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Coordinamento Servizi Informatici Bibliotecari di Ateneo | |
| Università degli Studi di Lecce |
BERND WEGNER
EMIS 2000: the European
Mathematical Information Service and its developments
[PowerPoint
Slides]
[versione italiana]
The increasing development of electronic devices for the publication of papers and books in mathematics lead to a drastic change in the communication facilities between authors and editors, to new ways of distributing mathematical publications to research mathematicians - like electronic journals, and to an extension of the offers of information on mathematical research to the mathematical community. Confronted with a permanently increasing number of research papers and high production and distribution costs for mathematical journals and monographs, it becomes more and more difficult to get access to these publications. Electronic publishing may provide better facilities for these purposes. It hopefully will reduce the production costs for the preparation of the articles and improve the methods to find his way through the tremendous bulk of mathematical research papers. It will enable reviewing journals to speed up and improve their procedures.
Moreover, as an extension of these offers, a lot of additional items of interest for mathematicians appear in the web already like pre-prints, educational material in mathematics, software, graphical material and others. Information databases provide a qualified access to some of these offers, but for the whole set a uniform access facility with a high degree of de-duplication will be highly desirable. The result of the EULER project may provide one tool for this.
The aim of this article is to report on these aspects related with methods of electronic publishing and electronic communication by exhibiting offers provided by EMIS (European Mathematical Information Service) as an example which may indicate a good model for the future. This refers to the production and distribution of electronic publications in mathematics, to electronic access to evaluated information on all mathematical papers as well as to general search facilities leading to interesting documents in mathematics.
The idea to develop the European Mathematical Information Service EMIS was born at the meeting of the executive committee of the EMS (European Mathematical Society) in Cortona/Italy, October 1994. It was decided to set up a system of electronic servers in Europe for Mathematics under the auspices of the EMS, and this was extended very soon to the current version of a central server collecting mathematical information and distributing this through a world-wide system of mirror servers. The installation of the central server began in March 1995 in co-operation with FIZ Karlsruhe at the editorial office of Zentralblatt für Mathematik in Berlin. In June 1995 EMIS went on-line under the URL http://www.emis.de/. The first mirrors were established very soon.
The sections of the contents of EMIS related to the topics above are "Projects", "Databases", and the "Electronic Library". World Wide Web access is regarded the primary access method. The access to the contents of EMIS is free up to the usage of some databases. In these cases a link leads directly to the corresponding system of gateways to the databases, and the user will be subject to the conditions valid for accessing these databases. In any case he will be able to do searches. But in the case his institution does not subscribe to the service, only some preliminary information will be available from the hit list.
Before giving a more detailed description of the services of EMIS which are of central interest for electronic publication and communication some other general aspects should be addressed at the beginning. The most important one is the idea to distribute EMIS through a world-wide system of mirrors where the full content of the service will be available and updated periodically. This improves the accessibility of EMIS, and it simultaneously is important for the safety of the data and their archiving: if the master server or one component of the system crashes down, it can be regenerated easily from the other components. In principle, every European country should have one mirror at least. The current mirrors of EMIS in Italy are in Torino and Lecce.
This section contains three items: MATH - the online version of Zentralblatt MATH, MATHDI - the online version of a similar service for education in mathematics, and MPRESS - a global pre-print index. MATH as the most comprehensive and traditional service has received a more detailed description in the article on the LIMES project, which also can be found in the collection of the articles related the Fourth Seminar of SINM. Access in Italy is co-ordinated by SIBA within SINM. This includes the installation of a mirror of the database as well as the ongoing activity to arrange subscriptions to the service at special conditions within the SINM-consortium.
MATHDI is the online version of the printed service of Zentralblatt für Didaktik der Mathematik. It provides comprehensive information on publications in education in mathematics. All aspects of quality and search facilities are the same like for Zentralblatt MATH. The editors are the European Mathematical Society and FIZ Karlsruhe. It is supervised by an Editorial Committee. The contents of the database comprise 85.000 items. A production using a distributed editorial structure is under development. Keeping in mind, that there is a community which is more interested in education in mathematics than in mathematical research, the database is installed separately from Zentralblatt MATH.
In contrast to these two charged databases, MPRESS is provided as a freely accessible service. It stores combined information on mathematics pre-prints available in the web. The gathering of information is done by robots, which are run by national brokers for harvesting of data. This procedure leads to a data structure which only allows for simple search facilities. MPRESS has no ambition to offer a pre-print server itself, only links to full texts are provided. The service is supervised by EMS among others. Countries which support the harvesting are Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. In addition to this some special servers are harvested by MPRESS. Among them are the Topology Atlas and the LANL-archive. The harvesting for Italy is done by SIBA and described by another lecture within this meeting (see Dr. Flavio Melcarne: Il SINM-MPRESS).
