Subscribe to Open (S2O): An Interview Post in Two Parts

Today on the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Scholarly Kitchen blog, in the first of a two-part series, AMS Associate Executive Director for Publishing Robert Harington interviews publishing and library community experts on the pros and cons of the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model for academic journals.

Continue on to the post to learn more about this intriguing new model for supporting academic publishing, and add your own opinion to the discussion.

[UPDATED on July 29] Part 2 of this series has been posted on the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

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Book Publishing with the AMS and MAA

Have you ever considered publishing a book with the AMS/MAA? New authors often have questions about the publishing process, and about the kind of experience they should expect when publishing with a scholarly society.

To help answer those questions, AMS book acquisitions editors hosted three sessions at this year’s virtual Joint Mathematics Meetings. Each session was geared to a different part of our publishing program–undergraduate textbooks, graduate textbooks and monographs, and books aimed at reaching the broader mathematical community. Current AMS and MAA authors joined to share their experiences and perspectives. Click the links or images below to view the sessions. All of these videos have a table of contents that will let you skip to questions that are especially interesting and relevant to you!

Book Publishing with the AMS and MAA: Undergraduate Textbooks

Book Publishing with the AMS Undergraduate Textbook panel at JMM2021

Book Publishing with the AMS and MAA: Graduate Textbooks

Book Publishing with the AMS and MAA: Community Outreach and Broader Impact

If you have questions that aren’t answered here, reach out directly to any one of our editors–they are always happy to hear from prospective (and current) authors.

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Introducing Communications of the American Mathematical Society

journal logoThe American Mathematical Society is excited to announce the launch of a new journal, Communications of the American Mathematical Society, designed to publish the very best research and review articles across all areas of mathematics. The journal will be a natural home for both pure and applied mathematics, presenting a window into a holistic view of mathematics and its applications to a wide range of disciplines. In support of emerging research from mathematicians around the world, the journal will be published via the Diamond Open Access model.  The Founding Chief Editors are Ralph Cohen and Qiang Du.

Ralph Cohen is the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and has served as Mathematics Department Chair, and  as Senior Associate Dean, Natural Sciences, College of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.  Dr. Cohen received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University.  He has received multiple research and  teaching awards and serves on several editorial boards.  He is currently serving on the Board of Trustees of the AMS.  His main areas of research are Algebraic and Differential Topology.

Qiang Du is the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics (APAM), Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), Columbia University. He is also affiliated with the Data Science Institute (DSI). Dr. Du earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University, serves on several editorial boards, and has received multiple awards.  His research interests are in numerical analysis, mathematical modeling and scientific computation with selected applications in physical, biological, and materials sciences, as well as data and information sciences and machine learning.

Dr. Cohen and Dr. Du provided some details about their backgrounds and their shared vision for the new journal:

How did you get involved in editorial work?  What has led to your role with the new journal, Communications of the AMS?

Ralph:  I’ve served on many editorial boards including the AMS Surveys, Topology, Journal of Topology, Homology, Homotopy, and Applications, and Geometry and Topology.    CAMS will be a top rate journal, serving a broad range of mathematics. Its diamond-open-access status will be free to both authors and readers.  I am very happy to be involved in  this exciting project.

Qiang: I’ve served on the editorial boards of many journals, including Mathematics of Computation at AMS. With CAMS, I am very happy to see AMS is taking a leading role on the diamond-open-access journal publishing and is making a great effort promoting the interaction of theoretical and applied mathematics.

How do you view the role and responsibilities of a Chief Editor?

As EICs, we will work with the editorial board and the associate editors to ensure that papers published in CAMS will be of the highest standard in the mathematical sciences. We will also work with the AMS publication team to provide a smooth submission, review and publishing process.

What are the greatest challenges you face working on a new journal launch?

Building CAMS as a top journals in the mathematical sciences will take much effort. There are already some very reputable journals in mathematics, which often are authors’ initial choices.  CAMS will aim to be in the same league in terms of the quality of research works published while serving to showcase the benefit of diamond-open-access platform to the mathematics community.

Can you describe the contribution to mathematics you envision CAMS providing?

