Browsing the episciences.org website recently, I’ve noticed that while math journals are not up yet, a first epijournal has seen the light of the day back in june : the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities.
That’s a good opportunity to see how the project is intended to work : here’s the page for one of the first papers. One observes the following:
– a layout which includes title, journal reference, abstract, submission & publishing dates, bibTeX citation, social widgets, and access stats
– when downloading one gets a file (with a funny extension not readily recognized as pdf, the website developpers might want to add some .pdf suffix there) and that file is exactly the accepted version of the arxiv preprint, nothing added on top to say it has been published somewhere and no .sty file provided
– the website offers to log in (I haven’t tried yet)
It looks nice, but clearly some choices have been made, in particular : there’s no built-in comment system, no link to the authors’ own websites, no names of the editors who handled the article next to it (one has to guess from the editorial team page). It is unclear at this stage whether all those choices are valid for all future journals or whether this is customizable.
Anyway, I’m rather curious to see what the first few math journals will be : some specialized and some generalist probably, but will they all be new or will we see some known journals move to that platform? Verdict soon, hopefully…
episodic thoughts 