Minutes of the Committee on Electronic Information and Communication (CEIC) meeting
Providence, Rhode Island
November 2-4, 2007
Attending: John Ball, Jonathan Borwein (chair), Michael Doob, David Eisenbud, John Ewing,
Ulf Rehmann, Alf van der Poorten.
Regrets: none.
Session 1: Friday Afternoon
A quick review and discussion of the changing role of the CEIC took place.
The history of this committee has had three phases:
- 1996-2000: External advocacy and tool building with open access (e.g. MathNet)
This phase was overtaken to some extent by commercial interests.
- 2000-2006: Best practices documents (successful), IMU on the Web, WDML,
proselytizing (to little effect), World Directory of Mathematicians
(expense and privacy problems killed it, but the FDWM has proven to be a workable replacement).
- 2006-2010: Continuing presence on the Web, becoming a resource for technical advice.
There was a further discussion of transition issues for the CEIC:
- Replace three retiring members of the committee. There was general agreement that
varied regional, age and gender representation is desirable.
- Nominations of new members should be sent to the chair by November 30 for forwarding
to the Executive Committee (EC) by December 15.
- It is desirable for the CEIC to continue to meet with the EC on a regular basis. This could be
facilitated by coordinating of the meeting times of the respective committees
within the four year IMU cycle.
- The CEIC should be incorporated into the IMU web site information management system
with appropriate reorganization.
- The terms of reference of the committee need revision.
- More projects (like MathNet) are not necessary.
- Meetings with workshops are no longer necessary.
- Remaining informed and communicating effectively with the EC is an important priority.
- We should continue to write best practices documents as needed.
Session 2: Saturday Morning
There was an extensive discussion about the digitization of earlier IMU proceedings.
- Ulf Rehmann and Keith Dennis have diligently worked on obtaining permissions, and
everything seems in place except for the 1924 proceedings for which permission has been
obtained until 2010. Apparently those proceedings go into the public domain at that time.
- The scans have been completed for all years
except 1994 and 1998.
- The files from Berlin, Beijing, and Madrid need not be scanned since they were born digital.
- In some cases the copyright remains with the author and obtaining rights for digitization
is impractical. We will put up files with a copyright disclaimer and remove them
if so requested.
Archiving (traditional and electronic) material. The following are recommended:
- The material should remain in Helsinki until 2010; in the meantime arrangements for future
archiving should be discussed and, if necessary, another site determined.
- A permanent committee should be formed to advise the EC about archiving and to implement
resulting decisions. The chair should be the IMU Secretary.
- The records of the President of the IMU should be preserved (digitized)
for historical interest.
It seems that ICMI/ICME is having copyright problems.
- Ulf will meet with Bernard Hodgson within the next few weeks and will give the
committee further details afterwards.
- Perhaps we could assist with a presentation at ICME08.
There was general agreement that the "IMU on the web" pages have been quite successful.
Alf has been able to publish various interesting documents that have come his way.
- Further articles should be solicited.
- Articles should be contributed by each CEIC member, perhaps once a year.
- We should consider setting up a blog.
- The mailing list for the IMU newsletter needs some revision. Apparently
some recipients have been orphaned.
It was noted that the Electronic World Directory of Mathematicians (EWDE) has
about 1500 entries and could use some publicity, as could the FWDM.
- It is requested that the EC
consider sending out a letter encouraging mathematicians to joint the list.
- Jon will contact the LMS to have an insert included in their newsletter.
- A moderator is needed to monitor new entries.
There was no substantive response from the letter sent to ICSU concerning intellectual property rights.
Perhaps the issue can be brought up at their November 2008 ISCU GA.
Session 3: Saturday Afternoon
Ulf reported on the items referred to on his Digital Mathematical Library page.
Most have public access, but there is not much mirroring. The AMS runs a parallel
page with journals only. Both are well maintained.
Various other digitization initiatives were discussed.
- The MSRI project to explore business models for
digitization projects was never fully funded by the Moore Foundation. As
part of the pilot project, 100 years of the AMS Bulletin was digitized, with
the work contracted to Project Euclid at Cornell.
- There is still interested in digitization at the Moore Foundation. It
is not clear how this will proceed.
- The Canadian Math Society has a demo of its digitization project for
its research journals. This was a test bed for smaller-scale projects and
indicates that such projects are financially and technically feasible for
smaller organizations.
John Ewing discussed the emerging trends on the use of impact factors. A report will
be forwarded to the EC next year.
It was noted that Scoap project
(Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics)
seems to have little direct relevance to the mathematical community. Still, it
is an interesting project and might be worthy of an article in the
"IMU on the web" pages.
The change of venue of Topology and K-Theory from Springer to
Cambridge University Press was discussed.
There has been an increase in spam from organizers of conferences whose
raison d'être is to make money rather than presenting papers of mathematical
merit. Perhaps CEIC should warn the naive.
The committee partitioned itself to work on drafts:
- (Ulf and Alf) An introduction to archiving old IMU proceedings on the web.
- (John E and David) Guidelines for ICM meeting bids: proceedings in electronic form.
- (Michael, Jon and John B) A renewed mandate to start in 2007.
Session 4: Sunday Morning
The final revisions were made to the following documents:
Respectfully submitted
Michael Doob
November 13, 2007