 We hope that the diamond-open-access can be well-received in our community, help creating a role model to this scientific publishing platform.  By making effort to promote the strong interactions between theory and applications, we hope CAMS can help inspire new mathematical concepts and research areas and generate wider impact of mathematics on other subjects and the society.

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More information about Communications of the American Mathematical Society can be found here. You can watch a short video about the journal here. Published continuously, we expect the first articles to begin in the first half of 2021.

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Interacting With Ordinary Differential Equations

Guest post by Stephen Kennedy (Carleton College), AMS/MAA Press Acquisitions

Reprinted with permission from MAA Books Beat

I often find myself in conversations about the future of the textbook. As I hope you are aware, both the MAA and the AMS have vibrant undergraduate textbook series. Each organization, within the past decade, independently decided that we had a role to play in delivering high-quality, reasonably priced undergraduate textbooks. In each case, the organizations were reacting to the predatory practices of commercial publishers in the math textbook market. We want to deliver textbooks that are useful to you and your students at prices that don’t make you wince. The merger of the MAA and AMS book programs brought a renewed emphasis on that goal.

In these conversations about the future of the textbook, I tend to be the conservative voice. I think there’s something different about reading mathematics that makes print a better medium. For most of my non-mathematical reading I have converted to electronic media. But when I want to understand some mathematical writing, I print it out. Partly it’s the ability to scribble in the margins, mostly it’s about being able to quickly flip back and forth and compare passages on different pages. But this is a debate for another time (although I’m happy to hear your thoughts by email), here I want to tell you about a new MAA textbook that just might be an example of the future of textbooks.

Sandy Saperstone has been teaching differential equations for decades at George Mason University. As with all of us who teach that course, both his content and delivery method have changed radically over the course of those decades. There is more emphasis on qualitative techniques, much more visualization, more, and more diverse, modeling examples. Mostly of course this is the result of easy access to computation. (There is also an effect on the course content due to the explosion of interest in dynamical systems, but that too is, in part, a result of better computational tools.) Sandy’s computational tool of choice is Mathematica. He uses it for mechanical manipulation to find explicit solutions (DSolve), numerical solutions (NDSolve), and, of course and most importantly, for visualization. He plots explicit and numerical solutions, draws direction fields, and the explores the effects of changing parameters and initial conditions.

As the years went on his lecture notes came to include more and more bits of Mathematica code and interactive graphics. Eventually he put them online so his students could interact with the Mathematica and, after some years of polishing, they are now published as Interacting with Ordinary Differential Equations, an online interactive textbook in the MAA Textbook series. (Co-author Max Saperstone is Sandy’s son, Max is responsible for much of the html and Mathematica coding). The “book” is actually a sequence of webpages, roughly one webpage per day or two of Sandy’s course. And the interactivity is at two levels. There is beautiful exposition that contains clickable links that open up to expand the details of an argument or computation. On first reading these can be ignored to get the big picture, students can go back on second or third reading and open these links up to go deeper. The more exciting interactivity is live computation. The pages contain scores, maybe hundreds, of interactive Mathematica cells. Students can manipulate sliders to vary parameters or initial conditions or watch movies of solution curves being generating. Differential equations are about motion, now your textbook can illustrate the motion!

The figures below show some examples. Figure 1a is from an interact that exhibits a saddle-node bifurcation in a model of ocean circulation. As salinity increases (Figure 1b)—salinity is the value in the slider—the equilibria at k1 and k2 merge and annihilate one another. The figure illustrates the slope field and several solution curves for two different values of salinity, one on either side of the bifurcation. Of course, in the book, the reader can drag the slider and watch the evolution. Figure 2 shows a phase portrait for the Van der Pol oscillator and, separately, a plot of x(t). One sees clearly the converging spirals and consequent periodic solutions trapped between them.

It is important to note that the user does not need to have Mathematica on her device. All the computations are done in the cloud seamlessly from the point of view of the reader. The reader experiences the book as if she is reading a webpage; she moves a slider or enters a parameter value and the webpage calls up the Mathematica engine and returns the result of the computation.

This is the future of textbooks, or maybe a future of textbooks. Your textbook now answers your questions interactively. If you wonder what would happen if you changed something in an example—just do it and the book shows you!

