Informationsplattform Open Access: Mathematics

Mathematics

In this section we have compiled some information on Open Access (OA) in the field of mathematics. If you have any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to send us an E-mail.

 

General information on Open Access in the field of mathematics

Since time immemorial, mathematicians have endeavoured to preserve and classify their literature and make it accessible to others. In contrast to their colleagues in many of the natural sciences and technical disciplines, mathematicians have a very direct interest in historical literature in their field. This interest is not only motivated by a desire to document the history of mathematics but also by the relevance of past mathematics literature for current research. Once proven, a mathematical theorem remains true forever and, as a rule, it continues to play an important role in the discipline. As a result, even in current mathematical research papers, works from the 19th century and earlier are consistently used and cited.

In view of this, it is a welcome development that also many older journals have digitised their entire back issues and, to a large extent, made them openly accessible online, even when the current volumes are not OA but toll-based. The moving wall model is frequently employed here. In other words, after an embargo period of, for example, five years from the date of publication, access is provided free of charge.

Journals which use the moving-wall model include

 
Taking advantage of the new digital opportunities which arose in the 1990s, many peer-reviewed electronic OA journals were launched by the scientific community worldwide. In Germany, for example,

  • Documenta Mathematica, the journal of the German Mathematicians' Association (DMV) which was launched at Bielefeld University in 1996.

 

As of June 2008, the European Mathematical Information Service (EMIS) listed a total of 84 electronic mathematics journals, some of which are also available as print versions for a fee.
As of September 2008, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 124 mathematics journals. Moreover, many mathematics monographs are now made openly accessible online where permissible under copyright laws.

The intensively-used e-print archive arXiv.org which was launched in 1991 contains preprint literature from all subfields of mathematics. In addition there are a large number of preprint servers dedicated to a wide variety of individual subfields of mathematics. These include:

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Open Access journals

Because of the large number of OA journals and other publications in the field of mathematics, individual periodicals will not be listed here. Instead we will provide a list of directories and repositories:

  • The European Mathematical Information Service (EMIS) provides access to numerous Opera Omnia, to many journals, conference proceedings, monographs and lecture notes.
  • The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides access to a large number of journals.
  • Project Euclid (Cornell University) is a platform which hosts a collection of electronic journals, many of which are openly accessible.
  • The DML: Digital Mathematics Library directory features a list of links to retrodigitised mathematics literature (as of September 2008: 2,447 books and 241 journals/seminars from 39 repositories; over 4.6 million pages in all) most of which is freely accessible.
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Subject-based repositories

The most important OA repositories for retrodigitised mathematics literature are:

 

Important OA services in the field of mathematics include

  • arXiv.org, this archive hosts almost 500,000 OA preprints (as of September 2008) in 39 physics sections and 86 sections in the areas of nonlinear sciences, mathematics, statistics, computer science and quantitative biology. The repository was founded in Los Alamos in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg who also wrote the software for it. In 2001 the primary archive moved to Cornell University. ArXiv.org has mirror sites in 16 countries.
  • ViFaMath, the Virtual Library of Mathematics.

We would like to thank Professor Dr. Ulf Rehmann of Bielefeld University (rehmann(at)math.uni-bielefeld.de), the author of this contribution on OA in the field of mathematics.

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