Centre Mersenne for open scientific publishing presents Annales de la Faculté des sciences de Toulouse

Les Annales de la Faculté des sciences de Toulouse (AFST) sont une publication périodique internationale à comité de lecture, sous l'égide de l'Institut de mathématiques de Toulouse1 (IMT), avec le soutien du CNRS et de l'Université Paul Sabatier. Elles publient des articles de haut niveau ainsi que des survols, écrits en français ou en anglais, dans tous les domaines de la recherche mathématique.

The Annales de la Faculté des Sciences de Toulouse (AFST) are an international peer-reviewed journal, under the aegis of the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse (IMT), with the support of the CNRS and the Université Paul Sabatier. It publishes high-level articles as well as overviews, written in French or in English, in all fields of mathematical research.

Background and first steps

Volume 1 of AFST was published in 1887. It was a multidisciplinary journal initiated by Paul Sabatier (Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1912), with the help of the city of Toulouse and the departments of Haute-Garonne and Hautes Pyrénées, to promote scientific culture outside of Parisian circles.

Mathematics was predominant in the first years (under the impulse of Stieltjes), with publications by Picard, Appell, Koenigs, Goursat, Painlevé, Hermite. We refer to the article by J. Cassinet (AFST 5e série, tome S10, 1989) for useful information on the first 25 years of AFST.

Here are some examples of important publications of the first decades:

•     the foundations of the Galois differential theory by E.Vessiot (1894) ;
•     Non-Euclidean geometry by F.Klein (1897) ;
•     stability of dynamical systems by A.Liapunov (1904, 1907);
•     a series of articles by H.Lebesgue (1909, 1921, 1922);
•     theory of algebraic number fields by D.Hilbert (1909-1911);
•     the (small) thesis of J.Delsarte (1928), that of L.Schwartz (1942).

The translation of major articles was an original idea at that time.

Second part of the 20^th century

There was a halt in publications between 1967 and 1978 (the events of May 1968 and the consequences of the Loi Faure seem to have played a role in this halt). The AFST resumed its publications in 1979, as an exclusively mathematical journal (with in its first volume articles by Y.Choquet-Bruhat, J.-M.Coron, A.Lichnerowicz, etc).

The rise of the AFST coincides with that of the ITM, under the impulse of successive editors D.Bakry, M.Boileau, J.-P.Ramis, M.Ledoux, M.Spivakovsky and J.-P.Otal between 1992 and 2015.

The Annals of Toulouse today

V.Guedj is editor in chief since 2015. The editorial board was renewed in 2020 for a four-year term. It contains 20 internationally renowned members, chosen for their scientific qualities, their thematic complementarity and their dynamism.

Editorial policy

•     The submitted articles are evaluated by one or more referees, chosen for their expertise in the absence of conflict of interest;
•     originality and scientific quality are the main criteria;
•     long articles are welcome, without limitation of size;
•     as the journal is generalist, an editorial effort is expected;
•     the content of AFST is protected by the CC BY 4.0 license;
•     AFST adheres to the COPE code of good practice.

Scientific production

•     Each year, AFST publishes a volume of 5 issues, i.e. between twenty and thirty articles for a little more than a thousand pages;
•     the average time for acceptance/rejection is about 4 months;
•     one of the issues is dedicated to a major scientific event (thematic semester of Labex CIMI, conference, etc.);
•     the recipients of the Fermat prize (created in 1989) publish a significant contribution in AFST;
•     the increased number and quality of submissions leads to a higher rejection rate at present.

Open access diamond

Until 2016, the AFST were open access on NUMDAM (ancestor of the Mersenne Center) with a moving wall and an embargo on the recent part accessible by subscription.

Since January 2017 the AFST are in electronic free access, without any cost neither for the authors nor for the readers. A few dozen paper copies are printed for archiving and exchange with other academic journals.

It is estimated that the cost of AFST (excluding volunteer peer review work) is approximately 10 euros per published page, which has decreased significantly since the pooling of institutional support.

Funding

The CNRS provides an annual grant to AFST. It also intervenes indirectly by financing, with the University of Grenoble Alpes, the Mersenne Center, which hosts since 2018 the website of AFST, ensures the upgrading of the journal, as well as the dissemination, the attribution of DOI identifiers or even the perennial archiving via CLOCKSS.

The Paul Sabatier University (UPS) provides an annual grant to AFST. The secretariat (3 half-days per week) is graciously freed from a permanent position (UPS) in the Mathematics and Mechanics library.

Did you know?

The AFST web page includes a section that allows you to discover a significant result published in the journal. We wish to progressively enrich this section with the help of members of the editorial committee or motivated readers who wish to do so. The first result concerns the famous Bloch constant.

Laurent Schwartz published the second part of his thesis in 1942 in the AFST.

It is a methodical investigation of the Fourier analysis of functions generated by a sequence of complex exponentials. The first part of the thesis concerned the case of real exponentials. Both parts will be republished together in 1959.

These fundamental results have become basic tools in harmonic analysis, in particular in the theory of Dirichlet series and trigonometric series. They have also been used recently in control theory (cf e.g. Glass, O., A complex-analytic approach to the problem of uniform controllability of a transport equation in the vanishing viscosity limit.  J. Funct. Anal. 258 (2010), no. 3, 852-868).

Assets for the future

At a time when more and more authors are sensitive to the virtuous practices of scientific journals, the Annales de Toulouse fulfills all the conditions to become one of the best generalist journals of reference in mathematics on the international scene.

The journal has the vocation to publish in all fields of mathematical research, from the most theoretical to the most applied, with the only criteria being excellence and originality, following the example of the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse.

The number and quality of articles submitted is constantly increasing, as are the bibliometric indicators (for example, the Mathematical Citation Quotient Mathscinet of the journal has doubled in five years, it is 0.74 in 2019).

A historical journal (it is one of about twenty journals created in the 19th century that are still active), academic, open access diamond, it is equipped with a dynamic high-level editorial board.

• 1Unité mixte de recherche 5219 (CNRS, Insa Toulouse, Université Toulouse Paul Sabatier)