Fig 1a                                                         Fig 1b

I should point out that, for technical reasons, what AMS is selling here is six months access to the website. So, students should be aware that their access will eventually be cut off. I suppose I should also point out that, just in case you are not ready for the future to be here this semester, AMS-MAA have three other truly excellent ODE textbooks: Differential Equations: From Calculus to Dynamical Systems by Anne Noonburg, Lectures on Differential Equations by Phil Korman, and Differential Equations: Technique, Theory, and Applications by Barbara MacCluer, Paul Bourdon, and Thomas Kriete. If you happen to be teaching differential equations this year, we’ve got you covered.

Fig 2

To learn more and request exam copy access, please click here.

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#ShutDownSTEM: Reflections from AMS Publications

On June 10th, the AMS closed for “business as usual” in order to participate in #ShutDownSTEM.  AMS Governance spent much of the day building an action plan to account for our own Society’s history of racist behavior and to address inequities in our mathematics community, while much of the staff used the day for self-education and self-reflection.  There were several “office hours” with executives, as well, which I, relatively new to both the AMS and the discipline of mathematics, found very useful and informative as I learned a great deal about the history of the AMS that the organization continues to reckon with.

This blog is maintained by the Publications team here at the AMS: the marketers, editors, graphic designers, and a host of others who bring you great content and help to make it easy to find.  We are content people; we love books, movies, podcasts, journals, and magazines.  This is why many of us work in publishing.

Our team found June 10th to be a valuable opportunity to engage with content and reflect on ways we can tackle systemic racism.  For some of us, it sounded like a luxurious opportunity: “I will be paid to read all day? To watch that documentary I have wanted to see?  To engage with my children about this content and these issues?”  And while it was generous of the AMS to give us the time and space to do those things, we all found it energizing, distressing, challenging, gut-wrenching, but not definitely not luxurious.

We wanted to share the resources we found useful.  We hope you will, as well.

Articles, Websites, and Podcasts:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2015/07/06/how-silence-can-breed-prejudice-a-child-development-professor-explains-how-and-why-to-talk-to-kids-about-race

https://www.aaihs.org/the-radical-democracy-of-the-movement-for-black-lives/

https://www.aaihs.org/using-mlk-to-quell-outrage-distorts-his-legacy/

https://m4bl.org/

https://janeelliott.com/

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/07/19/guest-post-safiya-umoja-noble-ethics-social-justice-information-part-1/

https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/george-floyd-protests-bail-funds-police-brutality-black-lives-matter-1008259/

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch

see also: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/09/873066989/the-code-switch-guide-to-race-and-policing

and this article from the Code Switch team: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police

Movies/Documentaries

American Son

When They See Us

Hidden Figures

13th

I Am Not Your Negro

What Happened, Miss Simone?

Books:

Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson

Becoming, Michelle Obama

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Keni

The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell, W. Kamau Bell

Raising White Kids, Jennifer Harvey

Algorithms of Oppression, Sofiya Noble

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Richard K. Guy and The Unity of Combinatorics —Stephen Kennedy

Stephen Kennedy and Richard K. Guy at MathFest

Stephen and Richard at MAA MathFest

This tribute by Stephen Kennedy (Carleton College), AMS/MAA Press Acquisitions, originally appeared in the most recent issue of MAA Focus and is shared with permission.

The news of Richard Guy’s passing was a blow. Not only because he was a dear friend, but also because I knew that the appearance of his last book, The Unity of Combinatorics, was imminent and that he would never see it. When I first met Richard decades ago I was too much in awe of him to actually talk, we had a nod-and-smile relationship for a long time. That changed about 15 years ago. I was sitting at an airport gate leaving JMM to come home and Richard in his familiar brown tweed jacket with his ever-present Peace is a Disarming Concept lapel button sat down next to me and asked about the math on the pad of paper in my lap. At the time I had just discovered Geometer’s Sketchpad and was using its capability to combine Euclidean geometry and motion to generate undergraduate research problems, questions like: What’s the locus of centroids of all the triangles that share a circumcircle? With Geometer’s Sketchpad you could make a little movie and observe that locus being generated in real time. It was thrilling to watch.

