[Air-L] open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

[Christian Nelson]

Grigori Perelman is but one mathematician. In addition, he is a true  
genius whose accomplishments aren't subject to debate, not least  
because they are in a field where there is little room for debate  
about scholarly accomplishments, so he has little reason to worry  
about his academic stock. To top it all off, he genuinely doesn't  
care about his academic stock, as he demonstrated when he declined to  
accept the Fields medal and did not attend the congress at which it  
was to be given out.
--Christian Nelson

On Feb 8, 2008, at 4:44 PM, Gilles Frydman wrote:

> There is an amazing precedent in the field of mathematics publishing,
> demonstrating that if you build it, they will come!  On their own.
>
> Look at the story of Grigori Perelman, who received the Fields Medal
> (the highest prize in mathematics) for solving the Poincare
> Conjecture. He published his solution to this 100 years old problem in
> 3 articles over an 8-months period in 2002-2003. He specifically
> published the 3 articles  ONLY on arXiv, the open-access repository of
> e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative
> Biology and Statistics. (for background information on arXiv.org:  
> http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/)