The future's bright, the future's online

On 8 October 2001 40 members of the editorial board of The Journal of Machine Learning (JML) published by Kluwers, announced in an email to the scientific community they were throwing their academic seniority behind an alternative, electronic publishing enterprise — The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).

Founded in the spring of 2000 by Louise Pack Kaelbling, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), JMLR makes its research papers freely available on the web. For archiving purposes, MIT Press is to publish a hard copy version, which will be made available on a not-for-profit basis.

The move sends a powerful message to tenure track committees that, though the journal is new and does not have the academic record of JML, publication in JMLR should be assessed on the basis that it has the backing of a substantial portion of the editorial board that contributed ...