I don’t remember exactly what problem I was struggling with at that airport gate but it was something close to the above and Richard listened thoughtfully and we spent an hour swapping ideas and pictures. It was clear that he knew about a thousand times as much about geometry as I did and also clear that his brain worked at about twice the speed mine did. But my awe melted away in the face of his kindness and modesty. He was genuinely interested in my ideas and in working together on the problem. He also had a razor-sharp wit and after one of his jokes would flash his disarming, but devilish, grin. It was great fun to do mathematics with him. Eventually he started telling me about the lighthouse problem [2]: What is the locus of the point of intersection of two rotating lighthouse beams? The cited paper is a great place to go to understand Richard’s approach to mathematics and to experience his sense of humor. For another quick taste of the latter, check out the MAA Review of The Inquisitive Problem Solver by Richard’s alter ego, Dick Fellow.

When I got home I had an e-mail waiting from Richard with some more ideas about my problem. We continued that e-mail correspondence for a while. He always did me the kindness of pretending that I was knowledgeable about geometry; I think it was enough for him that I clearly loved it. A few years later I was in Calgary visiting Richard to talk about a possible book on combinatorial games. I spent a week with him, every morning we’d go to his office at the University of Calgary. He taught me about Sprague-Grundy theory and we analyzed dozens of games together. Every evening we’d go back to his home and eat one of the dreadful frozen pot pies he favored for dinner, then get back to work. For a time I thought I could understand three-car Dodgerydoo, Richard did me the courtesy of taking seriously the possibility that I did. (Of course, I didn’t. I think he probably suspected as much all along but was too polite to say so.) We never got the book put together. In spite of that, it was one of the best mathematical weeks in my life.

The Unity of Combinatorics Cover ImageThe Unity of Combinatorics is the latest volume in the MAA Carus series and its genesis was a paper by that name that Richard published in 1995. Richard was reacting to the perception that combinatorics was nothing more than a bag of disconnected clever tricks for toy problems. It is clear today that combinatorics is a mature mathematical discipline with deep problems, subtle results, and intriguing connections to other areas of mathematics. Twenty-five years ago that was not clear and combinatorics’s connection to recreational mathematics made it seem slightly disreputable and frivolous. This book was first imagined by Don Albers who encouraged Richard to expand his article and recruited Bud Brown as a co-author. The result reflects both authors’ personalities, their mathematical interests and their beguiling expository skills. It’s a pure pleasure to read; the perfect mixture of Richard’s gentle wit, Bud’s down-home, welcoming enthusiasm, and both authors’ deep knowledge of, and absolute joy in, the combinatorial landscape.

Let me give you a taste. Suppose you want to find a collection of five-element subsets of the eleven-element set $\{ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X \}$ with the property that each pair of elements occurs together exactly twice. It’s not obvious, at least to me, that such a collection is even possible. A quick count— each of 55 pairs occurring twice is 110 pairs, a five-element set contains ten pairs—will tell you that any such collection will contain 11 sets. But that’s no help in finding it, or even proving it’s possible. It just reassures you that it is not obviously impossible. The Brown-Guy example is given in Table 1, but you’re encouraged to try and construct your own example before peeking.

It is also not obvious why you want to do this. The respectable answer is that it is an example of an $(11,5,2)$ symmetric block design, objects that arose in the design of statistical experiments in agriculture. (The parameters correspond to the bolded numbers in the previous paragraph.) The frivolous answer points to the obvious analogy with Kirkman’s Schoolgirl Problem. You are of course wondering which values of $(v, k, \lambda)$ actually correspond to achievable symmetric designs. You should read Chapter 7. I’m more interested in following up on $(11,5,2)$ right now. Brown and Guy call this gadget a biplane. It is worthwhile to understand why.

Suppose that instead of requiring each pair of elements to occur twice we will be satisfied with a single appearance. As noted above there are 55 pairs and each five-tuple contains ten, so $(11,5,1)$ fails the obvious divisibility test and no such object exists. But, to take one example, $(91, 10, 1)$ does not fail and, so, is not obviously impossible. (Those numbers are a clue to what’s happening, but you might not recognize that.) If we think of the elements as points, we are looking for ten-point subsets such that each pair of points is in exactly one subset. Replace “subset” by “line” and you recognize the description of a finite projective plane of order nine. Thus, the $(11, 5, 2)$ biplane. More saliently, perhaps you begin to see Brown-Guy’s “Unity.”

