On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 11:19:45PM -0500, Albert Henderson wrote: > > My access to math research is as good as it ever > > was thanks to MathSciNet, which is unfortunately proprietary but not > > expensive; the math arXiv, which is free; and home pages and other > > Internet sources. > > Maybe. Here is a note from my book, ELECTRONIC DATABASES > AND PUBLISHING on a publisher's response to the library > crisis: > > "In an effort to contain costs, the publishers of Mathematical > Reviews decided in 1989 to keep the number of reviews at > approximately 1989 levels. In order to do this and maintain > comprehensive coverage of the literature within the scope of > Mathematical Reviews, they increased the percentage of items > that are not given reviews ...." p. 219.
Math Reviews may not be perfect, but it is vastly more useful in its electronic incarnation as MathSciNet than it was on paper. Our own math department used to have Math Reviews. When there was no MathSciNet it was very useful. It was even useful when not all of it was digitized. But the AMS finished copying back issues of Math Reviews into MathSciNet, we threw out our print copy of Math Reviews. It wasn't to save money, or even to save space, although that was a small factor. The main reason was that it was in one of our classrooms and it was ugly. It may be true that a smaller *fraction* of math papers indexed in the companion Current Mathematical Publications get reviews, but the *total number* is still as large as it ever was. They also try to devote reviews to more serious formal publications and spare verbatim summaries and flat listings for conference proceedings. And even a listing in CMP adds to MathSciNet's new mission in the Internet age, which is increasingly to bind all of the math journals together, rendering them as one giant super-journal. There is a lesson in this trend for open archival. The readership in each discipline wants a giant electronic super-journal. The market is moving in that direction whether decision-makers like it or not. Should it be a subscription-based monopoly? -- /\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis) / \ \ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ \/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *
