Subject: Tuesday evening at CT97, future of publication

From: categories <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 1997 15:42:51 -0300 (ADT)

Date: Fri, 11 Jul 97 11:22:43 -0700
From: Art Stone <[email-masked]>

The Tuesday evening of CT97, 15 July, we contemplate having an
open discussion on the future of publication in category theory.

Questions that are likely to come up:

Are the paper publications really dying?  (With diminishing library
budgets, one Vancouver area university has been forced to cancel
both Cahiers and JPAA, and  with limited library space,  no longer
has available on its shelves journals more than 10 or 15 years old.)
How do we provide for archiving in such a situation?

What are the opinions of the current editors of our journals?

We're fortunate to have TAC.  Is there need for a wider range
of styles of publication?  What are the alternatives?  Is CD-ROM
a possibility?  (Might it give us again the freedom we had in the
early volumes of Springer's LNM -- or would that be a good thing?)

Would it be better to have an e-archive, like q-alg?  How?  Where?
Would it be secure, a lasting archive?  What is to be learned from
existing or past examples: Imperial College, Hypatia,
triples.math.mcgill,  the Sydney category seminar?

Frequently papers appear which the authors subsequently wish they
could change.  And terminology changes over time -- as we begin to
understand what it was we were trying to say.  Might we want to
have "papers" or "books" that can be modified over time (with
ongoing version numbers as we have now for software)?

For the most basic and important works, might we prefer something
that approaches what Bourbaki intended to give us: works that would
evolve over time and never to go out of date?  (Bourbaki's vision
preceded the development of media that would make it possible.)

And how do we want to treat the proceedings of CT97?  At first,
papers should be available by ftp on  math.ubc.ca, but what do
we want in the long run?

Art Stone