On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 11:02:55AM +0000, Manfredi M.A. La Manna wrote: > 1. what is the point of publishing in journals with high acceptance rates? > As a 100% acceptance rate is equivalent to vanity publishing, surely any > journal where the majority of submissions are published is not worth > submitting to.
I am sure that the acceptance rate in mathematics is much higher than in many disciplines, and I would guess that it is higher than in economics. My explanation is that, because of the nature of the research, mathematicians rarely disagree about what is right or wrong, and they even agree more than you might expect about the quality of papers. I am not an expert observer of other disciplines, but I remember that a dean at Harvard University (Henry Rozovsky) told me that mathematicians ahd a reputation among deans for consensus in hiring decisions. We still think that we fight a lot over hiring, but maybe not as much as some departments. On that note, I also believe that journals in mathematics, especially good journals, enjoy self-selection by the authors. For example many American mathematicians think of the Annals of Mathematics as the supreme math journal. I'm not sure how the Annals earned this status or whether any single journal deserves it. I also suspect that some of the Annals don't want quite that much authority. Still, even if it is partly a self-fulfilling prophesy, the Annals is obviously an excellent journal. > 3. the suggestion ventilated by someone on the forum that papers posted on > the web could somehow be refereed by well-disposed readers, in economics is > simply preposterous; I work in a subdiscipline of mathematics with many papers in the arXiv, which is an archive of mostly prepublished papers. In my opinion, the arXiv works so well that any peer review of its articles, even traditional journal publication, is ex post facto. The question is whether traditional publication is still the best system in its new ex post facto role. I don't think so, but I agree with you that peer review needs more structure than just letting readers "write in the margins". That's been tried before: it may be okay for Amazon.com but it will never work for math papers. -- /\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis) / \ \ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ \/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *
