So, what if “Breakthroughs” existed not only as a web venue, but also had a printed copy? This printed copy could be sent to libraries / subscribers whenever a particular number of pages is reached, or papers would be sent individually as they get approved for publication?

“Breakthroughs” could be a venue with multiple disciplines, with specialist editors for each broad subject and a pool (or community) of editors in a diverse range of specialties, not only on mathematics, but also on other sciences as well.

It could charge a symbolic price for submissions (which is meant to keep time-wasters away), but everyone could consult it online. Subscriptions could be based on broad subject (ie. Maths) or specialties (ie. Combinatorics) and as articles are printed individually, one could also purchase a single printed copy of any article (so one can frame their article and hang it on the wall, for instance).

I’d love to work in this project, if it ever see the light of day, but for that the first thing that Breakthrough needs is editors.

Thanks alot just for the proposal. I really wish it happens and I am convinced many more would love it.

PS: I tried posting this comment yesterday but it did not work, without any error message.

I don’t think anyone doubts that software fulfilling any particular requirements can be built. Indeed, any proposal which frames the difficulties as “building software” is probably doomed. The difficult questions that have to be thought through are more along the lines of “how will this coexist with the existing system?”, and “how will this be useful for the first tiny fraction of people using it?”. Imagining a replacement system isn’t very useful by itself; we need to know which directions in the tangent space get us closer.

One approach could be to use the reddit system, which has been open-sourced (https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki)
The way it works is that there are multiple “subreddits” [ see for example http://www.reddit.com/r/math ] which have a short list of moderators, and to which anybody can submit links, upvote, downvote, and comment. In this system we could have “subreddits” corresponding either to arxiv categories (math.NT, math.AG, etc) or to ad-hoc online journals where the moderators correspond to a review board. There’s a notion there of which posts have been verified or not, which corresponds to having a proper reviewer vet the result. So links to new papers could be submitted and there would be a mix of crowdsourced due-diligence, and certain control and oversight by an editorial board. One can then search for existing papers, see comments, browse categories, and see both the newest and the top papers per category by day,week,month,year,etc
And since this is open-source all of this could be available immediately, given a good system administrator.

University librarians can perform this task. For example, if journals are based at Universities then an infrastructure is already in place via institutional repositories (which are maintained on the whole by Library staff) possibly or platforms using open source software, as others here have already referred to.

As an alternative approach, Cameron Neylon has written a very interesting analysis in his blog post “The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension”. He envisages that funders would perform the content publishing role and “within ten years all major funders will mandate CC-BY Open Access on publication arising from work they fund immediately on publication”.

Other factors which I don’t think have yet been mentioned are that University Library and Computing staff spend many, many hours negotiating licenses with publishers, maintaining authentication systems, training institutional staff and students to navigate these authentication systems which can be tricky as there is a lack of standardisation amongst publisher websites. So, instead of these time-consuming, costly activities staff could concentrate on maintaining open access systems, and ensuring ease of access.

I understand the wish to be published in a prestigious journal, but could this evolve to being published by a prestigious University in their repository or equivalent? The concept of a journal could be maintained but would it still be needed? The academic community also relies heavily on various citation metrics, including of course the impact factor of a journal. Perhaps these need re-thinking as well. At the article level, free tools like Google Scholar Citations are available. Not perfect, but if the development of a new model for academic online publishing adopts the principles of a Semantic Web as first proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee then it should be possible to develop tools to generate these metrics.

Content already owned by publishers may still be subject to subscription fees, but in time perhaps these can be re-negotiated. As others have noted, this transition needs a strong will, but does online publishing of academic research still need the traditional publishers?

In a way, MathOverflow has modularized mathematics, in a way Polymath has done it (but has yet to scale to a wider audience), in a way, blogs do.

Could we imagine a figshare of mathematics? A micro-contribution journal? A journal for “failed attacks on a problem”? Could we imagine crowd-sourced survey articles?

I think we have enough creative people in mathematics that have thought about these things but there’s no incentive to spend time realizing them — after all “you could write a paper instead”…

This journal does
“exploit its electronic character in order to have a positive appeal.”
Colour images and videos can be attached to papers.

A related discussion on the issue of Elsevier replacement, journal scope and rankings: http://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/thinking-about-elsevier-replacements/

In addition, I support legislation to free, open archiving of all papers which were funded with federal money.

JSTOR doesn’t even sell subscriptions to individuals. It’s ridiculous that access to knowledge is so exclusive in the age of the internet.

I urge you to support open access, and not merely fleeing the abuses of the worst publishers. Only through open access can the great masses of people gain access to knowledge, many of whom hold graduate degrees and maintain the capacity and inclination to enjoy academic work. Some of them might even be inspired to contribute themselves to humanity’s body of knowledge.

Open access allows people to build tools for indexing, discussing, and sharing papers, like Mendeley. Support open access and let a new age of open scholarship bloom.

This boycott should be easier to organize than the one being proposed, because there are fewer institutions than individual scholars and they are already motivated to reduce expenses. Universities also seem to exhibit silly peer-imitating and hierarchical behavior patterns that can be exploited. For once, the interests of cost-cutting administrators and students / faculty are in perfect alignment: stop funding the parasites that exploit us.

PS Drop the “Breakthroughs in”. Just “Mathematics”. It’s cleaner =)

A possible action could be to invite every mathematical institute of the world to create a journal that would reflect their history and personality. For example, the Fields Institute could create a journal called *The Fields Institute Mathematical Journal* or another journal called *The HSM Coxeter Mathematical Journal”, since Coxeter spended most of his career in Toronto.