Report about the activities of the Committee for Electronic Publishing of the EMS in 2009 and in first half of 2010: Date 15.03.2010, updated and modified July 1, 2010 (see below under item 3.): (appended for reference: Previous report dated 12.10.2009): 1. The EuDML project has been successfully negotiated and the project has started. Here are further informations: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/apps/projects/factsheet/index.cfm?project_ref=250503 http://www.eudml.eu/w/Main_Page 2. As it was mentioned in the previous report, the EPC had helped to prepare and had offered to give advice for the intended INFRA proposal of the EMS. However, no further involvement of the EPC was requested (except that apparently some text snippets authored by EPC members eventually have made their way into the proposal). 3. Thierry Bouche's invited talk on the DML 2009 in July 2009 (cf. http://www.fi.muni.cz/~sojka/dml-2009-program.html) seems to have opened some cooperation with JSTOR, but nothing more definite here. 3. Ulf Rehmann was contacted by Springer Verlag (apparently because he is chairing the EMS EPC): They want to update their Encyclopaedia of Mathematics (EoM) on a wikipedia kind of basis and with the help of the mathematical community. They want to have the EoM content converted into a wiki format and want to give the EMS the full editorial control, including any updates that the community wants to add here. The current online EoM does contain ca. 8000 pages. An unfortunate technical aspect is: The formulas included in the EoS pages are generated from tex and stored as (unflexible) pixel images on the server, but apparently the tex sources of these images are lost, so most formula stuff needs to be retyped. Copyright conditions will be as follows: Springer has to maintain the copyright on the old stuff (as they inherited that from the previous Russian owner), but all the new content will be under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License. All the content will be freely available on the web. The EMS will (hopefully) have rights to set up mirrors of the electronic material (in order to distribute and to guarantee longevity of the material). It is probably desirable to get support from the math community, and therefore help by EMS, CEIC and IMU at some point might be very welcome. (CEIC/IMU have been notified.) A letter of intent about the cooperation of Springer and the EMS is expected to be signed this week. Update on July 1, 2010: The letter of intent has been signed, so the cooperation is active. However, according to a recent letter by Springer (dated June 16,2010), their software ist not yet ready for being actively used: Quoting from the letter by Sprinter about their wiki software development: | "The site is currently being tested regarding the basic features | and sample data but this it too preliminary and so is still for | internal use only. | | The content arrived at the developer's two days ago. The basic spec | has been written and agreed upon and we have begun determining the | details for the conversion script, which will import the content | from xml into the wiki. | | The next step is to take another sample set of articles for | conversion and then write a script to process the entire body of | content. After that, we will tend to any manual items left over | after the conversion. Then we will deal with things like design and | such. It is too early to give any sort of timeline". End of quote They say they will keep me informed about the progress. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last years's Report, dated 12.10.2009: The main concern of the EPC in 2009 were various DML issues: 1. In Spring there was a "Preparatory Meeting Towards a European Virtual Library in Mathematics" at Santiago de Compostela - Spain, 13-14th March 2009 at wich most Committee members and many DML experts participated: http://www.usc.es/~esfmaths/. 2. On the occasion of an ESF meeting at Berlin, on June 15, 2009, there was a presentation of a Forward Look proposal concerning the EVLM by Thierry Bouche, upon a suggestion at the Santiago meeting. 3. In Summer, there was a workshop "Towards a Digital Mathematics Library July 8-9th, 2009, Grand Bend, Ontario, Canada": http://www.fi.muni.cz/~sojka/dml-2009-program.html, with similar participation as at the Santiago meeting. 4. In August, an EU-project concerning the EuDML has been accepted for support (1.6 Mill Euro/2 years). It will be negiotiated by José Luis Borbinha and Thierry Bouche on October 21 at Luxembourg. 5. Meanwhile, the EU Infrastructure ca,, was released on Juli 30 (cf. http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=UserSite.FP7DetailsCallPage&call_id=262) Concerning the Forward Look ESF proposal, it was decided to follow the advice of the PESC Standing Committee to integrate these efforts into the upcoming EC infrastructure proposal. The committee is willing to give advice w.r. to an integration of DML issues into an EMS infrastructure application.