One of the ways to ensure visibility of a country in the mathematical
sciences is through its journals. Unfortunately, the main Australian
journals (Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society and
the ANZIAM journal) are not very well ranked, whether Impact Factor-wise or ERA 2010-wise. This last ranking cannot be changed, but international rankings such as IF (or other) count towards acknowledgement of the country’s importance in the discipline.
The Australian Mathematical community should, over the next decade, strongly invest in its main journals, ensuring their ranking and quality are competitive at the international level. There is no magical rule for this but one way to work in this direction is to ensure “our” mathematicians (meaning the Australian mathematicians, or their collaborators overseas) submit their best results in those journals.
Another way to achieve worldwide recognition is also to internationalise more the editorial boards, including editors-in-chief: each journal could have one Australian editor-in-chief and another one from overseas.
Note that it has been decided, at Monash, to establish a list of “high quality journals” in which we should aim at publishing to be considered as “high achievement researchers”. Needless to say, the Australian journals are not in this list, which makes them much less attractive to early- and mid-career researchers to publish in. The submission of “excellent papers” in our journals must therefore first come from senior mathematicians in the country, whose career no longer needs to boost their track record…