Mathematics Roundtable
Holly Flynn
The Mathematics Roundtable was held on June 6, 2007 from 3:00-4:30. Over 29 people attended. Thanks go to SIAM for their sponsorship. The session began with several presentations and then moved on to open discussion.
Presentations:
1. Linda Yamamoto, “Making MathSciNet work harder for you!”
Linda (Stanford University) shared a poster session that she did for a campus colloquium. Her presentation is at http://sulair.stanford.edu/scholarly_com/colloquium/presentations/yamamoto.pdf .
MathSciNet makes it possible to find detailed data about mathematical publishing. By combining a search on institutional codes and Mathematics Subject Classification Codes, one can compare the publishing output of math departments, universities, or countries over a period of time. One can even determine the publishing output in a particular area of study. MathSciNet works better than SciSearch for this because MathSciNet indexes more mathematics journals, and SciSearch does not index books or conference proceedings. Librarians can use this data to ensure that their funds are going to journals in subfields that the faculty frequently publishes in.
Bob Noel (Swain Hall Library at IU) has also adapted this and his findings can be seen at: http://swainlib.blogspot.com/2007/05/comparing-six-big-10-mathematics.html .
2. Martha Tucker and Carol Hutchins, Mathematical Sciences Publishers
Carol Hutchins (Courant Institute, NYU) started off with a broad discussion about the history of open access journals in mathematics, citing a paper by Donald Babbitt in Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 1997 (http://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-babbitt.pdf ). At that time there were many start-ups of electronic journals, leaving librarians to wonder about their functionality and sustainability.
Next Martha Tucker (U of Washington) followed up with a discussion about her involvement with MSP (making clear that she and Carol were not there as official representatives of MSP):
MSP’s journals used to be completely open-access; Geometry & Topology is a leading journal in its field. After seeking the advice of several math librarians, most all of whom are PAM members, MSP developed a hybrid subscription model: they now have a paid subscription model in order to keep the quality of the journal and become sustainable. There have been some issues with this new model (issues with an embargo; proxy server problems, etc.). However, librarians can deal with MSP through a subscription agent. MSP may start selling e-books on Amazon, as well.
Discussion Questions:
a) What do you do when you have one professor who wants a very obscure journal that is print only?
b) What do you do when you routinely route print journals to the Math Department and the new chair wants to stop that practice? (Participants offered advice on faculty liaison, including making it clear that this decision came from the chair, not the librarian).
c) AIMS is now publishing the Electronic Research Notices, formerly published by the AMS.
d) Are people canceling their subscription to Topology? Word has it that the last of the papers processed by the original editorial board have gone through the process. Cancellation is sometimes not possible if it is part of a package deal.
