Geometry and Topology

From Eureka

Basic Info

Published by :	Mathematical Sciences Publishers
First published :	1997
ISSN :	1465-3060 (print), 1364-0380 (electronic)
Subjects :	Geometry, Topology

AMS (link)

Price in 2006 :	$360
No. of pages in 2005 :	2414

Full AMS data
2006 : $360 (2504pgs)
2005 : $360 (2414pgs)
2004 : $170 (1499pgs)
2003 : $160 (1073pgs)
2002 : $150 (990pgs)
2001 : $140 (945pgs)
2000 : $80 (579pgs)
1999 : $70 (446pgs)
1998 : $50 (335pgs)
1997 : $18 (112pgs)

Geometry and Topology is a journal published by Geometry & Topology Publications, an imprint of Mathematical Sciences Publishers, a non-profit academic publishing company based in Berkeley and Warwick. Together with Algebraic and Geometric Topology, it was founded in 1997 as part of the first rebellion against the Elsevier journal Topology.

In 2000, one of the editors (Joan Birman) wrote:

Most new journals are started when a group of mathematicians senses the need for a new one. Geometry and Topology was no exception, but this time the felt need was genuinely new: to run a journal of top quality essentially free, using author's labor for the typesetting and the Internet for the distribution of its electronic version.

1 No longer free
2 AMS price information
3 Editorial board
4 External links
5 Related journals

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No longer free

At first the online version of Geometry and Topology was indeed free to individuals (institutions are and always were expected to buy an electronic and/or print subscription, although many didn't). This ceased to be true during 2006. The reason for this policy change was stated on the newsgroup sci.math.research on 24 July 2006. The website for the journal allows free access to the full text of articles published more than two years before the current year.

Below is the explanation given when the journal ceased to be free.

Colleagues:

The purpose of this message is to inform you that in the near future Geometry & Topology, and Algebraic & Geometric Topology, will no longer be open access journals, free electronically to the world. We have kept these journals open access for 10 and 5 years, respectively, depending on volunteer labor and a minimal amount of subscriptions income.

Although the journals are open access, we never granted libraries permission to connect to our sites without paying us a very small fee. However the income generated by this fee has never grown to cover our modest costs and we have been forced, reluctantly, to close the sites. Nevertheless, we intend that the journals shall stay freely accessible to individuals and, to this end, we shall continue to store the individual papers at the arXiv.

There is an ongoing evolution in the math libraries to switch from paper to electronic journals. For example, UC Berkeley no longer takes paper copies of any Elsevier or Springer journal. Since our two journals were open access, and libraries were consequently unwilling to pay for access, our modest number of subscribers has been dwindling, just as our volunteer labor wishes to move on to other endeavors.

Thus, within weeks, G&T and AGT will become accessible only to those people whose libraries subscribe and provide us with their IP addresses. Please use your negotiation skills to persuade your math librarian to take out an electronic subscription for GT and AGT (which automatically gives access to the monograph series as well).

Our journals will continue to sell at 10 cents/page for electronic, and 15 cents/page for paper. This is below almost all journals, as can be seen by the tables appended. What follows is a discussion of quality and the economics of publishing math journals, which you can skip if you wish. This discussion will contain some arguments in favor of G&T and AGT which you may want to use with your math librarian.

One way to measure quality is through citations and impact factors. For a journal J one counts all the citations in journals published in 2005 to papers that were published in J in 2003 and 2004, and then divides by the number of articles in those two years. The resulting number, roughly the average number of citations for a given paper in the year 2005, is called the impact factor. This is the method used by The Thomson Corporation's ISI Web of Knowledge, also known as Science Citation Index, which can be reached at this URL:

http://portal.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi?DestApp=JCR&Func=Frame

They list only 181 math journals, the journals which they believe are established and worth of ranking (the AMS surveys 274 journals). The top 20, plus selected topology or geometry journals, are listed below, and you can see that Geometry & Topology is eleventh, or actually eighth among regular math journals.

