## Monday, February 06, 2023

### After you are notified that an article is accepted...

After just one round of referees reports

(they send me the reports, I made the corrections, they were happy) I got email saying my paper on proving the primes are infinite FROM Schur's theorem in Ramsey was ACCEPTED. Yeah! Now What?

1) The journal send me an email with a link GOOD FOR ONLY FIFTY DAYS to help me publicize the article. Here is the link:

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gTyD,H-cWw6X

Will this really help? The article is already on arxiv. (ADDED LATER: the link on arxiv is here.)  Also, I can blog about it, but how do non-bloggers publicize their work? Do they need to?

(ADDED LATER: A commenter wanted to know why I am publishing in an Elsevier journal. This was a memorial issue in honor of Landon Rabern (see here) a combinatorist who died young.  I was invited to submit an article.)

QUESTION: Is this common practice? If so, what do you do with those links? Email them to all of your the people who should care about the article?

2) I got some forms to fill out that asked how many offprints I wanted. While my readers can probably guess what that means, I will remind you: paper copies of the article. I filled out the form:

I want 0 of them.

They still wanted to know the address to send the 0 copies to, so I gave that as well.

Does anyone actually get offprints anymore? That seems so 1990's. With everything on the web I tend to email people who want article pointers. In fact, that happens rarely - either nobody wants to read my articles (quite possible) or they find them on my website (quite possible).

In 1991 when I went up for tenure the dept wanted 15 copies of every article I wrote so they could send my letter writers (and others) all my stuff. Rumor is that the Governor of Maryland got a copy of every article I ever wrote. I hoped he was a fan of oracle constructions.

In 1998 when I went up for full prof they did not do this, assuming that the letter writers could find what the needed on the web. I do wonder about that- it might have been a nice courtesy to send them stuff directly and that would be a use for offprints. Depends on if my letter writers prefer reading online or on paper. They could of course print out my papers, but again- as a courtesy perhaps we should have supplied the papers.

QUESTION: Do you order a non-zero number of offprints and if so why?

3) The journal offered to have my article to be open access at their site for a price. I did not do this as, again, the article is already on arxiv.

QUESTION: Is there a reason to have your article formally open-access given that its already on arixv?

4) One of my co-authors on a different article asked me When will it appear IN PRINT?  I can't imagine caring about that. Its already on arxiv and I doubt having it in a journal behind paywalls will increase its visibility AT ALL. The only reason to care about when it appears IN PRINT is so I can update my resume from TO APPEAR to the actual volume and number and year.

QUESTION: Aside from updating your resume do you care when an article that was accepted appears IN PRINT? And if so why?

1. The short answer to most of your questions is that not all scientific papers are in math, and in different fields things work very differently, but the policies of all journals that belong to a publisher are usually set at a very high level.

1. I am more curious about what YOU (or any of my readers do) rather than the publishes policies. Do you order offprints? Does anyone?

2. No one I know does.

1. Many scientists have some social media accounts where they can post about their paper. I”m guessing Elsevier is trying to improve their image in the face of a continued backlash.
2. Back in the 90’s and before, journals would send some free offprints. I’ve never paid for offprints, but I suspect some do just to have keepsakes.
3. One would assume the journal version took into account some referees comments and thus at least somewhat superior to the arxiv paper. The journal version also confers a level of approval that an arxiv version doesn’t have. But it’s hard to argue that it’s worth paying to get open access.
4. Not really.

The real question is why you are still publishing with Elsevier. Most of their journals in math and computing have taken a large reputation hit as authors publish most of their work elsewhere.

3. I added to the post- I published in Elseivier since I was invited to for a memorial issue for Bruce Landman, a combinatorist who died young.

4. QUESTION: Is there a reason to have your article formally open-access given that its already on arixv?

Yes. Some funders have open-access mandates, which require all papers resulting from work they funded to be published open access. But generally it is a bad idea to publish open access in hybrid journals (i.e. ones that are closed access by default but open for a fee). Libraries are still charged for a subscription to those journals and they do not get a discount based on the proportion of articles published open-access. So, publishers are double dipping in those cases, and you are better off not paying the fee and posting on the arXiv. Well-intentioned policies sometimes lead to perverse incentives.

1. QUESTION: Is this common practice? If so, what do you do with those links? Email them to all of your the people who should care about the article?

2. QUESTION: Do you order a non-zero number of offprints and if so why?
ANSWER: I've never paid for offprints. When I was a young assistant professor, I was advised that it was a good idea to hang on to offprints for things like promotion packets. Also, in the olden days I would sometimes get requests for hard copies of papers through the mail. Consequently, in a corner of my office for many years I had stacks of offprints of my old journal papers. (I received no offprints from more recent publications.) Now that I'm slowly clearing my office as I transition to emeritus status, they've all been recycled. Personally, I have not had any use for offprints for quite a while (and I haven't received any for quite a while).

3. QUESTION: Is there a reason to have your article formally open-access given that its already on arixv?

ANSWER: If you want to refer to a particular theorem in a paper, and you cite a journal article, are you sure that the arXiv version you access has the same numbering scheme as the journal article? If the referees made helpful suggestions and the journal article has fewer errors than the original arXiv submission, did the author update the freely-available arXiv version? There are good reasons to have an "archival" version of a paper. Ideally, authors will make sure that there are freely-available versions of their papers that are essentially identical to the journal version ... but lots of authors don't bother to update their arXiv papers. Personally, I never pay to make papers "open access" but I try to make sure that the material is freely available somewhere. NSF has mechanisms to try ensure that the work they fund is freely available ... but when I'm looking for papers I never end up searching the NSF's archives.

4. QUESTION: Aside from updating your resume do you care when an article that was accepted appears IN PRINT? And if so why?

ANSWER: I like to know when a project is truly finished. If a paper is "to appear" but hasn't yet appeared, it's still taking up space in my "to do" pile. So, yes, I do care.

6. QUESTION: Aside from updating your resume do you care when an article that was accepted appears IN PRINT? And if so why?

ANSWER: Only IN PRINT articles are indexed by Scopus and Web of Science. In Italy, only these two repositories are considered for the National Scientific Qualification. And to have a chance of becoming Associate or Full Professor, in Italy, you need the NSQ.

1. AH Thank you! I did not know this. There may be other idiotic repositories that have stupid policies, but since there ARE such places, indeed, we do have to be concerned about when something appears IN PRINT. Here is hoping they change their policies and enter the 21st century.

7. Bruce Landman is very much alive! I wonder who you meant…

8. Thanks, fixed. It was Landon Rabern.

9. "Many scientists have some social media accounts where they can post about their paper."

That is, inherently, an unfortunate situation.

"I'm guessing Elsevier is trying to improve their image in the face of a continued backlash."

I'm not sure why anyone should be subject to the Dutch.

----

People keep using the phrase "offprints" here. I do not understand what such a thing is. I seem to gather that it's something involving splaying a combination of solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, flourescents, and other materials in order to color a physical surface.

I read the linked article (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.04755.pdf) at great length, and I saw that it was talking about coloring, but I didn't figure out from the text how it applied to offprints.

1. Not sure if you are kidding or not. Actually Daniel, I never know when you are kidding, including when you have a guest lecture in my crypto class about the NIST post-quantum challenge. HOWEVER, I will answer your questions''
a) offprints are (as I said in the post) PAPER copies of your article. So Elsevier would snail-mail be a box of, say, 50 paper copies of my article.
b) My article was not about offprints. It was about using Ramsey theory and FLT (n=3) to prove the primes are infinite.
You read it! I wonder if the number of people who have read it is in double digits!