Dear Group Pub Forum,

I'd like to bring to your attention the newly
created MAGNUS Group Theory Preprint Server on the World Wide Web.
It is maintained at the City College of the City University of New 
York by myself (my name is Ilya Kapovich and I'm a PhD student in 
Mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center) and Roger Kuhlman (he is a 
system administrator of Gilbert Baumslag's computer lab).

The http address of the MAGNUS homepage is

  http://zebra.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/web/html/magnus.html

There is also a link to MAGNUS from the list "Other preprint servers"
at the AMS home page, http://e-math.ams.org/web/

The MAGNUS server is (or at least is supposed to be) user-friendly 
and easy to deal with. Everyone is very welcome to stop by, browse 
through the available preprints (there are about 30) and submit a paper.

It is hoped that authors will submit to MAGNUS papers, submitted 
and/or accepted for publication, already published papers and papers 
which are not intended for publication but which authors want other 
people to know about. When a paper is submitted to MAGNUS, it as 
also automatically submitted to the American Mathematical Society 
Preprint Server.

Papers can be submitted by anonymous ftp, e-mail and by supplied URL.

Users of MAGNUS can download Tex (or DVI or PostScript, whichever you 
submit) file and print it out. This is much faster, cheaper and more 
convenient than photocopying an article from a journal, so it makes sense 
to submit a paper even if it has been published. This especially applies 
to publications in journals, books and proceedings, which are not very 
widely available but have a lot of interesting articles (e.g. International 
Journal of Algebra and Computation). 

If someone feels uncomfortable with submitting a source Tex file, 
you can submit a DVI or a PostScript file.

I think this method is much superior to that of mailing your preprints 
to a few people which, in your opinion, may be interested in your paper 
and not mailing it to quite a few others who are really interested in 
it but whom you did not know or did not think about.

Also, MAGNUS allows you to view DVI and PostScript files on-line, 
without downloading them first. There is a nice and, hopefully, convenient 
search facility.

I hope you do visit MAGNUS and enjoy it.
Any comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Ilya Kapovich.

ilya@zebra.sci.ccny.cuny.edu

+++++++++++++++++++

P.S.  I should have mentioned in my previous posting that the new MAGNUS Web
server is in replacement of the old e-mail squirrel server which was 
maintained by AMS.

The AMS gopher cite gopher://e-math.ams.com/00/preprints/magnus
was just a set of instructions for that server.
As I understand, AMS has already shut it down and
it is no longer maintained.

Ilya Kapovich.