Editorial

Readers,

With this volume, the Journal of Functional Programming opens a new chapter. From now on, every article in JFP will be available under Gold Open Access. No more paywalls and logins and other irritants.

The published “version of record” will be made available to all upon publication on the JFP webpage: papers will be free for anyone anywhere to read. Authors will continue to retain copyright in their work: content will be published under a Creative Commons license, which allows free access and redistribution and, in many cases, allows re-use in new or derivative works. Back issues will also be free to read, although with no change of the license under which they were published.

As an Open Access journal, JFP will be financially supported through an article processing charge (APC), which we expect to be covered by various sources. Authors who are part of a Read & Publish Agreement would not need to pay an APC. Other authors might have the APC covered by their funding bodies or their own institutions. Authors from Research4Life countries will have their APC discounted or waived. We are also seeking sponsorship to cover APCs for authors who do not have other funds to cover them: no author of an accepted paper will be denied publication due to lack of funds.

The timing for this could not be better. Functional programming is exploding in use everywhere, from middle schools to cutting-edge industries. We are no longer the oddballs in the corner; rather, our ideas are pervasive, languages market themselves on the adoption of our ideas, and programmers everywhere are learning that they ignore our lessons at their peril. However, as is common with industrial adoption, many of the ideas we are just now seeing adopted date back a long time and are commonplace in our world. The functional programming community has not been resting; if anything, activity in our world has become even more exciting and frenetic. So the future holds enormous promise.

Though industrial adoption is only one of many metrics for success, it remains a useful and important one. How do we shorten the “idea to industry” pipeline? It takes several things: for people in industry to get access to ideas, understand them, and value them. Open Access solves only one of those problems, but one that is a critical precursor for everything else. We are proud of the quality of writing in our community, especially as featured in the pages of this journal, and hope that improving access will turn the pipeline into a series of locks in the canal that connects the lake of ideas to the ocean of widespread use.

We believe Open Access will benefit many communities. It naturally helps authors reach broader audiences. It helps readers everywhere get access to material that may previously have been effectively impossible to obtain. Somewhat subtly, it also rewards the people who make this community special: the reviewers who tirelessly toil to make papers better. Their unnamed, unheralded contribution—conveyed through the papers—will be accessible to a much broader audience, hopefully attracting a new generation of authors as well.