The software for managing the refereeing process will be provided by Scholastica, an outfit that was set up a few years ago by some graduates from the University of Chicago with the aim of making it very easy to create electronic journals. However, the look and feel of Discrete Analysis will be independent: the people at Scholastica are extremely helpful, and one of the services they provide is a web page designed to the specifications you want, with a URL that does not contain the word “scholastica”. Scholastica does charge for this service -- a whopping $10 per submission. (This should be compared with typical article processing charges of well over 100 times this from more conventional journals.)

In theory, this offers a way out of the current stranglehold that the publishers have over us: if enough universities set up enough journals at these very modest costs, then we will have an alternative and much cheaper publication system up and running, and it will look more and more pointless to submit papers to the expensive journals, which will save the universities huge amounts of money. Just to drive the point home, the cost of submitting an article from the UK to the Journal of the London Mathematical Society is, if you want to use their open-access option, £2,310. If Discrete Analysis gets 50 submissions per year (which is more than I would expect to start with), then this single article processing charge would cover our costs for well over five years.

An obvious partial answer to this question is that the list of links on our journal website will be a list of certificates that certain arXiv preprints have been peer reviewed and judged to be of a suitable standard for Discrete Analysis. Thus, it will provide information that the arXiv alone does not provide.

However, we intend to do slightly more than this. For each paper, we will give not just a link, but also a short description. This will be based on the abstract and introduction, and on any further context that one of our editors or referees may be able to give us. The advantage of this is that it will be possible to browse the journal and get a good idea of what it contains, without having to keep clicking back and forth to arXiv preprints. In this way, we hope to make visiting the Discrete Analysis home page a worthwhile experience.

Another thing we will be able to do with these descriptions is post links to newer versions of the articles. If an author wishes to update an article after it has been published, we will provide two links: one to the “official” version (that is, not the first submitted version, but the “final” version that takes into account comments by the referee), and one to the new updated version, with a brief summary of what has changed.