Combinatorial Theory Journal Launches with Innovative Open Access Funding Model | Hacker News Reader

Combinatorial Theory Journal Launches with Innovative Open Access Funding Model

osc.universityofcalifornia.edu

71 pointstingletech14 comments

It's interesting that the journal is attempting to be double blind [0], but I think in practice that's impossible.

Essentially every piece of mathematics research that is later published is first put on the arxiv in pre-print form. Most mathematicians subscribe to the daily arxiv email updates for their subfield and will take notice of any paper close to their work – and the identities of the authors. It is exactly these closely related works that mathematicians are usually asked to referee (precisely in virtue of their expertise). So I would guess that the blinding is not very effective.

[0] https://escholarship.org/uc/combinatorial_theory/authorGuide...

I think the point here is to prevent first-impression bias from emerging before the referee had time to at least skim the paper. So instead of thinking "this author is known for boring papers; I'm outta this" or "this author's papers have always been rare and deep; I'll really give this one a chance", you first give the paper a fresh look.

I would expect double blind journals require that you have not distributed the preprint publicly.

This journal explicitly allows posting submissions to arxiv.

This could be done after submitting to the journal though, to allow double blind reviews.

It’s still common practice to place the pre-print online, either before or during article submission. Journals and conferences usually ask the reviewers to not explicitly look up the paper online. (Honor code. Usually works, sometimes doesn’t, but definitely does seem to decrease the amount of silly bashing that sometimes happens when authors are clearly known.)

Indeed. The whole system relies on trust.

In computer science, it's usual to know who is writing because the specific field is small and you basically know who is working on what anyway. I guess it's even more so in math.

You'd better not piss off anyone in your community.

I agree, and I hope to see more fully open review approaches in the future, where everyone who is interested can see the reviews and the reviewers' names. The Journal of Open Source Software has this: https://joss.theoj.org/. It's certainly not a high-profile journal, yet, but it starts getting contributions from strong researchers. Considering that in small communities, it is not uncommon that even the author can infer who the reviewer is, anyway, I think this is the way to go.

So maybe I am just not familiar with the jargon but is this basically the idea of libraries and universities giving them donations and then they make their journal public for free?

Either way I'd be interested in signing up for it.

at first glance it seems like a donation based model isnt the most sustainable (or innovative)

could be wrong though

It's great to see an open access journal sponsored by a major academic entity, but they gave it a terrible name. I could easily see it being confused for the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, which is one of the best journals in the field.

> Combinatorial Theory was founded in September 2020, when most of the editorial board for one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in Combinatorics, the Elsevier-owned Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Ser. A (JCTA), announced their intention to resign to start a new, open access journal.

I guess this is the reason to give a similar name?

Yes -- this is exactly the reason to give it the similar name. (I know you're saying that, but I want to confirm.) It's one in a line of several journals that have undergone similar reconstitution. Compare for instance to AlCo (Algebraic Combinatorics) which was formed primarily by the previous board of Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, in 2017. AlCo has been successful, as far as I can tell (maybe I'm biased). There is some overlap of boards with this new journal Combinatorial Theory, so they know how to do it by now.

The consonance in the naming conventions alone gives a signal to the community what's up.

I wonder whether the name reflects the hope that the JCTB editorial board will follow suit.

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