       Rank    Abbreviated Journal Title       Impact Factor
       1       J AM MATH SOC                           2.323
       2       ANN MATH                                2.009
       3       COMPUT COMPLEX  (not math)              2.000
       4       COMMUN PUR APPL MATH                    1.841
       5       B AM MATH SOC   (not research articles) 1.800  
       6       ACTA MATH-DJURSHOLM                     1.778
       7       INVENT MATH                             1.652  
       8       J EUR MATH SOC                          1.414  
       9       MEM AM MATH SOC (monographs, not articles) 1.315
       10      DUKE MATH J                             1.304  
       11      GEOM TOPOL                              1.275  
       12      J MATH PURE APPL                        1.195
       13      PUBL MATH-PARIS                         1.182
       14      DISCRET MATH THEOR C                    1.061
       15      DISCRETE CONT DYN S                     1.025
       16      INTERFACE FREE BOUND                    1.024
       16      RANDOM STRUCT ALGOR                     1.024
       18      ANN SCI ECOLE NORM S                    1.000
       19      ADV MATH                                0.991  
       20      AM J MATH                               0.978

       37       TOPOLOGY                               0.770  
       46       J DIFFER GEOM                          0.676  
       84       K-THEORY                               0.474  
       131      GEOMETRIAE DEDICATA                    0.330
       133      J KNOT THEOR RAMIF                     0.323  
       149      TOPOL APPL                             0.297

However G&T also has one of the the lowest subscription prices. If we divide the impact factor by the price per page for an electronic subscription, then we get a rough approximation of value per cost, or bang-for-the-buck. Some journals do not have a separate price for the electronic version, and some companies bundle their journals, so for the purposes of this calculation, we have used 90% of the price per page given at

http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/BIB/AMS/Price_per_Page.html

For some of the more mainstream math journals listed above, here is an ordered list based on this calculation. Note again that this is a rather odd number, citations per article divided by price per page, but it gives some idea of relative worth.

Annals Math             18.26  (= 2.009/.11)
G&T                     12.75
JAMS                    10.56  (= 2.323/.22) 
(AGT)                    6.76
American J. Math         5.43
Acta Math                4.20
Duke J.                  3.10
J Eur. Math. Soc.        2.12
Pub IHES                 1.85
Invent. Math.            1.72
Comm Pure App Math       1.61
Advances Math            1.48
J Diff. Geom             1.99
Topology                  .86
K-Theory                  .59
J. Knot Thy Ram           .58
Geom. Ded.                .38
Topology Applic.          .28

Algebraic & Geometric Topology is not yet listed at Thomson ISI, but it is possible to get citations and impact factors from the AMS at mathscinet by entering journal names one by one. The AMS impact factors are computed by counting citations to articles in the year 2000 through 2004. See

http://www.ams.org/mrcitations/search.html

The citations usually do not vary too much from Thomson, and the ranking do not change much (unless a journal has changed quality in 2003-04 compared to the previous three years). The impact factor for AGT at the AMS site is .676 (on 19 July 2006; the AMS figures change as new information comes in, whereas the Thomson impact factors are fixed for 2006). This is a remarkably good number for such a young journal, and if you divide by its cost per page, the bang-for-the-buck figure is an even more remarkable 6.76. This places it fourth in the above table.

Take these numbers with a large grain of salt. If the approximations in the above calculation all fall on one side, a journal can be quite too low or too high. Note also that some journals which are not in the top 20 in impact factors, are also very cheap, so their bang-for-the-buck number will place them high on the list. A good example is the Indiana Univ. Math. J. which has an impact factor of .769 and a cost of .15, giving 5.13, placing it 6th on the list. Other university press journals do well, e.g. the Pacific J. Math at 2.82.

Rob Kirby

Colin Rourke

[edit]

AMS price information

AMS Journal Price Survey
2006 USD Price	2006 Price	2005 Pages	2005 USD Price	2005 Price	2004 Pages	2004 USD Price	2004 Price	2003 Pages	2003 USD Price	2003 Price	2002 Pages	2002 USD Price	2002 Price	2001 Pages	2001 USD Price	2001 Price	2000 Pages	2000 USD Price	2000 Price
	360	2415		360			170	1073		110	990		100	924		100	579		55