Features of growth

Every organism should grow and progress, until its development stops and it starts the path towards its end. But for it to have a long and healthy life, its growth must be moderate. Growing too fast can be very dangerous; uncontrolled growth may cause damage, and even death — for individuals and businesses, and also for journals. We started this journal in 2008, publishing 20 papers in that first year. The number of papers grew to 35 in 2013 (a 75 percent increase). More than half of the papers for the year 2014 are already on-line, and we have a growing back-log of papers accepted but not yet published. The quality of the research published in these papers and the inclusion of the journal in various databases have made it popular among mathematicians worldwide. The number of submissions to our journal is also growing, with over 15 in each of September and October this year, and correspondingly, both the number and percentage of papers that we have to reject or redirect to other journals are increasing as well. We would like to shape this journal into a self-consistent form that will attract the best possible papers from a rich and wide range of fields of mathematics, while retaining an expectation that their content combines at least two branches of a discrete nature. To pursue this goal, however, we must carefully control the growth of our journal, with respect to its size and maturity. That explains why we are taking some novel approaches to the journal’s production. For reasons of business viability, we changed the main publisher from a learned society to a university. We decided to apply for support being offered by the Republic of Slovenia to scientific journals, and a visible consequence is the translation of abstracts into the Slovenian language. Next, because we are committed to preserving our policy that neither readers nor authors should pay for access to the journal’s papers over the internet, from 2014 we are introducing a ‘Creative Commons Copyright’ model for our journal. We hereby announce that Ars Mathematica Contemporanea will publish four issues per year, from 2015. If you wish to support our journal and help with the long-term preservation of its contents, please subscribe to Ars Mathematica Contemporanea, and ask your library to subscribe to the printed edition.