The professor for my Statistics class this year, David Aldous, is the editor of a new open-access journal called Probability Surveys. It highlights another problem in corporate journal publishing. Tutorial articles are often invited papers at the editor’s discretion or for special issues. This journal will be full of survey articles, and treads the line between those collections of research monographs and more bleeding-edge research journals. It’s not a profitable area for publication, because survey articles serve graduate students and intersted outsiders, and therefore do not lead to subscriptions, which is what commercial journals rely upon.

Of course, it’s not off the ground yet, but I’m pretty excited. I’m usually willing to spend an hour reading up on some subject I know very little about, especially if it’s an expository article.