As a new item the link to a free offer of high-quality geometric models and animations had been arranged. This is a preliminary version, and it has to be investigated, how the data of these models could be stored in a convenient way, to make them accessible within the same menu as it is provided for searching mathematical articles.
EMS is involved in three projects, where two of them are funded by the European Union and one is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The first two are LIMES and EULER while the other one is the Jahrbuch-Project. The one closely related to Zentralblatt MATH is LIMES (Large Infrastructures in Mathematics - Enhanced Services). It is described in a separate article in these conference proceedings. The same refers to the Jahrbuch-Project, which officially is called ERAM (Electronic Research Archive in Mathematics).
The EULER-project is funded by the European Union within the programme "Telematics for Libraries". The goal of the project is to develop a prototype of an internet service which integrates some of the most relevant publication-related resources in the field of mathematics. This should provide a "one-stop-shopping" in heterogeneous resources for the user. The approach should be open to other participants, scalable for different kinds of user interests and it should be easily portable to other subject domains. The team co-operating in this project comprises an addition to partners in charge of software supply different providers of electronic resources available in the web: OPACs, databases, pre-print servers, electronic journals and other WWW-catalogues.
Tools have been developed facilitating the production of DC-metadata for the different resources. Using the Z39.50 protocol the so-called EULER-engine users of the EULER-systems can carry out combined searches for mathematical information in all these resources. Different search levels are installed depending on the quality of the metadata offered by the resources. De-duplication checks are done automatically and links are arranged to full texts resp. the more detailed information given by the provider.
The EULER-project terminated in September 2000. The engine has passed the beta-test successfully and the current beta-version has been proved to be installable at new service providers. During the exploitation period a model has been developed how to establish EULER as an internet service. There will be a consortium of different providers for the future service, including some of the partners of the project. New partners already have agreed to take part in the service. The first goal is to establish a library and society based web service which includes a system of resources with a well-distributed European background. Economic viability of the EULER system was not among the concerns of the project. This has to be investigated by future measures to enable commercial publishers to join the service by making their holdings visible through EULER. To produce the meta-data will not be that problem. But to make the content accessible they will ask for an access control, and that yet has to be designed for the EULER machine.
By the way, EULER stands for "EU"ropean "L"ibraries and "E"lectronic "R"esources in Mathematical Sciences.
The Electronic Library of EMIS has the aim to present a collection of freely accessible electronic publications which should be as comprehensive as possible. There are four sections: journals, proceedings volumes, monographs, and collected works. In order to guarantee that the electronic publications stored in the Electronic Library meet the requirements satisfied by articles in print journals, the decision on the inclusion of journals, proceedings or monographs is taken in accordance with the Electronic Publishing Committee of the EMS. Hence no items will enter the library which have not been evaluated and recommended by a referee within the editorial procedures of the corresponding journal or series. This is in particular important in order to rule out the reservations of many mathematicians who have the opinion that electronic publishing will damage the quality of mathematical publications.
The section on Electronic Journals contains pure electronic journals as well as electronic versions of print journals. The pure electronic journals are produced elsewhere and EMIS only serves as an additional distributor. The installation of electronic versions of print journals depends on the technical facilities of the editors of these journals. We prefer that the offer of the electronic version is installed at the site of the editors, such that a mirror of the journal can be taken over by EMIS. The organisers of EMIS provide support for this purpose. Most of these print journals are published at a low-budget level, and hence the risk to loose subscribers to the print version due to the free electronic offer currently is considered as low by them. Some of them give the electronic offer with a delay to EMIS such that the earlier availability will be considered as an advantage of the print version.
Though there obviously is no chance to offer free access to electronic versions of the journals in mathematics published by commercial publishers, EMIS succeeded to get the agreement of a series of quite established journals to be made freely available in its library, as can be seen from the samples in the subsequent list. The pure electronic journals are marked by an (e): Acta Mathematica Universitatis Comenianae (Bratislava), Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae Series A. Mathematica (Helsinki), Archivum Mathematicum (Brno), Beiträge zur Algebra und Geometrie / Contributions to Algebra and Geometry, Commentationes Mathematicae Universitatis Carolinae (Prague) DOCUMENTA MATHEMATICA (Bielefeld) The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics (e), The Electronic Journal of Differential Equations (e), Electronic Research Announcements of the AMS (e), Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis (e), Geometry and Topology (e), Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux (Bordeaux), Matematicki Vesnik (Belgrade), Mathematical Physics Electronic Journal (e), Revista Colombiana de Matemàticas (Bogotà), Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire, Theory and Applications of Categories (e) More or less all freely available electronic journals in mathematics are mirrored in EMIS.
