published bi-monthly as of January 2001 by the Cambridge University Press (CUP). The price for the libraries is 300 US $.
This journal was founded by the former editors of the Journal of Logic Programming (JLP) who in November 1999 collectively resigned to found TPLP. In the period from the JLP inception in 1984 until 1999 its price per page increased by the staggering amount of 314%. The subscription price per page of TPLP for libraries is 60% cheaper than JLP.
The Association for Logic Programming (ALP), http://www.cwi.nl/projects/alp, the only organization representing the interests of the logic programming community worldwide, endorsed TPLP as its only journal.
The matter received considerable attention in the media. The story how and why after 16 months long unsuccessful negotations with Elsevier the editors moved to CUP is told in Joan Birman, Scientific Publishing: A Mathematician's Viewpoint, Notices of AMS, Volume 47, Number 7, pages 770-774, August 2000, http://www.ams.org/notices/200007/forum-birman.ps.
In June 2000, during the 91st annual conference of the Special Libraries Association, Maurice Bruynooghe, the past Editor-in-Chief of the JLP, received for this collective decision of the editors the most prestigious award of the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division, see SPARC e-news, May-June 2000, http://www.arl.org/sparc.
The action of the editors was cited in The New York Times on December 25, 2000 in the article "Librarians Unite Against Cost of Journals" by David D. Kirkpatrick, see http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/25/business/25JOUR.html.
In response to the action of the editors Elsevier found a new, small editorial board, vastly extended the scope of the journal while reducing its size, and modified the name of JLP to Journal of Logic and Algebrair Programming (JLAP), this after the protests of the former editors.
No former editor of JLP was willing to join again JLAP. Professor Emeritus John Alan Robinson, of Syracuse University, and Founding Editor-in-Chief of the JLP, asked Elsevier to remove his name from the cover of JLAP. So it is clear that JLAP is a completely new journal and not a continuation of JLP, in spite of the fact that it retained its cover referring to the reversed arrow of the logic programming notation, its Science Citation Index impact factor, subscription base, and the consecutive numbering. In the first four months of 2001 JLAP published just 3 papers.
Recently SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, http://www.arl.org/sparc), an alliance of libraries that supports economical alternatives to high-priced journals, signed a partnership with TPLP. Rick Johnson, SPARC Enterprise Director stated "SPARC partners have proven that high-impact, low-cost scientific journals like Theory and Practice of Logic Programming can provide researchers with prestigious alternatives to expensive commercial journals."
While CUP is satisfied with the subscription growth of the TPLP we need now your help to reconstruct the original subscription base for TPLP. It is essential that libraries subscribe to the TPLP to support this move to keep the price of journals affordable.
Veronica Dahl,
President of the Association for Logic Programming
This message appeared in dbworld at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/dbworld/messages/2001-05/992545085.html.