Future of mathematical communication. Final technical report

摘要

One of the first fruits of cooperation with LBL was the use of the MBone (Multi-Cast Backbone) to broadcast the Conference on the Future of Mathematical Communication, held at MSRI November 30--December 3, 1994. Late last fall, MSRI brought together more than 150 mathematicians, librarians, software developers, representatives of scholarly societies, and both commercial and not-for-profit publishers to discuss the revolution in scholarly communication brought about by digital technology. The conference was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum Foundation. It focused on the impact of the technological revolution on mathematics, but necessarily included issues of a much wider scope. There were talks on electronic publishing, collaboration across the Internet, economic and intellectual property issues, and various new technologies which promise to carry the revolution forward. There were panel discussions of electronic documents in mathematics, the unique nature of electronic journals, technological tools, and the role of scholarly societies. There were focus groups on Developing Countries, K-12 Education, Libraries, and Te(sub X). The meeting also embodied the promises of the revolution; it was multicast over the MBone channel of the Internet to hundreds of sites around the world and much information on the conference will be available on their World Wide Web server at the URL http://www.msri.org/fmc. The authors have received many comments about the meeting indicating that it has had a profound impact on how the community thinks about how scientists can communicate and make their work public.