Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 09:49:45 -0400 (AST) Subject: e-prints Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 10:45:08 -0500 (EST) From: James Stasheff Dear colleagues, I'm writing to you about a proposed e-print archive in category theory, on behalf of a committee of mathematicians which is advocating the unification of various electronic preprint servers and archives into a single system with a common format. We want to invite Category Theorists to join this group. This invitation is being issued to 15 preprint servers (listed below) which together cover about half of the subject areas in mathematics. We are also trying to organize active groups in the remaining subject areas, so that the unified preprint server will soon cover all of mathematics. This organizational effort has already produced interested groups in combinatorics and geometric topology. Managing a preprint server can be a time-consuming task, but fortunately there is a similar preprint server in operation in physics, running at Los Alamos National Lab and funded by the National Science Foundation, whose staff is willing to take on the operation of a unified mathematics server. This will enable all of us to take advantage of their years of software development, as well as their efficient staff who monitor the (fully automated) operation. When scientific questions arise (such as the suitability of a particular paper for a particular archive), these staff members would consult with a designated "moderator" for each subject area. (The moderator also receives abstracts of papers as they are submitted, and can have the staff intervene in the rare instances of inappropriate papers or other difficulties.) Someone you designate collectively would serve in this capacity under the new system. The great advantage of a unified server is that all mathematicians will be able to participate in electronic preprint exchanges in a single, flexible system (which can distribute preprints in a variety of formats, including dvi, ps and pdf). The computer systems staff in a mathematics department can be asked to familiarize themselves with this system, which will be easy to support for users. Moreover, a central location for preprints (with dozens of mirror sites worldwide) together with a soon-to-be-familiar scheme for citing these preprints will mean that mathematicians in one field who see a citation to a preprint in another field will easily be able to locate it. We will also all gain the ability to simultaneously search through related archives, including full text searches. There is a common keyword index for the mathematical holdings, permitting simultaneous searching of all or designated related archives. A given paper could easily be relevant to users of more than one archive, so this would make information much easier to track. In order to take advantage of the system in place at Los Alamos Lab, we have agreed to follow the technical decisions they have made: authors are asked to submit tex source files, for example. Although this may be a change for users of your current system, we believe that the long-term advantages of unification outweigh the temporary disadvantages to users of an established archive. We propose to copy the contents of your archive (in its current form) into the unified archive, and suggest that you encourage all future submissions be made directly to the unified archive. Category theory is one of the subject areas in the unified archive and is intended as a continuation of your archive. It should be fairly easy to construct a kind of front-end on a web page at your site which will provide access to both old and new papers in your portion of the unified archive, giving your users a certain degree of continuity and allowing them to retain the feeling of belonging to a smaller community of users of a particular preprint archive. We will be happy to assist in the construction of such front-ends. A primitive prototype for such a front-end (in the area of combinatorics) can be viewed at http://eprints.math.duke.edu/archive/CO/ All but one of the links on that page take you directly into the archive at Los Alamos. A front-end for the entire unified archive is under construction at U.C. Davis by Greg Kuperberg: you can view it at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu You might also like to look at the Los Alamos Math Archive itself (partially functioning already), at http://xxx.lanl.gov/form/math You will see that the combinatorics and geometric topology sections are getting a good start this week. At the time of unification (probably Jan. 1) the four current math archives alg-geom, dg-ga, funct-an and q-alg at the Los Alamos site will be merged into the unified archive, becoming subject areas AG, DG, part of FA, and QA, respectively. Our committee has had Joe Christie, Greg Kuperberg, Dave Morrison, Dick Palais, Jim Stasheff and Mark Steinberger as its active participants, with occasional participation by a few others. If you are interested in having a representative of category theory joining this committee, we would love to have one. Our tasks after this unification will be