Organic Publishing

The Organic Mathematics project is directed towards the exploration of the emerging network and information technologies within the context of mathematics. Numerous groups around the world are engaged in enhancing the specific aspects of the information highway and its associated processes for transporting data. However relatively few are actively integrating and adapting the raw technological building blocks to suit particular fields of endeavour. In our case, we are interested in incorporating several different mechanisms into a single coherent environment which will support the contributions and interaction between mathematics researchers in the field of experimental mathematics.

In particular we are seeking to offer the following capabilities:

Multi-format access and service (Document Vault)
Hyper-text organization and public access (World Wide Web)
Direct user contribution (CMS Preprint service)
Parsing and operation on mathematical text (M3Plexus)
Public annotation and commentary (Annotate, Co-note and others)

The end product will be a digital proceedings of the workshop on experimental and virtual mathematics on December 12 to 14, 1995 at Simon Fraser University. It will be formed around a core of extant published articles on experimental and computational mathematics and will include enhancements by the original authors (all of whom will be participating in the workshop) in the form of commentaries, reflections, appendices, activated mathematical exercises and illustrations, biographies and personal information. Subsequently the proceedings will be open to inspection, comment and alteration by the Internet public. Moderated contributions to the articles will be encouraged including additional articles, comments and annotations on the core articles, pointers to related materials and reviews. Direct access to the mathematics within the text will be supported, permitting the reader to actively explore the mathematics contained therein.

Portions of this project are supported by Waterloo Maple Software Corp., MathActive, Inc. and the Canadian Mathematical Society.

References:

ACELA:: Interactive book project on Lie algebras (CAN/RIACA); Interactive lecture notes
DAGS'95: Conference on Electronic Publishing and the Information Superhighway
CNIDR: Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval
HyperTex: Adding hyperlinks to TeX documents.
CTAN: TeX Archive Network; a collection of TeX-related software.
Red Sage Project: Electronic Distribution of Journals.
Knowledge Management: Refining Roles in Scientific Communication by Richard E. Lucier
Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals by Andrew M. Odlyzko
Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals by Andrew M. Odlyzko (condensed version)
David Dubin's work at Dept. Information Science, University of Pittsburgh
The Perseus Project
Open Math Project