12
$\begingroup$

I'm a phd student in number theory, and I'm required (by the funding council) to publish any article I write in open access journals. The problem is that all journals I can find are either out of my league (but open access), or at the right level (but not open access). So I was wondering:

Is there a list of good open access journals specialised in or biased towards number theory? If not, what are good open access journals (with a rough ranking in terms of quality and/or prestige) for number theorists?

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
6
  • 8
    $\begingroup$ IMHO a publication of a close to final version on arxiv.org is good enough for all practical purposes. $\endgroup$
    – Dima Pasechnik
    Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 10:09
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ Have you checked if putting the final paper also on arXiv will suffice (this is sometimes the case, or at least can come to be the case if one asks). $\endgroup$
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 10:09
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ The term "funding council" suggests that you are in the UK and are referring to the EPSRC, but it would be helpful if you could confirm that. $\endgroup$
    – Neil Strickland
    Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 11:58
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @NeilStrickland Yes, that's indeed the case. $\endgroup$
    – user66266
    Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 12:46
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ Can I suggest discussing choice of journal with your PhD supervisor? $\endgroup$
    – user25199
    Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 18:25

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
13
$\begingroup$

Here are a few thoughts:

  • As several posters have already pointed out in the comments, many funding agencies are happy to accept an Arxiv preprint version as satisfying their "open access" requirement. This is certainly true for the big funders in the UK such as EPSRC, although you should check what your funder's rules are. (This is what's sometimes called "green open access".)

  • Lots of publishers now offer the option called "gold open access". This is where you pay some extra fee at the time of publication to make your article freely available online. This is regarded with suspicion by many researchers, but that's another story. The point is that some institutions/funders have special pots of money available to pay these open-access fees, so it may end up costing you (and your research budget) little or nothing; it's worth looking into.

  • A special case of the previous point is for journals that are published by your own funder. In this case the article-processing fees may be heavily discounted or waived entirely; if I remember correctly, this applies in the UK with the Royal Society, which allows holders of Royal Society grants to publish open-access in their journals without paying the usual fees.

That said, there are some excellent journals that are fully open-access and publish many number theory papers. "Documenta Mathematica" springs to mind, as does "LMS Journal of Computational Mathematics" for computational number theory.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
3
  • $\begingroup$ So for EPSRC, uploading the preprints on the arXiv is enough? (Do you have a source for this?) If I post a paper on the arXiv, though, I might reduce the number of journals available anyway. Is there a solution to this? Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – user66266
    Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 13:44
  • $\begingroup$ Posting a paper on the arXiv does not preclude you from submitting to any reasonable math journal. I don't have first hand experience, but 3.9 of this document suggests that posting an accepted version on the arXiv may be in compliance. I didn't look specifically at EPSRC, but you probably should. $\endgroup$
    – Kimball
    Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 14:24
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ I can confirm, from personal experience, that posting the final accepted version of an article on the arxiv is sufficient for compliance with EPSRC's open access policy. $\endgroup$
    – David Loeffler
    Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 14:58
7
$\begingroup$

The New York Journal of Mathematics (http://nyjm.albany.edu/) is a peer reviewed and free online general math journal that has published lots of papers in number theory. It has been publishing since the mid-1990s. It is not an ArXiv overlay journal. Published articles appear on the journal website as free downloadable PDF files. However, it is an electronic only journal, so if your funding requires a hard-copy print journal, it would not be allowed.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .