JOB: Glasgow, lectureship, senior lectureship or readership; closing 31-May-2013

From Ken Brown via Radha Kessar:

Lecturer / Senior Lecturer / Reader in Pure or Applied Mathematics
Ref: 004011
Salary: Grade 7/8/9; £32,267 – £ 36,289 / £39,649 – £45,941 / £47,314 – £53,233 per annum

The University of Glasgow, established in 1451, is a member of the UK’s Russell Group of leading universities. The University is committed to enhancing its position as one of the world’s great broad-based research-intensive universities. Central to our strategic development plan, ‘Glasgow 2020: A Global Vision’, the School of Mathematics and Statistics will make a key appointment to a Lectureship, Senior Lectureship or Readership in Mathematics. The successful applicant will pursue internationally leading research in Mathematics that complements our existing research, and he or she will teach at all undergraduate and postgraduate levels. We are particularly seeking to make an appointment in Algebra, Analysis, Geometry & Topology, or Mathematical Biology.

For appointment to a Readership you will be an outstanding, internationally recognised researcher, taking on national and international leadership roles where appropriate, regularly applying for and securing research funding, and with a track record of high impact publications in internationally recognised journals.

Informal enquiries may be directed to the Head of School:

Professor Nicholas Hill (0141 330 5176, hos@maths-stats.gla.ac.uk)

Information about the School and all its research groups is available from the School website at

www.gla.ac.uk/schools/mathematicsstatistics/

Apply online at www.glasgow.ac.uk/jobs

Closing date: 31 May 2013

Head south for SoCalAGS

Navigate to sunny San Diego to hear some fine algebraic geometry talks at SoCalAGS (Southern California Algebraic Geometry Seminar).

It’s Saturday 13 April at UC San Diego.

The speakers are:

• Ben Antieau, UCLA
• Izzet Coskun, University of Illinois, Chicago
• Karl Schwede, Penn State
• Anastasia Stavrova, Fields Institute

 

Image: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive via Flickr Commons.

UCLA Mathematics Distinguished Lecture Series, 2000-present

Link to this year’s lectures

2013
Jean-Pierre Wintenberger
Ursula Hamenstädt
Lázsló Lovász

2012
Paul Seidel

2011
Pierre Colmez
Ehud Hrushovski
Michael Brenner
Noga Alon

2010
Pierre-Louis Lions
Barry Mazur
Leonid Polterovich
Ken Ono
Horng-Tzer Yau
Michael Harris

2009
Gregory Margulis

2008
Elias Stein
Mario Bonk
Avi Wigderson
John Coates

2007
Charles Fefferman
David Levermore
Shing-Tung Yau
Shouwu Zhang

2006
Peter Schneider
Peter Sarnak

2005
Goro Shimura
Jean Bellissard
Andrei Suslin
Zhengan Weng
Etienne Ghys

2004
Michael Harris
Pierre Deligne
Alexander Lubotzky

2003
Peter Lax
Nikolai Reshetikhin
Shing-Tung Yau
Hillel Furstenberg
Robert Langlands
Clifford Taubes

2002
Louis Nirenberg
Oded Schramm
IM Singer
Jesper Lutzen
LH Eliasson
Raoul Bott
Dennis Gaitsgory

2001
Gilles Pisier
Gregg Zuckerman
Freydoon Shahidi
Alain Connes
Joran Friberg
David Mumford
Michael Atiyah
Jean-Michel Bismut
Jean-Pierre Serre

2000
Gang Tian
Nessim Sibony
Christophe Deninger

Keeping my copyright

It’s embarrassing: even after a year’s fervid discussion of scholarly publishing, much of which I followed, I was caught out today when I finally got around to checking some proofs and dealing with the European Mathematical Society’s (EMS) copyright agreement.

The first clause of the agreement reads in full:

1. The Author hereby transfers, for the duration of the copyright period, to the Publisher the copyright of the Work named above and consents that the Publisher has the exclusive right to publish and distribute the Work throughout the world, including offprints, reprints, electronic form (offline, online), licensed photocopies, microform editions, document delivery and secondary information sources such as abstracting, reviewing and indexing services.

In clause 2, I’m to warrant that the Work hasn’t been published before, doesn’t libel anyone, violate anyone’s statutory rights, etc.

Clause 3 allows me to retain the right to use my material in other, non-commercial publications provided that the original publication by the EMS is credited in a specified way.

And that’s it. Nothing explicit about my right to post the work on the arXiv (is this covered by clause 3?), and nothing explicit about derivative works (I assume, in fact, that once they hold the copyright, EMS could in theory do whatever they like). I mention these two points because they’ve been the subject of lots of discussion where “mathematics” meets “open access”.

So, I know I shouldn’t sign this as is, but what to do?

Luckily, the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication has a website with advice on managing your intellectual property, including practical advice about retaining copyright. Their “at minimum” “ideally” advice seemed to fit the bill this time, so I have sent to the EMS an agreement with amended clause 1.

What have I learned?

• Check a journal’s copyright practices before submitting a paper. I should have done this. JEMS doesn’t hide their requirement, and I don’t know whether they will accept my amendment.
• Don’t sign an agreement “until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it” (as always, good advice from Homer Simpson).
• Check for advice from my library or university. It’s daunting to think of unpicking an agreement myself from scratch, but lots of knowledgeable people have given lots of thought to these matters, and their advice is not hard to access. If your university doesn’t advise on this matter, I recommend the UCOSC and MIT sites.
• Then do what I need to do.

P.S. The paper in question: Line bundles with partially vanishing cohomology (arXiv:1007.3955v1 [math.AG]).

I cannot tell a lie: WAGS has a fine program

Celebrate the Presidents’ Day weekend by hearing some fine algebraic geometry talks at WAGS (Western Algebraic Geometry Symposium).
It’s 16-17 February at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, 35 miles east of Los Angeles (contrary to popular opinion very reachable by public transportation).

The speakers are:

• Federico Ardila, SFSU
• Noah Giansiracusa, Berkeley
• Ravi Vakil, Stanford
• Chenyang Xu, Utah
• Xinyi Yuan, Berkeley
• Zhiwei Yun, Stanford

Compositio meeting

Update on other commitments: supervising the grading of exams

I am trying out Open Access

The title of this post is, of course, an exaggeration: I already have some version of nearly all my papers on my department webpage and now diligently post new papers on the arXiv. What I mean is that I’ve submitted a paper to one of the new Open Access journals launched by Cambridge University Press, in my case Forum of Mathematics Sigma, where the algebraic geometry strand is edited by Sebastien Boucksom, Ravi Vakil, and Claire Voisin. Sigma has other strands — the nearby algebra strand is edited by Dennis Gaitsgory, Raphaël Rouquier, and Catharina Stroppel. (There is also a second journal, Forum of Mathematics Pi, for papers of broad interest.)

The journals are meant to investigate whether mainstream Open Access can be a large-scale solution in mathematics to the problem of the increasingly expensive subscription model, and there is meant to be no corner-cutting on editorial integrity or publishing standards. Since, to really put this to the test, there needs to be serious volume I thought I’d do my bit to send some their way.