Access to Electronic Publications in Mathematics through EMIS ( European Mathematical Information Service )

The European Mathematical Information Service (EMIS) has been founded in 1994. It provides a variety of electronic offers in mathematics. Most prominent among them are the Electronic Library ELibM, the collection of databases, and the access to projects dealing with electronic information and communication in mathematics. The service is distributed world-wide by a growing number of mirror sites. In the past ten years the library expanded from a few journals to a collection of more than 60 journals, several monographs and proceedings volumes and some interesting innovative electronic offers. The collection is the biggest repository of freely accessible mathematics on the web. The general aim of this note is to give a summary of the development and the basic ideas of EMIS, a survey of the main current offers and a description of ongoing activities to keep the service up-to-date and to remain at the front of new developments in information technology for electronic libraries. A special section is devoted to the different strategies to use EMIS and its services as a navigation tool for accessing full text offers in mathematics. 1. The general concept of EMIS The idea of EMIS emerged as a result of the increasing development of electronic devices for the publication of papers and books in science and technology. The reason for installing c © 2005 FIZ Karlsruhe 112 H. Kröger, B. Wegner: Access to Electronic Publications in Mathematics through EMIS the ELibM has been described in previous articles on EMIS (see [7], [3] for example). The increasing number of links going to and provided by reviewing services in their reference databases made these services an important addition to the full text offers. They and other qualified indexes help scientists to find their way through the tremendous bulk of current and previous mathematical research papers and a lot of additional items of interest, like pre-prints, educational material in mathematics, software, graphical material and others. From the beginning EMIS tried to bundle freely accessible electronic publications and to deal with all aspects related to methods of electronic publishing and electronic communication in its projects section. Information on conferences, jobs, mathematics society matters etc. can also be obtained there, but the three sections dealing with the ELibM, the databases and the projects are the highlights of this service and the subsequent exposition will concentrate on them. The central server for EMIS had been installed in March 1995 at the editorial office of Zentralblatt MATH in Berlin in co-operation between FIZ Karlsruhe and the European Mathematical Society EMS. The URL is obvious (http://www.emis.de/), and in general those of the mirror sites are as simple as that of the master site. The mirror sites came up very soon and they form world-wide network now, providing copies of EMIS on all continents now. The updating is done automatically. The mirror sites improve the visibility and the accessibility of EMIS on one side, but being run on a voluntary basis the requirements leading to additional efforts on their side have to be kept at minimum. The World Wide Web access to the contents of EMIS is free for all users, except for the full usage of some databases. In these restricted cases a link leads directly to the corresponding system of database gateways, and the user is subject to the conditions valid for accessing the databases. In any case, users will be able to do searches. But in the case where his institution does not subscribe to the service, only some restricted information will be available from the hit list. 2. The electronic library The ELibM more or less succeeded to present a quite comprehensive collection of freely accessible electronic publications. In order to guarantee that the electronic publications stored in the ELibM meet the quality standards required for articles in traditional print journals, the decision on the inclusion of journals, proceedings or monographs is taken in accordance with the Electronic Publishing Committee of the EMS. Hence, no items will enter the library which have not been evaluated and recommended by a referee within the editorial procedures of the corresponding journal or series. Most of the journals in the electronic journals section are completely produced elsewhere, and EMIS only serves as an additional distributor. In some cases, however, the e-journal is produced by EMIS from the original source files provided by the editors. The e-journals section contains purely electronic journals as well as electronic versions of print journals (dual journals). Most of the dual journals are published at a low-budget level, and hence the risk of loosing subscribers to the print version due to the free electronic offer currently is considered as low by them. Some of them give the electronic offer with a certain delay to EMIS such that the earlier availability will be considered as an advantage of the print H. Kröger, B. Wegner: Access to Electronic Publications in Mathematics through EMIS 113 version. Acknowledging that the electronic versions are becoming increasingly important for the users, this delay period had been