This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important way: it will be purely an arXiv overlay journal. That is, rather than publishing, or even electronically hosting, papers, it will consist of a list of links to arXiv preprints. Other than that, the journal will be entirely conventional: authors will submit links to arXiv preprints, and then the editors of the journal will find referees, using their quick opinions and more detailed reports in the usual way in order to decide which papers will be accepted.

Part of the motivation for starting the journal is, of course, to challenge existing models of academic publishing and to contribute in a small way to creating an alternative and much cheaper system. However, I hope that in due course people will get used to this publication model, at which point the fact that Discrete Analysis is an arXiv overlay journal will no longer seem interesting or novel, and the main interest in the journal will be the mathematics it contains.

The members of the editorial board so far — but we may well add further people in the near future — are Ernie Croot, me, Ben Green, Gil Kalai, Nets Katz, Bryna Kra, Izabella Laba, Tom Sanders, Jozsef Solymosi, Terence Tao, Julia Wolf, and Tamar Ziegler. For the time being, I will be the managing editor. I interpret this as meaning that I will have the ultimate responsibility for the smooth running of the journal, and will have to do a bit more work than the other editors, but that decisions about journal policy and about accepting or rejecting papers will be made democratically by the whole editorial board. (For example, we had quite a lot of discussion, including a vote, about the title, and the other editors have approved this blog post after suggesting a couple of minor changes.)

I will write the rest of this post as a series of questions and answers.



What is Discrete Analysis, and what is the scope of the journal?

The members of the editorial board all have an interest in additive combinatorics, but they also have other interests that may be only loosely related to additive combinatorics. So the scope of the journal is best thought of as a cluster of related subjects that cannot easily be pinned down with a concise definition, but that can be fairly easily recognised. (Wittgenstein refers to this kind of situation as a family resemblance.) Some of the subjects we will welcome in the journal are harmonic analysis, ergodic theory, topological dynamics, growth in groups, analytic number theory, combinatorial number theory, extremal combinatorics, probabilistic combinatorics, combinatorial geometry, convexity, metric geometry, and the more mathematical side of theoretical computer science. The phrase “discrete analysis” was coined by Ben Green when he wanted a suitable name for a seminar in Cambridge: despite its oxymoronic feel, it is in fact a good description of many parts of mathematics where the structures being studied are discrete, but the tools are analytical in character. (A particularly good example is the use of discrete Fourier analysis to solve combinatorial problems in number theory.)

We do not want the journal to be a fully general mathematical journal, but we do want it to be broad. If you are in doubt about whether the subject matter of your paper is suitable, then feel free to consult an editor. We will try to err on the side of inclusiveness.

Are there any charges for publication?

No. This journal is what some people call a diamond open access journal: there are no charges for readers (obviously, since the papers are on the arXiv), and no charges for authors.

What are the costs of the journal, and how will they be covered?

The software for managing the refereeing process will be provided by Scholastica, an outfit that was set up a few years ago by some graduates from the University of Chicago with the aim of making it very easy to create electronic journals. However, the look and feel of Discrete Analysis will be independent: the people at Scholastica are extremely helpful, and one of the services they provide is a web page designed to the specifications you want, with a URL that does not contain the word “scholastica”. Scholastica does charge for this service — a whopping $10 per submission. (This should be compared with typical article processing charges of well over 100 times this from more conventional journals.) Cambridge University has kindly agreed to provide a small grant to the journal, which means that we will be able to cover the cost of the first 500 or so submissions. I am confident that by the time we have had that many submissions, we will be able to find additional funding. The absolute worst that could happen is that in a few years’ time, we will have to ask people to pay an amount roughly equal to the cost of a couple of beers to submit a paper, but it is unlikely that we will ever have to charge anything.

Whatever happens, this journal will demonstrate the following important principle: if you trust authors to do their own typesetting and copy-editing to a satisfactory standard, with the help of suggestions from referees, then the cost of running a mathematics journal can be at least two orders of magnitude lower than the cost incurred by traditional publishers. In theory, this offers a way out of the current stranglehold that the publishers have over us: if enough universities set up enough journals at these very modest costs, then we will have an alternative and much cheaper publication system up and running, and it will look more and more pointless to submit papers to the expensive journals, which will save the universities huge amounts of money. Just to drive the point home, the cost of submitting an article from the UK to the Journal of the London Mathematical Society is, if you want to use their open-access option, £2,310. If Discrete Analysis gets 50 submissions per year (which is more than I would expect to start with), then this single article processing charge would cover our costs for well over five years.

Furthermore, even these modest costs could have been lower. We happened to have funds that allowed us to use Scholastica’s facilities, and decided to do that, but another possibility would have been the Episciences platform, which has been specifically designed for the setting up of overlay journals, and which does not charge anything. It is still in its very early stages, but it already has two mathematics journals (which existed before and migrated to the Episciences platform), and it would be very good to see more. Another possibility that some people might find it worth considering is Open Journal Systems, though that requires a degree of technical skill that I for one do not possess, whereas setting up a journal with Scholastica has been extremely easy, and I think using the Episciences platform would be easy as well.

Will you have to pay $10 if somebody submits an obviously unsuitable paper?

