As the year winds down, the Journal of Functional Programming gets ready to open a new chapter. From January, every article in JFP will be available under Gold Open Access.

The published ‘version of record’ will be made available to all upon publication, and will be found from the journal’s homepage. Papers will be free to read for anyone, anywhere.

Authors will continue to retain copyright of 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. Read our FAQ page to find out more about what the move to Open Access means for our authors.

Back issues will also be free, although with no changes of the licenses under which they were published.

The timing for this change couldn’t be better. Functional programming is exploding in use everywhere, from middle-schools to cutting-edge industries. Our ideas are pervasive, and many of the ideas we’re just now seeing adopted date back a long time and are commonplace in our world. The functional programming community hasn’t been resting; if anything, our world has become even more exciting and frenetic. The future holds enormous promise.

As an Open Access journal, JFP will be financially supported through an article processing charge (APC), which can be covered by various sources. Authors within an institution who are part of a Read and Publish Agreement with Cambridge University Press will not need to pay an APC. Other authors might have their 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 funds to cover them: no author of an accepted paper will be denied publication due to lack of funds. Additional information on APCs can be found on our FAQ page.

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, to understand them and value them. Open Access solves one of those issues, and it is a critical precursor to everything else. We have a number of Open Access papers published already, which you can find here.

We’re proud of the writing in our community, especially as featured in the pages of JFP, and we 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 helps authors reach broader audiences. It helps readers access material and research that may previously have been impossible to attain. And, hopefully, it was attract a new generation of authors as well.

Functionally yours, Jeremy Gibbons and Shriram Krishnamurthi