developing the remaining subject areas, and publicizing this archive among mathematicians. Short of that, as individuals, all you need to do right now is write back and say you think the category theory category is a good idea, or better yet, to pledge some number of e-prints to be submitted soon after the category starts. Those already archived other than on your own server should be offered with a copy of the offer going to the archive administrator. Of course we are most eager to have your present and future e-prints added to the unified server. (For e-print versions of papers for which you no longer have the copyright, permission from the copyright holder will be needed.) I am very optimistic that this effort will eventually lead to a complete transition to efficient electronic distribution of new results in category theory. The xxx archives has 3,000 math e-prints in the four existing mathematics categories and 50,000 physics e-prints. As you might guess from these numbers, xxx has already effected the electronic transition in several areas of physics. The category theory category will be of great benefit to us all. Please help get it started; the more who join, the better. Best regards, Jim Stasheff P.S. Here is the list of 15 preprint servers which we propose to merge. If you have other suggestions for inclusion on this list, please let us know. 1. Algebraic Geometry (http://eprints.math.duke.edu/archive/alg-geom/) 2. Algebraic Number Theory Archives (http://www.math.uiuc.edu/Algebraic-Number-Theory/) 3A. Banach Spaces & Functional Analysis (ftp://ftp.math.okstate.edu/pub/banach/) 3B. Functional Analysis (http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/funct-an/) 4. Combinatorial and Geometric Group Theory (MAGNUS) (http://zebra.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/web/html/magnus.html) 5. Conservation Laws Preprint Server (http://www.math.ntnu.no/conservation/) 6. Differential Geometry (http://www.msri.org/preprints/dg-ga.html) 7. Dynamical Systems Electronic Preprint Server (http://www.math.sunysb.edu/dynamics/preprints/preprints.html) 8. Hopf Topology Archive (http://hopf.math.purdue.edu/pub/hopf.html) 9. K-theory Preprint Archives (http://www.math.uiuc.edu/K-theory/) 10. Logic Eprints (http://www.math.ufl.edu/~logic/) 11. Mathematical Physics Preprint Archive at the University of Texas, Austin (http://www.ma.utexas.edu/mp_arc/mp_arc-home.html) 12. Quantum Algebra and Topology (http://eprints.math.duke.edu/archive/q-alg/) 13. Representations and Cohomology of Groups (http://www.math.uga.edu/~djb/archive.html) 14. Several Complex Variables (ftp://iu-math.math.indiana.edu/pub/scv/) ************************************************************ Until August 10, 1998, I am on leave from UNC and am at the University of Pennsylvania Jim Stasheff jds@math.upenn.edu 146 Woodland Dr Lansdale PA 19446 (215)822-6707 Jim Stasheff jds@math.unc.edu Math-UNC (919)-962-9607 Chapel Hill NC FAX:(919)-962-2568 27599-3250 Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 16:43:55 -0400 (AST) Subject: Re: e-prints Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 16:25:28 GMT From: Michael Barr I am all in favor of Jim Stasheff's proposal, but what does one do about the fact that I, for example, have my own personal macros files and my TeX files cannot be compiled without them. If this is to be a straitjacket, I would just as soon maintain our own server with dvi and ps files. I am also just a bit wary of distributing the tex source, since it is so easily changed. Not that dvi and ps files can't be changed, but it is certainly a good deal harder. Michael Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 08:46:33 -0400 (AST) Subject: Re: e-prints Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 13:51:23 -0800 (PST) From: john baez Michael Barr writes: > I am all in favor of Jim Stasheff's proposal, but what does one do about > the fact that I, for example, have my own personal macros files and > my TeX files cannot be compiled without them. Preprint servers of the sort Jim is describing have facilities for uploading macro files, postscript files, etc. along with the TeX files. I use them a lot and they work. Best, John Baez Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 08:45:44 -0400 (AST) Subject: Re: e-prints Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 16:27:02 -0500 (EST) From: James Stasheff you can input your macros directly into your tex file as for the plagarism issue, I will let the experts respond ************************************************************ Until August 10, 1998, I am on leave from UNC and am at the University of Pennsylvania Jim Stasheff jds@math.upenn.edu 146 Woodland Dr Lansdale PA 19446 (215)822-6707 Jim Stasheff jds@math.unc.edu Math-UNC (919)-962-9607 Chapel Hill NC FAX:(919)-962-2568 27599-3250 Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 16:13:06 -0400 (AST) Subject: Re: e-prints Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 13:19:58 -0800 (PST) From: john baez Jim Stasheff writes: > you can input your macros directly into your tex file But you don't need to. You can also upload a bunch of separate files using the