Right. You want me to regurgitate some dry, academic drivel. Fine. Don't expect me to enjoy it. And don't expect me to make it pleasant. It's just information. Like dust. It settles.

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Journal of Machine Learning Research

This is the Journal of Machine Learning Research, or JMLR, as the academics so charmingly abbreviate it. It’s a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal that, predictably, covers machine learning. It clawed its way into existence in the year 2000. The inaugural editor-in-chief, a certain Leslie Kaelbling, apparently set the tone. Now, the reins are held by Francis Bach of Inria and David Blei from Columbia University. They're the current editors-in-chief. Try not to be impressed.

History

They say JMLR was born out of a desire for an open-access alternative to the rather more… exclusive journal called Machine Learning. Apparently, in 2001, forty members of that journal’s editorial board decided enough was enough. They resigned, citing the archaic practice of publishing in expensive, pay-access journals in an era where the Internet supposedly made things… accessible. The gall. JMLR, on the other hand, embraced the open-access model. Authors can publish for free, keep their copyrights, and the archives? Freely available online. A novel concept, I'm sure.

MIT Press handled the print editions until 2004, after which Microtome Publishing took over. It’s noted, with a certain lack of surprise, that the journal never saw a penny from its print runs, nor did it pay any sort of subvention to its publishers. [1]

Then, in 2007, probably realizing that the actual money was in the proceedings, JMLR launched a branch dedicated to publishing them. [3] Now, they churn out proceedings for all the major machine learning conferences—the International Conference on Machine Learning, COLT, AISTATS, and even those workshops held at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. It seems even academic disdain for profit can be… managed.