The Illinois Journal of Mathematics has undergone a major overhaul of its operation during the past several years, aimed at saving costs by streamlining the production and distribution process, while at the same time raising the technical and scientific quality of the journal.
These changes have led to drastically reduced production costs, a saving that has been passed on to subscribers. As a result, IJM has become the low-cost leader among mainstream math journals, as shown by the most recent AMS Journal Price survey.
Among all 263 print journals included in the survey, IJM was ranked 5th lowest in terms of price per page, and lowest among “mainstream” mathematical journals (the only journals with a lower cost per page figure are two publications by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, and Demonstratio Mathematica, a journal published by Warsaw University).
The price per page for IJM is half that of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, one fourth that of the Journal of the London Mathematical Society, and one tenth that of some well-known commercial journals, such as Inventiones Mathematicae.
Other measures also put IJM at or near the bottom of the price/value range. For instance, the annual subscription price for IJM is second lowest among all print journals publishing more than 1000 pages per year (behind Annals of Applied Probability); and IJM is one of only 28 out of 263 print journals whose cost per page has decreased over the past 8 years, and it has one of the highest rates of decrease among those journals.
Although operating under the auspices of the University of Illinois, IJM is supported entirely through subscription costs and receives no subsidies from the University or the Mathematics Department. In fact, IJM provides a significant benefit to the University in the form of exchange subscriptions to several hundred journals which the Mathematics Library receives at no cost.
By keeping its subscription costs low, IJM has been able to avoid erosions in subscriptions that many higher priced publishers have experienced in recent years. As a result, IJM is in excellent financial shape and one of the few units within the University of Illinois that are not suffering from the current economic downturn.