uufiles program obtainable from the preprint archive. It's painless and easy. Information on this and a million other technical issues is available at the archives themselves. Try: http://eprints.math.duke.edu/ or send email with subject header "help" to q-alg@eprints.math.duke.edu > as for the plagarism issue, I will let the experts respond I'm no expert, but I don't see what the problem is. If you upload your paper to one of these archives, the paper itself and the exact date and time it was first received is publicly accessible, so any attempt by anyone to plagiarize it would be incredibly easy to prove. If you store your papers on your own site, it's much harder to prove you wrote them before someone else. This is one reason why highly competitive physicists rush to put their papers on the archives as quickly as possible: to get a certified time stamp on their paper! Anyway, I've never heard of any problems with plagiarism actually happening. In case it's not been made sufficiently clear, the main advantages of having all papers on a given subject stored electronically at a single institution are: 1) they are easy to find 2) they are easy to refer to 2) they stay there, archived, while the authors move from institution to institution and ultimately perish. Will our institutions keep our websites going after we die, while technology continues to change? Many of my papers (or pointers to them) appear on Ginsparg-style preprint archive, my own website, Hypatia, Mathematical Reviews, the category theory mailing list, and paper journals --- all of which serve different purposes. Presumably some of these systems will fall into disuse in a natural sort of way as time passes. I wouldn't advocate the brutal elimination of existing systems. I think the question now is: would category theory be served by creation of a Ginsparg-style preprint archive for the subject? Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 16:36:21 -0400 (AST) Subject: eprint discussion - from moderator Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 16:32:02 -0400 (AST) From: Bob Rosebrugh A discussion has been going on by email for several days which, because of its technical nature, has not been forwarded to the categories list though it grew out of Jim Stasheff's posting on the preprint server question. Anyone who wants to join the discussion is welcome to. Simply send an email to me that says `subscribe eprints' in its subject line. If you'd just like to look at the discussion or some of the sites mentioned, I have put a Web page at http://www.mta.ca/~rrosebru/eprint.html which has links to the mail file and various places on the Web. Regards to all, Bob Rosebrugh, moderator, categories list Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 14:17:38 -0400 (AST) Subject: unified electronic preprint archive for mathematics Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 18:56:40 GMT From: Paul Taylor An open letter to Jim Stasheff, re the proposed unified electronic preprint archive for mathematics Dear Jim, Last week you published a proposal for a unified electronic preprint archive in mathematics, at http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/math/info making use of the software at Los Alamos National Laboratory which was written by Paul Ginsparg, originally for a certain branch of Physics. Following our extensive semi-private correspondence on this subject, I think it is time for me to write something to the "categories" list. First, I want to commend the efforts of yourself and your committee in taking the initiative to call for a unified archive. Mathematics is a notoriously parochial subject, and the existence of such a central resource may in the long term help us to form The Big Picture. Having said this about the mathematical issues, I am unhappy about the way in which this proposal has been made in terms of management and technical issues. Such a unified archive will immediately acquire considerable de facto authority, and it creates a monopoly over the means of publication in mathematics which is potentially far more significant than the contraints of the existing journal system from which we are trying to free ourselves. You have also accepted wholesale Paul Ginsparg's design decisions, some of which may be accidents of implementation. In several respects there are or could be other paradigms of electronic publishing, which ought to be encouraged to co-exist with his ways of doing things, so that the community at large can decide over a period of years which method is to be preferred. I am worried that you may be making assumptions that things have to be done in one way when in fact alternatives are possible. In short, the proposal should have been "put out to tender" for other software designs and implementations to compete on fair terms on the basis of the facilities that they provide to authors and readers. In these respects this issue is analogous to the debate about TeX macros for commutative diagrams, on which a certain amount of blood was spilt some years ago. In that case someone who had used package X proposed that there be an electronic journal in category theory in TeX