[UPS] fwd: Official report of the CEIC meeting in Berkeley, December 1999

[Paul Ginsparg]

f.y.i. attached below is a report from a math "Committee on Electronic
Information and Communication" (we'd provided them with a prelim copy of the
Santa Fe convention which they'd requested for the purposes of their meeting).
they're still focused on "Dublin Core" (which unlike dienst does not provide a
protocol for transmitting the metadata...) but did at least give lipservice to
remaining interoperable.

  The MathNet initiative which was started in Germany will be developed as a
  worldwide system of access to electronic information and communication.  It
  is based on the use of machine readable metadata for preprints, institutions,
  persons, etc., which are developed within the frameweork of the `Dublin core
  metadata initiative'. Contacts are being preserved with the Santa Fe
  initiative on metadata for preprint servers.  See http://www.mathnet.de/ for
  an entry point into the existing system.

since this is entirely metadata based, serves as example of overlay service
(as does equally front.math.ucdavis.edu for the math arXiv )

------- start of forwarded message -------
From: Peter Michor <michor@esi.ac.at>
Subject: Official report of the CEIC meeting in Berkeley, December 1999
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:40:03 +0200 (CEST)

From: Peter Michor
To: EMS committee on electronic pubishing
    Math. advisory board of the arXiv
    Math-Net
    CEIC 
    etc

The following is the official public report of the meeting of the CEIC in
Berkeley, December 1999. I have also prepared a HTML-version on 
http://radon.mat.univie.ac.at/~michor/rep-ceic99.html
for your convenience. A Latex version is available upon request.  
Best regards,
Peter Michor

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
The  Committee on Electronic Information and Communication

This is a report on the meeting of the Committee on Electronic Information and
Communication (CEIC) of the IMU in Berkeley, December 5, 1999, MSRI, during and
after the conference `The Future of Mathematical Communication' Berkeley,
Dec. 1-5, 1999, see: http://msri.org/activities/events/9900/fmc99/index.html
for the full record of the conference including overheads and streaming
video. The conference was very successful.  It was jointly sponsored by the
three Canadian research Institutes (CRM, Fields and Pims) and by MSRI, with
additional support from the IMU, AMS, CMS, Springer, Cambridge University
Press, Mathematicaand Maple.  Their support is gratefully acknowledged.

There were roughly 100 participants and 35 speakers from more than a dozen
countries representing mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists,
educators, librarians, software developers, publishers and many other
perspectives.  One highlight was a stimulating public symposium held on
December 4th.  This symposium --- as much of the rest of the meeting --- helped
emphasize that we are a small part of a much larger world. In particular, there
are three parts to the mathematical literature: commercial journals, freely
accessible parts (see below), and all the rest.

The CEIC is a standing committee of the IMU which held its first meeting in
Berlin in November 1998 and its second meeting on December 5th, 1999 at
Berkeley. It will meet next fall in Vienna.  As described in Appendix 1, the
CEIC has an ambitious mandate and is now quite advanced in its activity.  Some
details of the December 5 meeting follow. They give a good sense of the CEIC's
preoccupations and of topics discussed at the conference.

The December 5 1999 CEIC Meeting

The morning was a session of the CEIC, open to the general public, with the
following  lectures:

Peter Michor, Martin Groetschel: Presentation of CEIC, its members,
	and its subcommittees

Wolfram Sperber: The Idea of Secondary Home Pages in MathNet

Roland Schwaenzl: Metadata --- a Tool for Indexing and Linking
	Mathematical Preprints Globally

Wilfrid Hodges: What do you want from your publisher? (Copyright issues)

Peter Michor: Electronic services offered by the European Mathematical Society

Jonas Gomes: MathNet in Brazil

Kapil Paranjape: The Situation in India

Open Discussion of the Prospects for MathNet and Similar Activities

The afternoon was a closed session of CEIC.
Present: Jonathan Borwein (deputy chair, CA), John Ewing (US), Jonas Gomes
(Brazil), Wilfrid Hodges (UK), Martin Groetschel (D), Kapil Paranjape
(India), Peter Michor (chair, A), David Morrison (US), Alf van der Poorten
(AUS), Alexei Zhizhchenco (RU),
Absent: Qin Zhou (China)

The MathNet initiative which was started in Germany will be developed as a
worldwide system of access to electronic information and communication.  It is
based on the use of machine readable metadata for preprints, institutions,
persons, etc., which are developed within the frameweork of the `Dublin core
metadata initiative'. Contacts are being preserved with the Santa Fe
initiative on metadata for preprint servers.  See http://www.mathnet.de/ for an
entry point into the existing system.  A charter for the organizational
infrastructure was discussed and will be available on the MathNet site
soon. Many thanks are owed to our German colleagues who have been developing
MathNet for several years.

