Foreword - After 15 Years

V.A. Malyshev

2010, v.16, Issue 1, 1-2

ABSTRACT

15 years of MPRF is a good occasion to express our biggest gratitude to the editorial board, to the authors, to the referees and to everyone else without whom the journal could not exist. We thank also the authors who submitted invited papers for the anniversary issues (there will be two) of the journal. It is a moment to say how the journal appeared. Once I wondered who are the owners and the real bosses (those who periodically change main editors) of the existing mathematical journals. Instead of pursuing this direction, the idea to launch a new journal appeared to be more useful. However, I still think that any journal should have one who is personally responsible for the scientific policy. The authors of the rejected papers should know personally one who rejected their papers. Seemingly, it is the main editor, often he has to play mediator between the author and some unknown referees. But as far as I know, often the main editor is not completely free in his decisions. That is why I prefer smaller journals, owned and managed by a working mathematician. It could be useful also that the author knew the names of his referees. But now the world is still far from this. MPRF was the first and still remains the unique international mathematical journal, which is owned, edited and published in Russia. International means that it is published only in English, there is no Russian translation of MPRF. Moreover, it is really a private journal, all other journals are owned by grand institutions and societies. While launching the journal, I underwent big pressure from some institutions who wanted to own it and from others who did not want such kind of journals to exist. Next important remark. Now there appeared the so called ratings, impact factors etc. of papers, journals, and even authors. MPRF did not make any effort to get these scores for the only reason - when the science wants to be similar to a business enterprise and to use PR agencies, the science starts degenerate, and scientific politics prevails. I want to thank personally my colleagues and former colleagues whose efforts allowed the journal to appear. Vadim Scherbakov was the first general director of our small publishing company POLYMAT, followed now by Elena Petrova. Elena Petrova is also the executive editor who governs all current activity of the journal. Without Flora Spieksma we could hardly establish connections with the distributors, that allowed to get first subscriptions (for some years I was the only financial sponsor of the journal). She also, for some period, took responsibility for the English language. Sergej Popov, Alexander Gajrat, Anatoli Manita designed the journal style, its cover etc. At the beginning we suffered from the lack of submissions and in the first issues we had to publish mostly the papers of my Moscow laboratory. Soon we received some papers which used words "stochastic, Markov" etc. but were so ridiculous that I thought it was the test for our editorial board. I rejected them immediately without any refereeing process. Now a difficult era for the academic science seems to come. Too many fields of mathematics, too many interesting problems, but no global goals. Insufficient number of scientists to cover even most interesting fields. There are several big communities which aggressively propagate their field of interest, making no attention to others. That is why wider papers and reviews, explaining connections between different areas of mathematics and other disciplines, are welcome to MPRF, and we ask the authors to spare no pains to write them.

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