Germany won't pay for Nature's "scientific porn", and other messages from Couperin's open science days

Earlier this week, there was a mini-workshop in Paris called Couperin’s open science days 2018. (Original title in French: Journées sciences ouverte 2018.) I followed most of it via webcast, and I will now summarize some of the salient points. The videos are available online, but most of them are in French.

The German way: Horst Hippler and Ralf Schimmer

 

The most important messages came from Germany: the country whose academic institutions have thought seriously about scientific publishing, and have organized themselves so as to drive the needed reforms. The most salient manifestation so far has been the standoff with Elsevier, and it was nice to have further details on the strategy.

Will no one rid me of these tiresome Latin plurals?

The English language has inherited many scientifc words from Latin: a spectrum, an index, a torus, a formula. Then which plural forms should we use: the Latin plurals two spectra, two indices, two tori, two formulae? Or the English plurals two spectrums, two indexes, two toruses, two formulas? The Latin and the English plurals of these words are both considered correct, but the Latin plurals are more widespread. I will nevertheless argue that using Latin plurals is impractical and illogical, and should often be avoided.

On single-valued solutions of differential equations

This post is about the issue of solving a nonlinear matrix equation that I raised on MathOverflow. This matrix equation determines the existence of single-valued solutions of certain meromorphic differential equations. The motivating examples are the BPZ differential equations that appear in two-dimensional CFT. For more details on these examples, see my recent article with Santiago Migliaccio on the analytic bootstrap equations of non-diagonal two-dimensional CFT.