Combinatorial Theory

I learned yesterday of a new free and open-access journal, Combinatorial Theory, owned by its editorial board. There is a temporary web page here, on which the editorial board (including some familiar names) is listed. This journal joins a list headed by the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics (more than a quarter of a century old), and including also the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics and Algebraic Combinatorics, along with many in other fields.

More information can be found on the FPSAC website here. This is a letter from Victor Reiner announcing that the new journal is to be regarded as the successor of the Elsevier publication Journal of Combinatorial Theory (A). Since I am in favour of free open-access journals owned by the editorial board, I welcome the new journal. On the other hand, I don’t want to disparage JCT(A), but merely note that the last couple of papers I published there have had almost no citations (9 and 6 respectively, according to Google Scholar which is not prone to undercounting).

Paying page charges (sorry, APCs) to major publishers with large profit margins has always seemed to me uncomfortably close to vanity publishing, where authors desperate to see their work in print are prepared to pay unscrupulous publishers. Of course, it is very difficult to occupy the high moral ground now, when publishers offer universities package deals including open-access publishing (but you can be sure that somebody is paying them, money which might be better spent supporting young scholars starting out).