As a professional mathematician I carry out research which I seek to publish in peer-reviewed journals. I type the work using the LaTeX typesetting system, producing professional looking results. The work is then sent to the editors of the journal in question, who are also professional mathematicians carrying out the role of editor for little or no recompense. They forward my work to another mathematician who in their unpaid role as referee determines whether or not it is fit for publication in the journal. If it is then minor modifications to my LaTeX file might be made by the publisher, who then prints out the paper and sells it to the libraries of our universities and institutes... The price we pay for buying back our own work can vary enormously depending on the journal/publisher in question, with small institutional-run journals generally being cheaper than the full-blown commercial concerns. Some articles that go into this in further detail can be found on the following pages:
On the other hand, even when people try to make use of newer technologies, things do not always work out as we would like, as has been demonstrated by the journals Geometry & Topology, and Algebraic & Geometric Topology, as discussed here.
The combined factors of budget cuts and price increases have forced us to cut a number of subscriptions to journals here in the mathematics department of UCC. Fortunately there are some useful resources coming into being which are just one facet of the changing world of scholarly publication. First and foremost is the arXiv where authors can deposit copies of their latest preprints. Chances are if the author of a paper that you are interested in wrote it after 1991 (and they are relatively computer literate) then the prepublication copy may be lurking here. You also get to find copies of articles that may take another few years to appear in print in the conventional manner!
Of a more historical nature there are also a number of programmes to digitise journals and books, most of which seem to be connected in some way to the World Digital Mathematics Library. The first three below are the pages of digitisation projects; the final three give links to these and other useful resources:
Finally, there are a number of electronic only peer-reviewed journals that are now beginning to appear such as Documenta Mathematica and Electronic Communications in Probability. They don't have the space limitations of their traditional counterparts so publication time can be much faster. A useful list of links to these (and some journals with free on-line versions) is maintained by EMIS (the European Mathematical Information Service), a mirror of which is at TCD. In a similar vein is the list of journals maintained by DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals).
Below is a table that started life as a list of bookmarks to journals that I find useful for my research, then incorporated various digitised journals, and also journals that we either currently or recently subscribed to here in UCC. This explains a possibly skewed choice.
I have tried to provide links to the official web page, indicate how long they have been putting the papers on the web there (beware - sometimes only the tables of contents and/or abstracts are available, especially if you don't subscribe!), and say whether or not digitised (and possibly free) versions are available. In the case of AMS journals (an institute-run suite of publications...) and a few others the official on-line versions are either totally free or become free if the article is more than five years old.
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Last updated: 21 October 2010