Lance Fortnow reports the creation of a new free-as-in-beer electronic journal, Theory of Computing, to be run following the same model as Herbert Wilf's incredibly successful Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. This is nothing but good news for the CS theory community.
The creation of ToC follows hot on the heels of the new ACM Transactions on Algorithms. ToA was created by the wholesale resignation of the editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms, at the urging of founding editor Don Knuth, following the sale of Harcourt General (who owned Academic Press) to Reed-Elsevier. (Anyone who watches skyrocketing journal prices and plummetting library budgets knows that Elsevier is one of the more egregious price-gougers, with subscription costs as high as $2/page and copyright clearance fees as high as $9/page.)
I've heard Herb Wilf say that EJC costs nothing to run. Authors, referees, and editors do their work on a volunteer basis, as they do for most other journals anyway. Authors typeset their own papers, as they have done for most other CS journals for years. (What is this "copy editor" of which you speak?) Universities donate (minimal) web server space, (minimal) domain registration costs, and 30 minutes per week of secretarial support. With no dead trees and postal-worker shoes to buy, there's simply no need to charge anyone. Publisher, shmublisher.
I hope ToC is more successful than the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science, which started with the same goals in 1995—although with a (small) subscription fee while it was also carried by MIT Press—but then seemed to sputter and die around 2000, when MIT Press dropped CJTCS from its catalog.
On the subject of free-as-in-beer theory journals, let's not forget J. Graph Algorithms & Applications, http://jgaa.info/
Posted by: David Eppstein | June 14, 2004 at 11:58 AM