resigned at the end of 1999.
ALP signed an agreement with Cambridge University Press to publish the association's new official journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), with J. Minker as editor, and the same editorial board that was formerly at JLP. Cambridge was considered a good fit as they also published the Journal of Functional Programming. Most authors withdrew the papers they had submitted to JLP and resubmitted them to TPLP. The ALP sent out an appeal to libraries in March 2000 to subscribe to the new journal, which costs about a third of the subscription price of JLP.
By March 2000, JLP had a new editorial board, but its members do not work in the area of logic programming. In 2001, the journal's title will change to Logic and Algebraic Programming, and its scope will change to reflect this.
The decision to establish a new journal was not taken lightly. This was a big risk for everyone as they lost the reputation of their title and its associated ISI impact factor. Researchers prefer to publish in an established journal with a high impact factor. The next step is to get TPLP included in ISI's Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and get an impact factor as soon as possible. Unfortunately, a journal must have been published for at least two years in order to be assigned an impact factor. The impact factor be can't be transferred from JLP to TPLP because ISI matches on the ISSN in its calculations.
Prof. Bruynooghe pointed out the problems with commercial publishing, and the fact that researchers are generally ignorant of these problems. In his experience, there is a lack of a relationship between production costs and price. Publishers monopolize information. Universities reinforce this monopoly as they look at the impact factor of a title for tenure purposes. Editors-in-chief have a conflict of interest as they are sometimes paid well. Investors are pitted against universities and libraries.
Prof. Bruynooghe suggested that librarians can help by:
- Educating researchers to care about institutional subscription rates;
- Creating a price index in conjunction with impact factors; and
- Actively discouraging their communities from publishing in commercial publications.
John Tagler (Elsevier Science) disagreed with some of Prof. Bruynooghe's analysis and figures. He acknowledged that there are some deep feelings over the journal and Elsevier he is unable to change, but pointed out that Elsevier pays taxes that support universities and libraries. Unfortunately, the time allotted to the session had run out before the discussion was over.
