Birman教授指出，亚洲数学杂志主编发表曹朱论文违反了学术常规。主编在论文发表前几天，连文章，文章摘要，审稿意见，全都不给其他编委看，就强行发表。
Birman教授认为，这种行径时整个学术界蒙羞。
http://www.ams.org/notices/200701/commentary-jan.pdf
Mathematical Community Should Police Itself
I would like to comment on recent events revolving about the awarding
of the Fields Medal to Grigory Perelman, and the article in the New Yorker magazine about it.
I have always felt proud to be a member of a professional community that embraces talent, with all the human diversity that can accompany it. As mathematicians, we have an extraordinary tolerance of eccentricity, and I truly believe that many individuals who might do badly in a different social milieu find acceptance and thrive in the mathematics community. Sylvia Nasar’s book, A Beautiful Mind, describes this in rich detail. Reading it, I was proud of our decency as a community.
But there is another, and a darker, side to the same phenomenon, i.e. a tolerance for bad behavior, especially when the individuals whose actions might be questioned are highly talented. To put it plainly, we do not police ourselves very well.
I focus on one small part of the complex array of matters discussed in the Nasar-Gruber article, namely the manner in which the normal peer review process, essential to the integrity of the profession, was tossed out the window when the paper of Cao and Zhu was accepted for publication in the Asian Journal of Mathematics (AJM). The xxxxted paper appears to be mainly an exposition of Perelman’s work on the Geometrization Conjecture, however it asserted that there were gaps in Perelman’s proof, which the authors filled. That was a serious assertion. The decision to publish the Cao-Zhu paper was made by the two editors-in-chief of the AJM, without consultation with the journal’s twenty-six member editorial board, even though it was known that the authors had deep personal attachments to the editors-in-chief. The members of the editorial board of the AJM were notified of the pending
publication a few days before the journal issue appeared, but were not shown the paper, an abstract, or reports by independent referees. Their names continue to appear on the journal cover, so one must assume that they approved that process. Thus those who were in a position to say “wait a minute, we will not let our names be used in this way” remained silent. This was just one of the many moments in this sad tale when there were no whistle-blowers. As a result the entire profession has received a very public and very bad black mark.
—Joan S. Birman
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Barnard College and
Columbia University
(Received September 23, 2006)
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