Slashdot Mirror
Sweet, Sweet Mathworld Is Gone
Jon Wild writes: "Eric Weisstein's online encyclopedia of mathematics, originally located at http://www.treasure-troves.com among Eric's other encyclopedias, and most recently hosted by Wolfram Research, has for some time been the most complete and reliable mathematical resource on the web. Now Wolfram has yanked it due to a lawsuit by CRC Press, the publishers of a print edition of the encyclopedia. See the announcement at http://mathworld.wolfram.com."
How so? Does calling for a boycott of your publisher negate their obligation to pay your royalties? Is this something written into these kinds of contracts?
This reminds me of something. I have a professor who has co-authored a niche book about computational solutions of partial differential equations. The book sells for over $100. He says he gets only a few dollars per book sold, and that it has sold in the low thousands, although it has become canonical for advanced post-graduate study in the field. It was written in TeX, although the publisher had it re-typeset when it was published (since typesetters need to get paid), and thus, MANY errors were introduced.
Basically, we talked about it in class, and I asked if the monetary compensation was worth all the frustration, or whether he would rather have just published the TeX source on the web, where the errors were fewer, and could be updated. He thought about it and said that, in retrospect, the money wasn't worth it, and that he would have preferred to just publish his correct, up-to-date version. The prestige of publishing an accurate version of such an important work, would likely more than make up for the lost royalty revenue, just in increased consultation fees.
Something to consider, if you plan to publish a book for a small niche.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Going back to who owns the copyright of the individual entries, a lot of entries on the properties of sequences of integers were submitted by Steven Finch of MathSoft. Steven still maintains a website with this material on, so I wonder if CRC will start chasing him? (Maybe he has a separate agreement with CRC, though - I don't know.)
Incidentally, some academic journals in mathematics allow for authors to have an electronic version of their papers on their homepages. The AMS is one example, where you will often see in the copyright notice on a paper `copyright retained by author'. A lot of other journals turn a blind eye. (As you might expect, the copyright notice in the CRC Encyclopedia is the standard `it's ours so hands off' one: no reproducing or transmitting in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, etc etc.)
My own feelings are that the best place for the encyclopedia is on the web. Some of the entries are mathematically wrong, and many are misleading. This is not a criticism of Eric, who obviously put a lot of work into the project, it's just a fact that a book containing so much material will contain many many errors. (See the (often extrmely rude) posts from about 5 years ago on sci.math.research complaining about the lack of mathematical precision in the treasure trove!) Having the treasure trove on the web would and should have allowed the project to grow, both in terms of the accuracy and the number of the entries. Sadly, the only way that such errors could be corrected in the printed version would be for CRC to issue a second edition - something I would imagine Eric is now unlikely to want to get involved in...
Particularly troubling is the fact that at least some of the content was contributed by people who most likely intended it to be online where others could get great benefit from their work. Did they give away ownership by contributing?
And finally, where can we direct our well written statements of objection to this action by CRC?
Bleh!