K-Theory editorial board resigns
August 6th, 2007 by WaltPeter Woit reports that the entire editorial board of the journal K-Theory (published by Springer) has resigned. The current editors have already formed a new journal, Journal of K-Theory, which will be distributed by Cambridge University Press.
The subscription price for the Springer journal was $1590. The subscription price for the new journal is 380 British pounds, which is roughly half the price.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Is it open access? Price is not the real problem, intellectual freedom is.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
That’s a good question. I don’t know.
August 7th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
[...] we seem to be the last in the mathematics blogging community to have noticed, let me offer some editorial content: good for them. Whether you [...]
August 7th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Totally off-topic, but I’ve always wanted to ask… aren’t research mathematicians supposed to work 80-100 hours per week? If so, how do they manage to write and comment on blogs?
August 7th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Andrei, my weblog is part of my work. A lot of it is leading up to discussions of my actual research, yes. But public outreach is also a valid part of mathematical work.
Besides, a big part of getting hired these days is to get known. The weblog will (hopefully) help with that.
August 8th, 2007 at 2:20 am
Surely only slow or very dim mathematicians work 80-100 hours per week!
The best ones do a few minutes reading and then set their unconscious mind onto the problem while they get and do other stuff. The number theorist GH Hardy supposedly never spent more than a couple of hours at his desk each day — usually in the morning. In the afternoons, he played cricket, read novels, took long walks, and went drinking with friends. If you read the autobio of the probability theorist (later an economist) JM Keynes, you find he did something similar — even when he was a senior civil servant, he rarely got to his office before late morning, and always left at 5. He usually spent his evenings being entertained with his ballerina wife and her louche friends.
After some point, both the quantity and the quality of outputs actually declines with increasing hours of input.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Peter:
“After some point, both the quantity and the quality of outputs actually declines with increasing hours of input.”
I hate to ask… but is this the Laffer Curve applied to Mathematics?
Related: the USA has the fewest days of paid vacation for the average employee of any developed nation (at least compared with Canada, Western Europe, even Japan). To me, that suggests the USA is on the wrong side of the maximum of the curve, and our productivity suffers in global competition.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Jonathan -
Yes, I almost mentioned the Laffer Curve in my post, but thought no one here would know it!
A former boss of mine used to say “It is impossible to do a week’s work in more than 5 days, or a year’s work in more than 11 months.”
August 9th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Using Erdos’ definition of a mathematician as machine that turns coffee into theorems, the decline in output is closer to diminishing returns to scale for a firm than it is to the Laffer curve.
August 11th, 2007 at 4:13 am
Well, Walt, I think that it is not only marginal output that declines with additional inputs, but indeed total outputs. How many times have I deleted some file I’d already written when I was over-tired! So, I think a Laffer curve applies here, not merely diminishing returns to scale.
August 14th, 2007 at 1:15 am
The situation with K-Theory may be more complicated than it seemed at first… check out the new math journal wiki. And while you’re there, help us write some articles!
August 21st, 2007 at 8:36 pm
[...] Peter Woit has more on the resignation of the K Theory editorial board. [...]
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:17 am
[...] talking about the resigning of the whole editorial board of K-Theory (more on this here, here and here, and references therein), I thought I could put on my two cents showing a bit of “the other [...]