CHING-LI CHAI
翟敬立
David Mumford Selected Papers Volume 2,
On Algebraic Geometry,
Including Correspondence with Alexander Grothendieck
- Published in July 2010 by Springer Science+Business Media,
ISBN 978-0-387-72491-1, xxii+767 pages, 99 USD.
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- Table of contents,
Bibliogrpahy of David Mumford,
Notes and comments.
- Further updates/corrections will be posted when we are aware of them.
Please send your comments to
the editors, Ching-Li Chai
chai@math.upenn.edu,
Amnon Neeman
amnon.neeman@anu.edu.au and
Takahiro Shiota
shiota@math.kyoto-u.ac.jp.
- An electronic version will be available to the public free of charge
after January 2025 when the copyright reverts to the author and the editors.
- The story/saga of the production of this book,
which may be of interest to (prospective) authors of mathematical monographs.
Looking back, the difficulties we experienced were both
predictable and inevitable.
The good old days when serving the scientific community was
the primary objective of the publisher,
reinforced by the legends of Julius Springer and his sons
Ferdinand and Fritz,
had been long gone since the late 1970's, when the CFO was made
the director.
When private equity firms took over the company, one can only
expect the pursuit of higher profits
and the abandonment of "service" to continue.
- Springer was owned by the British
private equity firms Candover and Cinven between
2003 and 2010.
Candover and Cinven sold Springer
to EQT Partners and the Government of Singapore Investment
Corporation in February 2010
for 2.3 billion euros (including debts),
making a total net profit of more than 170% of
their initial investment of 600 milliion euros, while saddling
the company with debts about 2.2 billion euros.
- Follow up
- In 2013, the British equity firm BC Partners acquired a majority
stake in Springer from EQT and GIC for about 4.4 billion dollars.
-
In May 2015 Springer merged with
Holtzbrinck (which owns Macmillan,
Nature and Scientific American) to form
"Springer Nature", with
Holtzbrinck holding a majority
53% stake and BC Partners
retained a 47% minority interest in the new company.
- The larger issue of scientific publishing in the digital age, including
the preadatory practice by commercial publishers, is discussed in
Wake Up!,
a call for action in
Mumford's
blog post.
- In the comments and response section, Mumford wrote ``He (Stuart Shieber)
suggested that something like a phase transition would take place
when a majority of scholars become aware of their being exploited.
All it takes is mathematicians refusing to submit papers to
commertical journals and demanding that their professional societies
and university presses expand their publications. Your papers
appearing in the Inventiones should be an embarrassment,
like wearing a mink coat, not an honor."
Developments in Algebraic Geometry,
a conference on research in algebraic geometry
in directions initiated by David Mumford, June 2, 2007, Providence, RI.
