Today a few observations on journals and tech:
- Scholastica is a company promising easy easy open-access journal publishing and management. Seems like a lot of law reviews use it currently. I like the pricing scheme, at $10 for each submission — this is something even a grad student can afford by planning ahead a week or two. It looks really interesting and has a nice slogan on the front page: putting scholarly publishing back in the hands of scholars. Of course, for mathematics, typesetting is a real issue. Could they handle that? Not yet, I think, but they’ve got a blog post on typesetting. They’re dealing with a totally different audience than mathematicians for the most part. Writing an article in Word?
- In Scholastica’s blog posts they mention Editorially, a platform meant to make collaboration easy. That sounds nice. What about LaTeX? Yay — a collaborative web-based math typesetting platform exists at WriteLaTeX. Anyone used it? Is it better than the endless iterations of Dropbox files that I use with my collaborators?
- Speaking of open access, I checked the Secret Blogging Seminar page after a long time and was interested to see a post on the Mathematics Literature Project, which looks at free availability of articles online by journal of publication. In a previous post I mentioned that a new federal law requires federally funded research to be made freely available (vast oversimplification here) and there were rumors that the arXiv is not enough. If mathematicians want to argue that the arXiv fills that role in mathematics, evidence like that at the Math Literature Project page will be very important to supporting the argument.
Recent Comments