We are happy to announce that after Volume 4,3, which is the last one produced by the Max-Planck Institute, the Logic Journal of the IGPL will be published from now on by Oxford University Press. OUP is one of the leading publishing houses for scientific literature. It will give our journal a long-term and stable perspective, which could not be guaranteed by the Max-Planck Institute. Moreover, OUP will provide us with the financial and technical resources to improve the services expected from an electronic journal.
OUP has taken over the printing and distribution of the hardcopies and maintains the electronic version at their site. This guarantees fast Internet access and long-term archiving of the electronic documents. The prestige of OUP and of the IGPL community will allow our journal to be one of the very best and most accessible journals in the area of pure and applied logics.
The refereeing process and the acceptance standards will not change. However, the transfer of a journal from a scientific institute to a professional publisher causes some changes in its management. For the first year, however, the changes will be minimal. The electronic version is still freely accessible, although at a different Web site. The hardcopies will be issued under the same conditions as before. In addition, for one year, OUP will send copies free of charge to 250 libraries.
After the first year, however, there will be new subscription arrangements for members of the IGPL, for individual subscribers and for libraries, both for hardcopies and for the electronic version. This is necessary because the production of a journal costs money and in the long run the costs need to be covered by subscription fees. We shall improve our services such that the subscription fees for the electronic version should be acceptable.
Before an issue is completed and the final version handed over to OUP, we shall, however, make pre-final versions of the papers accessible at the Imperial College Web server. This, we hope, is a fair compromise between the academic's needs for free dissemination of information, and the practical needs of covering the costs of running a journal. The details about submitting and accessing the papers can be found at our new Web site: http://www.oup.co.uk/jnls/igpl.
The journal would not exist without the substantial support we got from the Max-Planck Institute and its staff members.
Dov Gabbay
Ruy de Queiroz
Hans Jürgen Ohlbach