Could a malevolent person — let us call him or her the Evil Seer — bankrupt the journal by submitting 1000 computer-generated papers? Is it reasonable for us to be charged $10 for instantly rejecting a two-page proof of the Riemann hypothesis that uses nothing more than high-school algebra? I have taken this up with Scholastica, and they have told me that in such cases we just need to tell them and will not be charged.

Will articles in the journal be recognised as “real” publications?

Yes. As already mentioned, the articles will be peer-reviewed in the traditional way. There will also be a numbering system for the articles, so that when they are cited, they look like journal articles rather than “mere” arXiv preprints. They will be exclusive to Discrete Analysis. They will have DOIs, and the journal will have an ISSN. Whether the journal will at some point have an impact factor I do not know, but I hope that most people who consider submitting to it will in any case have a healthy contempt for impact factors. We will adhere to the “best practice” as set out in MathSciNet’s Policy on Indexing Electronic Journals, so our articles should be listed there and on Zentralblatt — we are in the process of checking whether this will definitely happen.

Is Discrete Analysis the first pure arXiv overlay journal in mathematics?

No. Another example is SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications), though as well as giving arXiv links it hosts its own copies of its articles. And another, which is a mathematically oriented computer science journal, is Logical Methods in Computer Science. I would guess that there are several others that I am unaware of. But one can at least say that Discrete Analysis is an early adopter of the arXiv overlay model.

When will the journal start?

The current plan is that people are free to submit articles immediately, via a temporary website that has been set up for the purpose. We hope that we will be able to process a few good papers quickly, which will allow us to have an official launch of the journal in early 2016 with some articles already published.

What standard are you aiming at?

It is difficult to be precise about this, especially before we have received any submissions. However, broadly speaking, we would like to publish genuinely interesting papers in the areas described above. So if you have proved a result that you think is likely to interest the editors, then please consider Discrete Analysis for it. We would like the journal to be consistently interesting, but we do not want to set the standard so high that we do not publish anything.

Will the editors of the journal be allowed to submit papers to it?

It would be a pity to exclude the editors from the journal, given that their areas of research are by definition suitable for it. Our policy will be to allow editors to be authors, but to apply slightly more rigorous standards to submissions from editors. In practice, that will mean that in borderline cases a paper will be at a disadvantage if one of its authors is an editor. It goes without saying that editors will be completely excluded from the discussion of any paper that might lead to a conflict of interest. Scholastica’s software makes it very easy to do this.

We have not (yet) discussed the question of whether I as managing editor should be allowed to submit to the journal, but I shall probably follow the policy of many reputable journals and avoid doing so (albeit with some regret) and send any papers that would have been suitable to other journals with publication models that I want to support.

What is the point of a list of links? Can’t people look up preprints for themselves?

An obvious partial answer to this question is that the list of links on our journal website will be a list of certificates that certain arXiv preprints have been peer reviewed and judged to be of a suitable standard for Discrete Analysis. Thus, it will provide information that the arXiv alone does not provide.

However, we intend to do slightly more than this. For each paper, we will give not just a link, but also a short description. This will be based on the abstract and introduction, and on any further context that one of our editors or referees may be able to give us. The advantage of this is that it will be possible to browse the journal and get a good idea of what it contains, without having to keep clicking back and forth to arXiv preprints. In this way, we hope to make visiting the Discrete Analysis home page a worthwhile experience.

Another thing we will be able to do with these descriptions is post links to newer versions of the articles. If an author wishes to update an article after it has been published, we will provide two links: one to the “official” version (that is, not the first submitted version, but the “final” version that takes into account comments by the referee), and one to the new updated version, with a brief summary of what has changed.

How secure will the articles you publish be?

The mathematical community is now sufficiently dependent on the arXiv that it is very unlikely that the arXiv will fold, and if it does then there will be greater problems than the fate of Discrete Analysis. However, in this hypothetical situation, we will download all the articles accepted by Discrete Analysis, as well as those still under review, and find another way of hosting them. Note that articles posted to the arXiv are automatically uploaded to HAL as well, so one possibility would be simply to change the arXiv links to HAL links. As for Scholastica, they perform regular backups of all their data, so even if their main site were to be wiped out, all the information concerning their journals would be recoverable. In short, barring a catastrophic failure of the entire internet, articles published in Discrete Analysis will be secure and permanent.

What about open peer review, post-publication reviews, etc.?

The editors have widely differing views about these sorts of ideas. For now, we are taking a cautious approach, trying to make the journal as conventional as possible so as to maximize its chances of becoming successful. If at some point in the future we decide to experiment with newer methods of peer review, we shall continue to be cautious, and will always give authors the chance to opt out of them.

How do I submit a paper to Discrete Analysis?

First, post it on the arXiv, selecting one of the CC-BY options when it asks you which licence you want to use (this is important for ensuring that the journal complies with the open-access requirements of various funding bodies, but if you have already posted the article under a more restrictive licence, you can always use a CC-BY licence for the version that is revised in the light of comments from referees). Then go to the journal’s temporary website, click on the red “Submit Manuscript” button in the top right-hand corner, and follow the simple instructions.

Not everybody reads blogs, so one way that you can support the journal is to bring it to the attention of anybody you know who might conceivably have a suitable paper for it. The sooner we can build up an initial list of interesting papers, the sooner the journal can become established, and the sooner the cheap arXiv overlay model can start competing with the expensive traditional models of publication.

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