Our conversations celebrating the milestone of the Chapman University Digital Commons reaching one million downloads continues today with Dr. Daniel Alpay, the Foster G. and Mary McGaw Professor in Mathematical Sciences, whose 141 articles and book chapters make him the second most prolific scholarly author in the Digital Commons.

How did your first piece make its way onto the Digital Commons? Did you submit it to our Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker, or did she reach out to you? For subsequent articles or objects of yours that were added to the DC, were they added in the same way?

Kristin reached out to me after receiving an alert about one of my articles, and I sent her my CV to review. For me it is very important to have my papers on the Digital Commons as a token of gratitude to the excellent conditions that I get at Chapman. I do my best to put Chapman “on the map,” and the Digital Commons plays an important role.

Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share about Open Access and academia?

I  myself created and am editor-in-chief of a journal, Complex Analysis and Operator Theory (https://www.springer.com/journal/11785), so I am aware of all the publishing problems not only as an author, but also as an editor. … In the end, I think universities will pay for part of the articles to be open access (Politecnico di Milano just did exactly that, I think, with one publisher).

How do you use the Leatherby Libraries and/or Digital Commons in your research?

I have an endowed chair and I systematically buy the books I need, and almost do not take books from the library (although I have check out books such as Andorra by Max Frisch; I needed a translation). I use the database MathSciNet all the time and I order a lot of papers via Interlibrary Loan.

Is there anything noteworthy you’d like to share about any of your collaborators? For instance, were they your students?

According to MathSciNet I have so far had 78 collaborators. Some were my students and are now professors, but my best collaborator (in life) is my wife Liora.