SLA 2024 Math Roundtable
The Math Roundtable at the SLA 2024 conference was a plenary discussion. We covered a number of great topics, which are detailed below.
Accessible HTML for Math: We discussed what tools were available to convert mathematics papers to an HTML format that would be accessible for use with screen readers. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) noted they had developed some tools to make math documents accessible. They are hoping to make them more publicly available in the future.
ArXiv has their own LaTex to HTML converter, and they are hosting an online forum on accessibility soon. They will make an announcement on PAMnet when they have the details ready, so look out for that.
Artificial Intelligence and Math: We talked about AI training on math. A representative from ArXiv said there was evidence that AI models had been trained on ArXiv.
E-Books Versus Print Use of Math Materials: The AMS reported that 40% of their book sales are e-books. Also, 75% of their journal subscriptions are online only. The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) noted that their digital sales also outstrip print sales for books.
Author IDs Using ORCID: The discussion involved the use of ORCID by math researchers. Librarians at the University of Rochester said that they help populate their researchers’ ORCIDs for them. Various publishers reported that they have seen inconsistent use of ORCID from authors. Mathematical Reviews said that they focus more on using MRID instead of ORCID. SIAM doesn’t mandate that authors have an ORCID, but they encourage authors to get one. It was also noted that sometimes mathematicians use a new ORCID when they move to a new institution.
AMS versus EBSCOhost re: the MathSciNet Interface: The discussion revolved around teaching the two interfaces to students. Some librarians said that they teach undergraduate students about the EBSCOhost interface because the students are already used to using EBSCOhost for other databases.
Summer 2024 Math Roundtable
An online Math Roundtable was hosted over ZOOM late in the summer. The discussion was active and covered a number of topics.
A question was posed about relocating Lecture Notes in Mathematics to storage if they have not circulated in 10 years.
Next, the IMU Permissions report was discussed. The report may be viewed at https://www.mathunion.org/activities/ad-hoc-committee-permissions-cop .
After the report discussion, there was a proposal that the MathSciNet and the Mathematics Genealogy Project could link to Open Access theses & dissertations as well as ProQuest Dissertations. More and more schools are making their theses & dissertations freely available online, so being able to access the documents directly from the two databases would save time and effort. It was suggested that perhaps MathSciNet might be interested in doing a pilot with a select group of PAM people.
Another item brought up was an interest in learning LaTex and learning how to teach others to use it.
Tyler Kane, AMS, speaking about mathematics and accessibility, said, “I’d love to get Peter Krautzberger in a PAM session to discuss math and accessibility. We had him do a webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2y-4bGBwec on how this applies to one aspect of AMS publications, Mathviewer, but he is also a great source of information on development. The asterisk here is that he is pretty invested in projects that he has worked on, but he is very invested in this topic.”
Finally, a great article was brought up on the trending topic of Data Sharing: Making Mathematical Research Data FAIR: Pathways to Improved Data Sharing. (2024) Scientific Data, 11 (1), art. no. 676 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03480-0
PAM Bulletin 