Open Access

Mathematicians do research, write papers, referee papers, edit papers. Mostly paid by university or government. The result of this work is very often sent to commercial publishers. A consequence is that mathematicians have to pay in order to read the work of their colleagues. Pay large amounts of money. And they do. Mathematicians are idiots.

Of course commercial publishers are happy with the millions they get for free. And universities, incorrectly, think they have no choice but to pay up.

Obligation

Mathematicians have a new obligation: Make sure the mathematics they produce is freely accessible on the web. Stuff that cannot be accessed (without paying a commercial publisher) effectively does not exist.

Location

Material can be made available by publishing in an open access journal, or by self-archiving. Where? On a private home page, on a university archive server, on a preprint server like arXiv, under scientificcommons.org, ...

Copyrights

Never sign unmodified copyright assignments to a commercial publisher. Always retain the right to make your own work freely available.

Removing your paper from your home page when the journal article has appeared means destroying your work. Someone else will have to redo it.

Lost material

Nontrivial parts of mathematics are lost today, captured by commercial publishers. If it is important material, it is a worthwhile activity to publish survey papers with full proofs covering such topics, so as to make these results available to a non-paying audience again.

Links

Directory of open access journals

scientificcommons.org

openarchives.org

arXiv.org

openaccess.nl