A list of articles from the AMS Notices about open content, journal pricing, and mathematics DL
- The Elephant in the Internet, Daniel K. Biss, November 2004 : a quality-based arguement against accessibility and open content. Strong echoes of the the criticisms leveled against wikipedia.
- The Digital Mathematics Library, Allyn Jackson, August 2003 : "The grand vision of the DML is to have all of the mathematical literature online and available through a central source to anyone who has a computer and an Internet connection." An institutionalized expression of the dream
- Three Views of Peer Review Steven G. Krantz, Greg Kuperberg, Alf van der Poorten, June/July 2003 : a key issue in the open access debate is quality and peer review. These points are usually made in defense of proprietary models. I include this, because of the interesting proposal by Greg Kuperberg of how to implement peer review in an open access setting.
- From Preprints to E-prints: The Rise of Electronic Preprint Servers in Mathematics Allyn Jackson, January 2002 : Allyn Jackson is another high-profile supporter of open access in the maths community. The article is a useful survey and overview on the topic of preprints and open access servers.
- The Slow Revolution of the Free Electronic Journal, Allyn Jackson, September 2000 : "Free electronic mathematics journals, which are run independently by mathematicians and are available for free on the Web, provide some important advantages over traditional print journals. This article examines how a number of such journals are run and discusses why there are not more such journals."
- Pricing of Scientific Publications: A Commercial Publisher's Point of View, Edwin F. Beschler, November 1998 : The view from the commercial side. Central argument: commercial publishers add value and doing scientific publication w/o them would degrade scholarly communication. An attempted rebuttal to the article below.
- Reforming Scholarly Publishing in the Sciences: A Librarian Perspective, Joseph J. Branin and Mary Case, April 1998 : report on the academic journal pricing crisis.
- "As a result of the high cost and continuing double- digit annual price increases for scientific journals, research librarians have had to shift everlarger portions of their acquisitions budgets into science journal subscriptions, even as they cancel journal titles and buy fewer books. With growing frustration and boldness, librarians are blaming the scientific community, particularly the commercial publishers of scientific journals, for this unfortunate situation. …
- The Barschall Study In 1986 and again in 1988 Henry Barschall, now deceased but at the time a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin and an editor of Physical Review, published a series of studies on the cost and cost effectiveness of scholarly journals in several scientific disciplines …
- Blame the Commercial Publishers of Science Journals Barschall's findings confirmed the experience of many research librarians: commercial publishers in the scientific disciplines were at the core of their economic woes. One commercial publisher, Gordon and Breach, who came out at the bottom of Barschall's survey of cost effectiveness, disagreed and sued Barschall, the American Physical Society (APS), and the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in West Germany, Switzerland, France, and the United States over the publication of the journal cost surveys"
By relative measures the AMS is a very progressive entity on the subject of copyrights and accessibility. Here are a couple of representative editorials by two presidents of the AMS.
- Copyright Policies, Anthony W. Knapp, January 2000 : The AMS position on copyrights
- Archimedes and the Internet, Harold P. Boas, September 2001 (local link) : "I prefer to think of scientific knowledge as a shared public resource rather than as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder." Another vocalization of the dream. The above link is a fair use, local mirror. Link to original (free, but registration required) is http://www.ams.org/notices/200108/commentary.pdf