source, standarding on package X for commutative diagrams, without being aware of the existence of packages Y, Z, ... Actually this is quite different: in using TeX, or whatever technology they use for their papers, authors are making a considerable commitment, and some of us have made a far greater commitment by writing and maintaining macro packages. In the case of electronic dissemination (of existing files), papers can easily be copied to and linked from many different places without any further effort by the author. Nevertheless, bad decisions at this stage about the database which says where everything (and everybody) is could be significant handicaps in the development of the technology at a later date. I therefore beg you at least to stay the widespread advertising of the new archive until its potential competitors have had a chance to discuss the way in which they should co-operate and compete. I intend to contact Paul Ginsparg myself to discuss some technical issues. In particular I have a number of suggestions to make about the process of registering authors and submitting papers. His collected bibliographical data should be provided in BibTeX format for processing by other services. It would also be possible to integrate his author registration with Hypatia's, which would greatly enhance the usefulness of both systems. In fact it is remarkable how closely the strengths of one system coincide with the shortcomings of the other. Yours, Paul Taylor PS The technical discussion which I have been having with Jim Stasheff, Bob Rosebrugh, Mike Barr and others has now moved to a new email list run from Queen Mary and Westfield College. Details of how to join this, together with the archive of the discussion and other information, can be found at http://hypatia.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/html/eprint.html This message is followed by a separate one on the issue of submission in TeX source form. Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 14:18:23 -0400 (AST) Subject: submission of papers in TeX source code Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 19:10:27 GMT From: Paul Taylor Following Jim Stasheff's announcement of a unified maths eprint archive on the "categories" list, one issue which provoked a strong reaction was the requirement that papers be submitted in TeX source form. Mike Barr and others pointed out that they use versions of macro packages which cannot reasonably be expected to work under automatic control or in the hands of anyone apart from themselves. I agree very strongly with their views. I claimed in a previous email that the main site at Los Alamos accepts submissions in numerous formats but that the implementation at Duke University, where several existing maths servers exist, restricts this to TeX. I have spent most of today reading the documentation at xxx.lanl.gov and it has given me a headache: electronic methods have a very long way to go to compete with paper when it comes to reading the whole of a lengthy technical document. So, my claim was wrong. Paul Ginsparg has very strong views in favour of TeX (source): http://xxx.lanl.gov/help/faq/whytex.html and against alternative formats such as PostScript. I agree with a lot of what he says, and would even stick my neck out to suggest that Mike Barr probably does too. However, Mike and I feel very strongly that being forced to submit TeX source is a straitjacket, and you can expect us to continue arguing this vigorously (and informedly). Curiously, Paul Ginsparg doesn't discuss DVI (the output of (La)TeX) as an archive format, this being the one for which I would argue. TeX and PostScript are programming languages, but DVI is a very simple and robust "byte code". For anyone worried about the "doomsday scenario" that TeX will no longer exist in 100 years time, the structure of DVI is simple enough that it could be decyphered from existing binary files and a viewer recreated. After all, this was done for hieroglyphs in the 19th century, without the aid of the very sophisicated hardware and artificial intelligence techniques which we can expect to exist in the future. Ginsparg's archives have been running since 1991 and (according to his statistics) take a considerable volume of traffic. From TeX source he generates several other formats, configurably by the reader, apparently on the fly. To promise to do this and still keep your head above water requires an extremely robust system, as I know from having run a major TeX implementation for many years. There is also a lot of documentation about configuring your web browser to accept files in formats for which Netscape was never designed. In other words, he seems to have a very professional way of delivering files to readers. I take my hat off to him, because this is a conspicuous weakness of Hypatia. Whatever the arguments and counterarguments about this particular issue, I suggest that a more liberal attitude to archive submission formats be taken by this and other archives. Paul Taylor PS There was also some discussion of plagiarism, on which subject http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/nch/www/koala-info.html is interesting.