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Apologies if this is not regarded as suitable for MO, but I have noticed other "soft" questions and feel this deserves some attention by the community, and did not know where else this could be asked.

According to the Closure announcement of the Math 2.0 Forum:

It is with a little regret that I am announcing the closure of this forum.

Not a lot has happened here recently, and discussion has largely ceased. Rather than let it drag on as a "graveyard on the internet", I have decided to close it.

(I will also shortly be giving up the VPS on which this resides, so if anyone is willing to host a flat copy of the forum for archival purposes, please get in touch.)

However, the very reason ``the discussion may have largely ceased'', might be the apparently dysfunctional registration facility, that simply does not let any new user join the discussion.

Naturally, this makes it impossible for me to post anything on that forum.

The Math 2.0 Forum contains numerous important contributions by the community on the subject of mathematics journals, peer review, open access in publishing of mathematics research, and its current ongoing crisis. With links to other important contributions that would be otherwise hard to find.

I find these discussions important to be preserved for future generations, who will be facing the same problems as described in the posts (most of which are still largely present). Despite of the ongoing Open Access movement getting increasing traction, there seem to be few if any active forums on the subject, specifically related to mathematics publishing.

Furthermore, many websites worldwide are linking to this Forum, including answers from MO, for instance see this or this answer. I think it would harmful for people following those links to find them broken. Even if the content were be hosted elsewhere, the links would still be broken.

So my question is, whether anything can be done to ``unlock'' this forum for new users and perhaps give it some chance to become active again?


EDIT. Here is a number of past posts announcing the Math 2.0 forum:

Some quotes:

... a lot of people are working on positive steps to make expensive journals obsolete...

So Andrew Stacey (the technical mastermind behind the nLab, Azimuth Wiki and Azimuth Forum) and Scott Morrison (one of the brains behind MathOverflow, an important math question-and-answer website) have started a forum to talk about the many issues involved:

  • Math 2.0.

That’s good, because these guys actually do stuff, not just talk! Andrew describes the idea here:

The purpose of Math 2.0 is to provide a forum for discussion of the future of mathematical publishing. It’s something that I’ve viewed as an important issue for years, and have had many, many interesting conversations about, but somehow nothing much seems to happen. I’m hoping that the momentum from Tim Gowers’ recent blog posts might lead to something and I’d like to capitalise on that.

The name, Math2.0, is intended to signify two things: that it’s time for an upgrade of the mathematical environment and that I think we can learn a lot from looking at how software—particularly open source software—works. By “mathematical environment”, I don’t mean how we actually do the mathematics but what happens next, particularly communicating the ideas that we create. This is where the internet can really change things for the better (as it has started to do with the arXiv), but where I think that we have yet to figure out how to make best use of it.

This doesn’t just include journals, but I think that that’s an obvious place to start.

So: welcome to Math2.0. Please join in. It’s important.

So: if you’re a mathematician or programmer interested in revolutionizing the future of math publishing, go to Math 2.0, register, and join the conversation! You’ll see there are a number of concrete proposals on the table, including one by Chris Lee, and Marc Harper and myself.

This are just some brief excerpts, the post contains many further interesting details.


EDIT$^2$. Here is an important post about MathSciNet linking to arXiv:

In various places on this forum, some suggestions have been made about improving mathscinet by adding some arXiv integration. Does anyone know who needs to be convinced to make such changes?

Here’s a brief summary of things they might do:

  • fix all the arXiv references currently in the references (often there are spurious spaces mid-link)
  • actually hyperlink the existing arXiv references
  • allow creation of “official” arXiv links, which would be listed next to the ’article’ link

(These “official” links could be created either by author submission or by automatically looking up the Journal Reference field on the arXiv page. See for example this paper at mathscinet and the arXiv, and this MRef lookup. I think either of these methods would be sufficient for ensuring that only ’official’ preprints would be captured in this way.)

I have never seen this suggestion mentioned elsewhere, whose importance is hard to overestimate though, as it addresses a major weakness of the arXiv. Without the ability for the author to update arXiv paper to the published version and link to MR, there is little chance for the arXiv to compete with indexed journals.

ADDED. Note that Zentralblatt MATH does link articles to their arXiv versions!

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    $\begingroup$ For what it's worth: The persons who runs mathforge.org is Andrew Stacey. He used to work at Trondheim university, and he is currently a high school teacher in Oxford. I have tried to get in contact with him by email in the recent past (less than a year ago), but I was unsuccessful. I get the feeling that Andrew Stacey tries very hard to not be reachable. Here's a quote from his website: "if you really want to contact me [...] then I'm sure you'll figure it out. If you can't, you obviously didn't really want to contact me after all." $\endgroup$ Nov 24, 2017 at 22:13
  • $\begingroup$ @AndréHenriques Ah that is interesting, he seems to be mentioned in johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/math-2-0 as "the technical mastermind behind the nLab, Azimuth Wiki and Azimuth Forum" and in the post plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27/posts/1rNCFQCPd51 by Terry Tao. From that it looks like he should be connected with quite a few people, maybe anyone can help to get in touch with him? $\endgroup$ Nov 24, 2017 at 23:08
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    $\begingroup$ It's very rare that I look at MathOverflow's main page, but I just happened on it today and saw this post. My old emails ought to work, so I don't know why I didn't get @AndréHenriques email (my apologies as it's quite likely a misconfiguration on my part). My new "semi-professional" email can be figured out by replacing the first . by @ in my website domain. I didn't mean to make myself completely unreachable, but to separate my old self from my new one. $\endgroup$ Nov 25, 2017 at 17:54
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    $\begingroup$ To answer the actual question, Math2.0 closed quite some time ago. The "13 hours ago" is very misleading (I should change that) and when it closed then I disabled registration. So your comment on that is backwards. The current site is actually the flat copy that I refer to in that post - I host it myself to ensure that no links die (which is why the "13 hours" is there). So providing I keep up the payments (and I host lots of other stuff on the same VPS which I've no intention of losing), it won't go anywhere. $\endgroup$ Nov 25, 2017 at 18:06
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    $\begingroup$ @DmitriZaitsev Given that the question has now been closed, and that MO comment threads are not great places for discussions, and that I believe I've given enough information to figure out my email, may I suggest that you email me if you want to discuss it further. $\endgroup$ Nov 25, 2017 at 18:45

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