Brown in [1] asked himself how he might draw a useful picture of the $(11, 5, 2)$ biplane. He wanted the picture to reflect some of the symmetries of the design. For example, note that the product of the two five-cycles $(1, 3, 9, 5, 4)(2, 6, 7, X, 8)$ is a permutation of our original set of order five. Note that it preserves the block structure, e.g., 2456X goes to 61478. This corresponds to the five-fold rotational symmetry in the figure. In fact, as Brown and Guy show, the symmetry group of the biplane actually has order 660 and can be shown to be $PSL(2, 11)$. Many of these symmetries can be seen directly in Figure 1.

One final unification observation. It’s interesting to notice that $2^{11}=1+\binom{23}{1}+\binom{23}{2}+\binom{23}{3}$. It is known that this equality is exactly what is required for the existence of a perfect three-error-correcting binary code. The alphabet has 23 symbols and the codewords are length 12. Similarly, the fact that $1+2\cdot\binom{11}{1}+2^2\cdot \binom{11}{2}=3^5$ means that there exists a perfect two-error-correcting ternary code. In this case the alphabet has 11 letters and the codewords have length six. Each of these codes can be realized as the row space of a particular matrix. Suppose one were to construct the $11\times 11$ incidence matrix for the $(11,5,2)$ biplane by putting a 1 in the $(i,j)$ entry if element $i$ is in subset $j$ of the biplane and a 0 if not. (NB: The subsets are indexed by their first listed element in Table 1.) This incidence matrix lives inside the code matrix as a submatrix in the case of each of those codes. You are invited to explore why.

All of the above was taken from just one chapter of Brown-Guy, and we have already run into statistics, group theory, linear algebra, coding theory, recreational mathematics, and projective geometry. Perhaps The Ubiquity of Combinatorics would have been a better title. Whatever we call it, it is full of wonders and breathes with Richard’s spirit. It is a fitting memorial to a mathematical giant whom we were lucky to have for 103 years.

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[1] Ezra Brown, The Fabulous (11, 5, 2) Biplane, Math. Mag., 77:2,
87–100, 2004, DOI: 10.1080/0025570x.2004.11953234.
[2] Richard K. Guy, The Lighthouse Theorem, Morley & Malfatti—
A Budget of Paradoxes, Amer. Math. Monthly, 114:2,
97–141, 2007, DOI: 10.1080/00029890.2007.11920398.
Posted in Authors, BookEnds | Comments Off on Richard K. Guy and The Unity of Combinatorics —Stephen Kennedy

Copyright, Creative Commons, and Confusion

This post by Robert Harington originally appeared on The Scholarly Kitchen blog; access the original post here. Robert Harington is Associate Executive Director, Publishing at the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Robert has the overall responsibility for publishing at the AMS, including books, journals and electronic products.

Back in 2017, I penned a post for The Scholarly Kitchen entitled “The Value of Copyright: A Publisher’s Perspective“. We are now in 2020, hunkering down in isolation, working remotely. As we ride out these difficult times, we can’t help but look ahead and consider what a post-COVID-19 publishing landscape will look like. In this article, I want to revisit the history of copyright, steering into Creative Commons Licensing, and weigh the value of protection and reuse in light of an inexorable push towards global openness. There is value in publishing in an open setting, but do we fully understand how openness will stimulate or hinder creation and expression of ideas? Publishers, and indeed all players in the publishing ecosystem, have not moved far in helping our communities understand the rights and licensing landscape. On the one hand, authors are mainly concerned with disseminating their research and doing so in a way that maximizes use and citation. On the other hand, authors be they authors of journal articles or books, may find their content repurposed in ways they did not expect by publishers they did not sign on with. I am deliberately not stepping into the treacherous waters of whether publishers pay royalties for differing kinds of content to authors. The issue I address is how to equip authors to be able to ask the right questions, and sign up to be published knowing how their content will be treated. An author’s bandwidth to consider complexities of licensing and rights associated with their publishing output is limited. However, it is important that authors grapple with such complexities, as their ability to create may rest on being able to navigate the right path for publicizing their research and communicating their ideas.

copyright symbol surrounded by circular lines

Copyright law is complex and varies greatly across countries – one of the main reasons that authors do not grapple with its complexities. Here I am referring specifically to American copyright law, though of course such law was established when the printing press was introduced to England in the late fifteenth century. Printing presses were firmly in control, and the Licensing Act of 1662 cemented what was effectively their ability to censor publications. By 1710, England’s parliament enacted the Statute of Anne, which established principles of how authors may own rights to their work – copyright. It set a fixed term of 14 years for protection of an author’s work, which could be renewed if the author was still alive when the first 14-year period expired. Copyright law continued to evolve, although you will no doubt be grateful that I will spare you the details of all of its extensions.

However, some key innovations are worth examining. For example, the Berne Convention, which came into being in 1886 and was signed by the US in 1989. The notion was to place the US approach to copyright in context of a broader international approach. Effectively, it recognized that there is a myriad of approaches to copyright laws across the world, which to this day confuses authors and publishers alike, given the global nature of research.

Copyright case law is convoluted: hundreds of important cases up to the present day further refine copyright law. One significant American law is the US Copyright Act of 1976, which substantially revised the Copyright Act of 1909 and essentially provided protection for all authors’ works between 1978 and the present day. Why does this matter? Well, it was the first real recognition that an individual’s work is worth something and needs to be protected, steering away from bookseller and printer monopolies.

A question we have not addressed is, why develop copyright at all? The notion behind copyright law is that authors are more able to express their creative ideas in the arts and sciences if they are protected through ownership of their work, by establishing rights that prevent unauthorized use of content. Too few people recognize that academic product – that is, ideas and knowledge – is the result of considerable hard work, work that should be recognized through attribution at least. An author can look to copyright law to help prevent others from re-purposing their work inappropriately, or altering it to say something different and republishing it under their name. Copyright protects the integrity of the research. This is a primary concern for humanities authors, where the argument is the result. They don’t want anyone else changing their carefully chosen words.

This, in turn, allows authors to benefit financially from publishing their work. I do find this notion appealing, and I sense that in the rush to demonize copyright law in the publishing industry, it is often easy to forget that copyright is indeed in force to protect authors themselves, not so much the publishers.

Let’s fast forward to the present day and take a look at how we have evolved into a world where Creative Commons Licensing is the new normal. Creative Commons Licenses were a successful venture into allowing authors to retain copyright, and allow for publication of their work through licenses that allow for reuse. These licenses come in a variety of flavors and courtesy of the Creative Commons organization, I list them here in their full complex glory, with Creative Commons’ short summary descriptions:

ATTRIBUTION: CC BY

This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

ATTRIBUTION-SHAREALIKE: CC BY-SA

This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

ATTRIBUTION-NODERIVS: CC BY-ND

This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.

ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL: CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE: CC BY-NC-SA

This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-NODERIVS: CC BY-NC-ND

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

What are the pros and cons for authors thinking about using Creative Commons Licenses? Advantages to Creative Commons Licenses lie mainly in the open nature of an author’s content, with the license allowing for reuse under conditions set by the license used. The con to using these licenses is in the lack of control an author may have over their content. A reuse of content can’t be revoked under a Creative Commons License once granted – unlike removing copyright permissions. Also, authors need to be very careful about which license they use. If an author is adamant that they do not want their work used by another party to make money, then they need to know to use CC BY-NC. If an author does not want their work to be the basis of a derivative work then ND comes into play and so on. Even with CC BY, where all that is asked is correct attribution in reuse, who amongst our authors knows how to follow up on abuses – and abuses are common. Even if attribution is given, an author may not initially realize to what use their content may be put. For examples of this you can turn to Rick Anderson’s excellent article of 2014 entitled CC-BY, Copyright and Stolen Advocacy, For example:

Last year we saw a troubling (if far less repugnant) example of how something like this can happen in the academic realm. Apple Academics Press published a book titled Epigenetics, Environment, and Genes. The book was comprised almost entirely of articles taken, without their authors’ permission, from OA journals in which they had been published under CC-BY licenses. It is now being sold on Amazon for just over $100. Although members of the scholarly community have responded with outrage, Apple Academic Press has done nothing illegal or even unethical. As long as the authors of the articles are given due credit, this kind of reuse is one of the many that are explicitly allowed under CC-BY terms. If the authors feel mistreated by Apple Academic, it’s because they failed to read (or understand) the agreements they signed when they submitted their articles for publication in OA outlets.