It is anticipated that the CEIC will have a robust web site by April and
will make a general call for the establishment of secondary home pages
and for development of harvestable preprint servers. Prototypes are
presently being checked in Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere.

A checklist devoted to copyright issues for authors of mathematical
literature is in preparation. This will be continued as an open source
intiative, lead by Wilfrid Hodges.  See
http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~wilfrid/copyrightdoc.pdf

The CEIC discussed whether bundling of small and independent journals
should be considered so that they could compete with the large
electronic libraries of Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, and Academic Press
in consortia negotiations.  The European Mathematical Society EMIS
(http://www.emis.de) is addressing this already, in freely accessible
fashion. The work of EMIS is commended and encouraged by CEIC.

What will happen to the electronic material in the electronic libraries of
the commercial publishers? Will the publishers archive this material
permanently? Should there be an independent archiving facility somewhere?

The arXiv (http://www.arXiv.org) is a very reliable and technically
very competent server for primary physical and mathematical
literature, growing out of the Los Alamos  preprint server.
It is willing to consider reliable archiving for  the indefinite future.
The work of the arXiv is also commended and applauded by the CEIC.

Appendix 1: the CEIC's Terms of Refererence

Building on the enabling resolution passed by the General Assembly (GA)
in Dresden on August 16, 1998, the Executive Committee of the
International Mathematical Union establishes a
{\it Committee on Electronic Information and Communication (CEIC)}
	of the International Mathematical Union (IMU).

	       Terms of Reference:



\item[a)]
 The CEIC shall be a standing committee of the Executive Committee (EC)
 of the IMU, to be reviewed every four years by the EC at its meeting
 preceding that of the GA.  Members will be appointed for four year
terms by procedures similar to those for  Commissions of the IMU.  The
Executive Committee will appoint one of its members to serve on the
CEIC.

\item[b)]  The CEIC may meet as necessary in each four year period,
 review the development of Electronic Information and Communication
  as it impacts the international mathematical community and submit a
 report to the EC.

\item[c)]
 The CEIC may organize or sponsor international meetings or forums to
bring together representatives of all interested parties, including
societies, publishers, libraries, and  researchers, publish and
otherwise disseminate  proceedings,  reviews of recent developments,
and  technical surveys for the use of the mathematical community.

\item [d)] The CEIC may recommend international standards on issues
related to electronic communication.  Such recommendations should be
reviewed by the EC and, if approved,  may be published and promoted in
the name of the IMU.

\item[e)] During its first 4 year term, the CEIC is specifically asked
 to address the coordination of world-wide efforts to establish
 web-based servers for mathematical papers,  preprints,  journals, and
 books.  This includes issues of uniformizing metadata, document
 identifiers and supported formats, promoting mirroring and the
 development of search engines for mathematical material and
coordination of existing servers.   It should publish its findings with
the goal of making  the use of these servers universally understood and
 usable by the whole mathematical community.  It is also asked to
 consider tranferring the World Directory of
  Mathematicians to an electronic freely accessible form.

\item[f)] Membership:

\begin{itemize}
\item
    Peter Michor (chair),
       University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; \\
       Peter.Michor$@$esi.ac.at
\item

    Jonathan Borwein (deuty chair),
       Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada; \\
       jborwein$@$cecm.sfu.ca
\item

    John Ewing,
       American Mathematical Society, Providence, USA; \\
       jhe$@$ams.org
\item

    Jonas Gomes,
       IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; \\
       jonas$@$impa.br
\item

    Martin Groetschel (EC member)
       Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum, Berlin, Germany; \\
       groetschel$@$zib.de

\item
    Wilfrid Hodges,
       Queen Mary \& Westfield College, London, UK;\\
       w.hodges$q@$mw.ac.uk

\item
    David Morrison,
       Duke University, Durham, USA; \\
       drm$@$math.duke.edu

\item
    Kapil Paranjape
       Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India; \\
       kapil$@$imsc.ernet.in

\item
    Alfred J. (Alf) van der Poorten,
       Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia;\\
       alf$@$math.mq.edu.au

\item
    Alexei Zhizhchenko,
       Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia;\\
       abz$@$ipsun.ras.ru

\item
    Qing Zhou,
       East China Normal University, Shanghai,China;\\
       qzhou$@$math.ecnu.edu.cn
\end{itemize}


\end{itemize}
\end{document}

  
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