The n-Category Café

Publications of the nLab

Posted by Urs Schreiber

A while back some of us started thinking that it would be useful to add to the nLab a peer-review functionality, whereby certain versions of entries could get an official stamp saying something like “This material has been read and carefully checked by an expert referee, it seems to be reliable”. This is the way it works for instance also at the scientific wiki called Manifold Atlas.

We have made this happen for instance with the entry geometric realization of simplicial topological spaces, after we noticed that it was being cited in publications. You can see its referee report here.

In the course of the discussion of these issues, it became clear that not only does peer-review add value to existing $n$Lab material, but offering official publication status also adds incentive for authors to put material into the $n$Lab in the first place. In other words, in addition to its functionality as a “lab book”, it could also function as a scientific journal. That branch now exists and is called

• The Publications of the nLab,

  a web-based journal for peer-reviewed publication of original research and expository writing on topics in mathematics and mathematical physics that are usefully discussed from the point of view of category theory and homotopy theory/higher category theory.

There are still some administrative issues to be organized behind the scenes, but we do have a first published article now:

• Tom Leinster, An informal introduction to topos theory, Publications of the $n$Lab, vol 1, no. 1 (2011) .

This went through a refereeing process as usual for journals. The referee report is in fact publically available, see the details listed here.

Meanwhile a second article has been submitted and is with the referee. Our idea is that once two articles have gone fully through the publication process, so that one can see at examples what the $n$Publications are going to be like, we formally install an editorial board consisting of names from the list of “tentatively confirmed” editors here (whereas currently the nLab steering committee still plays the role of the editorial board for the $n$Publications).