Joe Esposito pointed out in his article of 2019, entitled “Internal Contradictions with Open Access Books“, that publishers themselves do not always understand, or compute the implications of a CC BY license, and can get quite upset when content they have published is reused quite legally.

An author essentially has to ask themselves how important control is to them when publishing their content. As it stands, publishers, and in fact all stakeholders in the publishing ecosystem, do a poor job of explaining how to navigate these questions.

The issue for many authors here is that publishers, institutions, and funders are not making it clear what their licensing and copyright expectations are of authors. A journal may require copyright transfer, but an author’s institution may require use of a Creative Commons License. How does an author resolve such a quandary? (If, indeed, they are even aware of it?) Publishers perhaps are not helping here, as we do very little to explain how rights issues may affect authors as they publish their content. An author deserves to be able to make an informed choice to publish based on the rights they want associated with their content, and to do that they need help understanding their rights.

Further Reading:

CC-Bye Bye! Some Consequences of Unfettered Reproduction Rights Become Clearer – Phil Davis, Scholarly Kitchen 2013

Creative Commons Confusion Continues to Confound Content Creators – David Crotty, Scholarly Kitchen 2014

More Creative Commons Confusion: When Does NC Really Mean “Non-Commercial”? – David Crotty, Scholarly Kitchen 2015

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Welcome to A Mathematical Word: The AMS Publications Blog!

Some of you have likely been readers of the BookEnds blog by AMS Consulting Editor, Eriko Hironaka.  We have made the decision to broaden the scope a bit to provide a wider look at the publishing activity of the AMS.  BookEnds will remain a key part of this endeavor in this new “home” (as a content category) and we will also occasionally “borrow” from Beyond Reviews, the MathSciNet blog by Edward Dunne, Executive Editor of Mathematical Reviews.   We also plan to highlight content, authors, and editors from our journals program, and to look at issues and changes in the world of mathematics publishing.

Who will be blogging?

Eriko Hironaka will continue to contribute the occasional BookEnds post and she will also be joined by her Editorial colleagues from time-to-time.  Other contributors will include Nicola Poser, Director of Marketing and Sales, Eric Maki, Senior Marketing Manager, and Robert Harington, Associate Executive Director for Publishing.  We also hope to have guest contributions from our authors and Editorial Board members, and from our readers – please feel free to be in touch if you have an idea for a guest post!  You can reach Nicola at nsp@ams.org.

Why a blog about AMS Publications?  Why now?

In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, communication is more important than ever.  At AMS Publications, we hope to maintain open communication with all our stakeholders:  authors, readers, teachers, students, librarians.  Our hope is that this blog will become a place you find useful information. Read on:  the next post gives an overview of some important information from AMS Publications related to access to our content.

 

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Staying connected to AMS content during the COVID-19 pandemic

In response to current challenges that colleges and universities face as a result of the spread of COVID-19, the American Mathematical Society is offering our community additional support in line with recommendations in the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) Statement on the Global COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on Library Services and Resources.

For libraries:

  • We are extending grace access for content hosted on our platforms (including MathSciNet) through the end of May for our existing customers. We will re-evaluate this timing as needed.
  • In normal circumstances, remote access and mobile pairing for access to AMS content can be set up while on campus or while connected via institution VPN (in order to validate IP-based access). We realize many students, faculty, and researchers did not have an opportunity to initiate this access before leaving campus and we reached out recently with a unique link and instructions for our library partners on how patrons can connect to our content. If you are setting up online access for the first time or have not received instructions to share with your patrons, please email us at cust-serv@ams.org.
  • We are aware that many institutions are closed globally. If you subscribe to our journals in print and wish to suspend delivery of print journals, please contact cust-serv@ams.org.
  • All of our print journal subscriptions include complimentary online access. If your library has not yet activated online access and you would like to do so, please complete the license agreement and send it to cust-serv@ams.org.

