Monday, February 16, 2009

Should we start a free CG journal?

After a bit of work we believe we have solved most of the practical problems that have to be taken care of before starting a free journal. This is probably the easy part. Now we have to decide if it is a good idea or not.

The aim is to have a high quality journal for the CG community that is run by the CG community and free to everyone (really free, no cost to publish and no cost to access). Obviously such a journal needs the support of the CG community to be successful. The work should be shared among the community, i.e., the editorial board and editorial manager(s) should be replaced regularly.

Starting it would require a strong commitment from everyone involved (including the editorial board) for the first few years. So do we want a free CG journal? Please let us know what you think by commenting and/or filling in the poll.

You can select "Yes", "No" or "No, but someone else should". The third option is there to capture anyone that is positive to the idea but believes that he or someone else is better suited to do it. We're doing this with the aim to get a free journal in the community and if someone else wants to do it we would be happy to give our support.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Progress report 1: open CG journal

After a bit of work and a lot of help from Pat we've made some progress.

- The Open Journal System seems to be a usable journal management system (although far from optimal). To get it going one needs to rewrite most of the information pages and pre-prepared mails, but it's possible.

- The most suitable copyright agreement we could find is the Creative Common Attribution 3.0. The only restriction is "Whenever a work is copied or redistributed under a Creative Commons licence, credit must always be given to the creator.".

- We need a latex style file. Any suggestions on what needs to be included in the style file? Theorem-environments, paper size, font size, font, figures...

- Name of the journal? Any suggestions? Journal on Computational Geometry (JoCG)? When the name has been decided we can easily get a domain name and an ISSN.

Anything else?