Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Computer science -- energized for Open Access

Two forthcoming computer science journals, both specializing in theory, attribute their nascent existence to Donald Knuth and the editorial board revolt at the Journal of Algorithms. [For background on this topic, albeit from my perspective, read Commentary: The Crisis In Scholarly Communication and Journal of Algorithms Fallout Getting Noticed, Stanford U Takes Stand Against "Pricey Journals".] Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS) is a free, Open Access ejournal published through the International Federation for Computational Logic (IFCoLog). LMCS is an overlay journal, utilizing the Computing Research Repository (CoRR), the computer science portion of arXiv. Theory of Computing (ToC) is based at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science, with mirrors IIT Kanpur and SzTAKI, Budapest. ToC cites the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics (EJC) as the source of its publishing model. Considering that EJC recently was added to ISI's Web of Science journal list, this seems like a reasonable choice of role models. Interestingly, Neil Calkin, a founding editor of EJC, is formally affiliated with LMCS. Calkin sits on the LMCS advisory board which includes Andrew Odlyzko and Krzysztof Apt.