reorganized. During the period, which is considered by dual journals as the most important one to keep libraries subscribing to them, the access to the electronic version may be provided only to subscribers. To enable the access control for this purpose, the journal is stored on a separate server, though the metadata should be made freely accessible in ELibM. ELibM will offer links to the complete articles. After a period to be decided by the journals themselves (moving wall), the full content is transferred to the system of mirrors of EMIS where it can be read without having a subscription. This structure is arranged to support ideas like posting articles “online first”, which speeds up the publication procedure considerably. Multilingual publications were integral part of the ELibM from the beginning, though most publications are in English, which is a general rule for mathematics. For example, on the Russian part some multilingual journals entered the ELibM in the first years already, but just recently two journals in Russian started their posting in EMIS, the Fundamentalnaya i Prikladnaya Matematika (Fundamental and Applied Mathematics) and the Sibirskij Matematicheskij Zhurnal. The latter is one of the most traditional and prestigious journals from Russia, having also an English translation. Clearly, ELibM only can provide the Russian original for free, because the translation belongs to the more expensive mathematical publications and does not allow for free access. The total number of journals in ELibM is more than 60 at present. In the past ten years only three offers were discontinued, though their older volumes are still available. As a rule full texts posted through EMIS never can be removed from the system because this cannot be enforced at the mirror sites, and last but not least, the preservations of the content should have high priority for ELibM. The total number of full text articles in these all sections of ELibM is more than 14.000 at present. In addition to this about 20 electronic monographs are available in ELibM, and two collected works (Riemann and Hamilton). After ten years of EMIS several features are on the way of modification and modernization. As already mentioned, the request for PDF-files became a must, because the preinstalled readers at electronic access facilities in libraries and desktop-computers of research mathematicians already point into that direction. For other offers special measures have to be taken to make the article readable or printable. For example, most of the installations at libraries ask the reader to enlarge his reading facilities when he wants to access PS-file. It is not hard to do this, but it needs some time and in most cases the reader is frustrated, because he wanted to read the article and not to handle some web resources before. In the section of innovative offers, a link to a full text database of high-quality geometric models and animations has been arranged. This is still under development as far as the display in EMIS will be concerned. It has to be investigated how the data of these models could be stored in a convenient way, to make them accessible within the same menu as is provided for searching mathematical articles. But as a first solution the different entries will be reviewed in Zentralblatt MATH, because they consist of fully peer-reviewed articles on their own, though in contrast to conventional mathematical publications they are providing a lot of geometric enhancements. The offer at the master site is fully functional. 114 H. Kröger, B. Wegner: Access to Electronic Publications in Mathematics through EMIS 3. The databases section This section contains four items: MATH – the online version of Zentralblatt MATH, MATHDI – the online version of a similar service for education in mathematics, Compuscience – a database service for computer science, and MPRESS – a global pre-print index. A special offer for logics is under construction. Furthermore, the reference database STMA, dealing with information on statistics, has decided to enter a joint venture with Zentrablatt, just when this article was written, and it will be displayed and made accessible in EMIS under the new name STMA/Z. More detailed descriptions of Zentralblatt MATH and MATHDI have been given at other occasions and can be found in previous articles like [5] and [4]. Here only a short account should be made. Some details will be given below in connection with the access facilities. The databases Zentralblatt MATH and MATHDI are accessible for subscribers only, though a restricted access on the free level is possible. MPRESS is provided as a freely accessible service. It stores combined information on mathematics pre-prints available on the web. The gathering of information is done by robots, which are run by national brokers for harvesting of metadata. This procedure leads to a data structure, which only allows for simple search facilities. MPRESS has no ambition to offer a pre-print server itself, only links to full texts are provided. The service is supervised by EMS among others. Countries, which support the harvesting, are Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. In addition to this some special servers are harvested by MPRESS. Among them are the Topology Atlas and the arXiv.