For teachers, students, and researchers:

  • As courses transition to online, we can provide instructors with complimentary electronic “reserve” copies of our textbooks for cases in which students do not have access to their print copies. Please visit the book page for your textbook on bookstore.ams.org and use the “request desk copy” link to request an e-copy that can be posted to a course website, course management system, or place on e-reserve.
  • E-books purchased through the perpetual access model on the AMS platform are always available DRM-free with unlimited simultaneous use.  In addition, we are partnering with ProQuest to allow multi-user access through mid-June to all e-books purchased on their platforms. Read ProQuest’s statement.
  • The AMS is also participating in the Copyright Clearance Center Education Continuity License program, providing access to our content for distance learning and other educational uses at no cost to the user.
  • We have also made relevant mathematical modeling content available free-of-charge; please visit this page for more information.
  • We also offer freely available content for teaching at Open Math Notes a repository of freely downloadable mathematical works in progress. These draft works include course notes, textbooks, and research expositions in progress. They have not been published elsewhere, and, as works in progress, are subject to significant revision. Visitors are encouraged to download and use these materials as teaching and research aids, and to send constructive comments and suggestions to the authors.
  • We are providing remote access and mobile pairing for access to all our content online, including MathSciNet. In normal circumstances, this remote access can be set up while on campus or while connected via institution VPN (in order to validate IP-based access). We realize many students, faculty, and researchers did not have an opportunity to initiate this access before leaving campus, so we have given instructions to our library partners on how patrons can connect to our content. Please contact your librarian for assistance.
  • Finally, our colleague, Abbe Herzig, Director of Education at the AMS, has compiled useful resources and practical strategies for transitioning to online teach, which you can find here.

We hope these resources and policy updates will be helpful.  Please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you need something as we all adjust together to this “new normal.”

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Why textbooks?

Do we really need textbooks?  In this age of swelling enrolments in undergraduate math classes, students with diverse interests and backgrounds, new modes of teaching, and alternative media, are textbooks too rigid?  Are they too expensive?  Would it be better for department faculty to write-up specially tailored notes for their students to download for free?

As a teacher, I see two important reasons for textbooks in academia.  The first, mundanely, is time. Faculty members are busy, and it doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel for each new course or move to a new institution.  The second deeper reason is orientation.  Though there should always be room in teaching for variation and individualization, it is also handy to have a few universally recognized reference points from which to measure knowledge in a subject.  For students, books help to give structure to their study, and a way to reference the material in later years.  Every now and then a textbook will be so good at capturing  how the mathematical world sees a subject that it becomes “the canonical textbook”, a sign-post.

In these days with so many sources of information, maybe the role of textbooks is less clear.  Maybe we are preparing for a jump in the evolution, similar to the jumps from  oral tradition, to scribing, and on to mass publications.  In the current system, a professionally produced textbook has a panel of reviewers to decide whether a book meets high standards of academic rigor and language, and has the necessary scope for its purpose.  A variety of specialists put care in copy-editing,  lay out, packaging and marketing the book to its intended audience.   All these additions to the value of the book incur costs.  Even for a non-profit publisher like the AMS, the expenses entailed lead to prices that can seem high when so much information is available to the public for free.

If the jump in the evolutionary process is leading to a brand new form of “book”, we have not yet seen a consensus on what it should look like.  What will be the new landmarks in mathematical history?  What are your thoughts?

Your comments are welcome!

Featured Book of the Day

Mathematical Understanding of Nature: Essays on Amazing Physical Phenomena and Their Understanding by Mathematicians by V.I. Arnol’d

This collection of 39 short stories gives the reader a unique opportunity to take a look at the scientific philosophy of Vladimir Arnold, one of the most original contemporary researchers. Topics of the stories included range from astronomy, to mirages, to motion of glaciers, to geometry of mirrors and beyond. In each case Arnold’s explanation is both deep and simple, which makes the book interesting and accessible to an extremely broad readership. Original illustrations hand drawn by the author help the reader to further understand and appreciate Arnold’s view on the relationship between mathematics and science.

 

 

 

 

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