Press Release 20/2001

1. Februar 2001

The SPARC alliance, a world wide association of eminent research centers and scientific libraries with membership of all the famous American universities has assessed the scientific periodical DOCUMENTA MATHEMATICA, which has been published in Bielefeld for five years to be a “Leading Edge” periodical, and established a partnership.

SPARC (an acronym for “The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition”) is an organisation which has set itself the goal to combat the spiral of rising subscription prices for scientific periodicals.

For several years, there has been an excessive inflation of subscription prices in the field of scientific publication. Yearly increases between 12 and 16 percent and more in the course of the last five years abound, as compared to a general inflation of 2 percent in most of the Western nations. The budgets of scientific libraries have been heavily burdened by this on an international scale. The market for publishing science is being dominated by a small number of international publishers.

Electronic methods of publication and the internet have now handed over the means of production to the scientists themselves. A large number of science periodicals depending on these novel academic resources have been founded recently.

SPARC intends to encourage competition in the market of scientific publication by promoting scientific periodicals which profit from the new forms of communication to make leading publications accessible to a large public at low cost.

One of these periodicals is in mathematics DOCUMENTA MATHEMATICA which was initiated in 1996 by the German Association of Mathematicians and has been published at the University of Bielefeld for the last five years.

After SPARC had selected one periodical each in physics and chemistry for the leading edge program, DOCUMENTA MATHEMATICA has been honored by being chosen for mathematics within this program. The said periodical acquired international renown in 1998 by publishing the Conference Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians which takes place every four years, lastly in Berlin. The proceedings were published as a three-volume special edition in excellent quality at a price which was less than half of that of former issues which always had been produced commercially.

Even at this low price, it was possible to have a financial profit which was used to essentially contribute towards establishing a new science award. This use of resources will certainly be a model for how to serve science.

For further please contact:
SPARC: http://www.arl.org/sparc/
DOCUMENTA MATHEMATICA:
http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/ documenta/
Prof. Dr. Ulf Rehmann, Faculty of Mathematics,  University of Bielefeld Telefon 0521/106-5039.
E-Mail: rehmann@mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de.
Internet:  http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann

Press and Information Office, 01-02-2001