The access to the journals in EMIS is organised quite conventionally. On the home page of EMIS a list of mirrors is provided where the site with the (probably) quickest access can be clicked. Then a choice can be made, to enter the Electronic library though the short list of journals without graphics or to use the full display of these items. The first one is preferable, if the choice of journal is clear already and if one wants to avoid the lengthy transfer of the graphical data associated with this journal. The full display contains also background information on the editorial policy of the corresponding journal and instructions how to submit an article. In cases style files for such a submission can be found on this level.
Having made the choice of journal one wants to read, the level of the contents will be reached which is organised as usual. At that level information on the offer of files is given. In all cases DVI- and Postscript-files will be available, sometimes also TEX-files can be found in addition to that, and in cases geometric material is stored in separate files. PDF is coming up rapidly and will be an obligatory offer in the near future. Clicking one of these files its content is transferred to the computer of the user and can be viewed there. Also printing or storage of these files will be possible at the site of the user, but he is requested to respect the copyright according to the rules of the corresponding journal. The access to the section of Proceedings Volumes is organised in a similar way.
At present we have only a few Proceedings Volumes in EMIS, because the organisers of conferences prefer to publish printed proceedings. They can support this publication from the conference fees or money they receive from sponsors, and the majority of participants consider a publication on paper as more valuable than an electronic one. Our hope is that the contributors to such volumes will become aware very soon, that the print versions of proceedings have a very low distribution in the average. Decreasing library budgets and growing prices for these volumes will make the distribution even worse. Hence, if these contributors really are interested to make their work public in a reasonable way, they will see that the only chance to improve the distribution lies in an electronic offer which can be accessed easily at several places. EMIS is just the appropriate system for a good distribution of electronic publications in mathematics. This is underlined by the present access numbers which are growing continuously.
Admittedly, after five years of EMIS some of these features will have to be modified. The request for PDF-files will become a must, because the preinstalled readers at electronic access facilities in libraries and desktop-computers of research mathematician already point into that direction. For other offer special measures have to be taken for making the article readable or printable. Decisions about affordable systems of digital object identifiers (beyond DOI) have to be taken to enable a richer linking system between electronic articles. The upcoming method to offer the electronic version of an article as soon as the article will be available in final form ("online first") will have impact on the free access to the installation of the dual journals in EMIS. They will not be able to survive from what they get for the paper version, when online will be declared as "first class" and print will be still important, but second class only. But anyway, EMIS will remain non-profit during such a transition, and provide as much as possible on the free level.
The offers in EMIS mentioned above and their distribution through a system of mirrors provide a unique facility for quick and easy access to qualified mathematical publications. These tools can be used by the mathematical community at suitable sites simultaneously for free or at modest rates. I think that this is a future-leading way to provide an alternative to the high-priced offers of commercial publishers which cannot be afforded by the majority of potential users anymore. In particular the mathematical community never will have the financial background to be considered as a market where research literature could be sold in accordance with the interests of the share holders of commercial publishers. The initiatives of some publishers to go into that direction will damage the publication facilities for the mathematical community rather soon. Hence mathematicians have to care about their own systems to maintain a reasonable infrastructure for communicating their research achievements. EMIS is one part of this enterprise.
It has to be pointed out that EMIS could not survive on the current level without the big group of its supporters, who serve as volunteers for maintaining and installing electronic journals, caring about submissions and transfer of content and keeping the mirrors running. Without these activities EMIS would not have been possible. It shows that a viable service can be installed on the collaboration of several volunteers, in contrast to those who argue that all these activities can only be pursued seriously on a commercial level. They should keep in their mind that at least in mathematics all the commerce hooks on voluntary services from the mathematical community: publishers do not pay the authors, editors provide their service for free, referees do not even get the mailing expenses for their contribution to the business and finally readers have to look for public funding to get access to the publications. Hence the question only is where to shift the voluntary support and where to spend the funding.
Professor Dr.
Bernd Wegner
Scientific Coordinator of EMIS
Fachbereich Mathematik, Technische Universität Berlin
Strae des 17. Juni 135, D-10623 Berlin, Germany
