Topics and Issues in Electronic Publishing

In January 2011 the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) published its first issue. JHM (http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm) is an online-only, peer-reviewed, open-access journal which has passed the all-important tenthousand-download barrier in its first anniversary. In order to remain faithful to the fundamental principles of open access, JHM uses Creative Commons licensing, where authors retain copyright of their work, but others are free to reuse them (with proper attribution). In this note I share and reflect upon our experience with open access and Creative Commons. PRELUDE: A QUICK PEEK INTO CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSING . . . In 2009, on New Year’s Eve, Pablo Flores, an Argentinian photographer, took a snapshot of a young person twirling about a fiery stick, using his Sony DSC-H7. Then he posted this image (Figure 1) to Flickr, “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.(http://www.flickr.com/about/, accessed February 7, 2013.) Flores labeled his photo “Infinito”, and added “Que el 2010 no te ponga lı́mites.” Almost one full year after his posting, Allegra Swift, a librarian at the Claremont Colleges Library, dropped Flores a line: “Pablo, would it be possible to get a waiver for the no derivatives portion of your license. we’d like to use just the infinity sparkler portion of the image on a non-profit open access journal for mathematics. you’d be given an image credit on the website. please let me know as soon as possible. best regards, Allegra”