A letter to the Editorial Board, Journal of Algorithms (2003) [pdf]

A letter to the Editorial Board, Journal of Algorithms (2003) [pdf]
www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

rip aaron swartz.

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This is a letter written by Knuth to the board members of the Journal of Algorithms. This journal means something special to Knuth, as he was one of the creators of the journal in 1979.

In this letter, Knuth describes the evolution of the journal. It used to cost about 30 cents per page in the 80s, but costs began to skyrocket in the 90s. The costs really began to skyrocket when Elsevier became the publisher.

Knuth argues that in the 80s, it was publishers who were responsible for all the typing, editing, and formatting --- things which were quite hard. But now (after Knuth made and proliferated TeX, which became still easier with LaTeX) authors and software do much of this work. So Knuth argues that costs should have gone down, not up.

The remaining several pages involve Knuth inviting the editorial board to consider the future of the journal. He paints four broad options:

1. Should they stay with Elsevier? 2. Should they switch publishers? 3. Should they go towards a SIAM model? 4. Or should they do something like the arXiv or PLoS and become pure open access, perhaps through finding some university (or universities) to host them?

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I'll also note what ended up happening.

The entire board resigned shortly afterwards, as they could not come to an agreement with Elsevier. Then Knuth (and other editors from the Journal of Algorithms) started the ACM Transactions in Algorithms shortly after.

The Journal of Algorithms (now under Elsevier but without Knuth) stopped being published a few years later, in 2010.

Some other editorial boards resigned from Elsevier as well --- with varying levels of impact.