Announcement made on July 25, 2017.

At the end of last month, the four of us informed Springer that 
we do not wish to renew our contracts, so the contracts will 
terminate at the end of December 2017.  Almost all of the 
editorial board members will also resign, 
and will become editorial board members of a new journal, 
called simply, Algebraic Combinatorics. 
The new journal will run according to the Fair Open Access Principles. 
Once my contract with Springer is over, I will also become one of the 
editors-in-chief at Algebraic Combinatorics. 

Let me explain the reason for the move we are making.
It has been becoming more and more clear that commercial journal
publishers are charging high subscription fees, profiting from the
volunteer labour of the academic community, and adding little value.
So we want to create a new journal covering the same subject area,
which is free for both readers and authors. You can get more
information about the Fair Open Access Principles at their website
and also our supporting organization, called MathOA. This is 
a non-profit organization with very distinguished advisory board.

I hope you will support this move by submitting your best 
research papers to the new journal. The online submission
system will be in place pretty soon, but you can submit your
article to the editors-in-chief Satoshi Murai or Victor Reiner 
via email, as indicated at the bottom of the homepage.

By the way, all papers already submitted to the old journal
will be processed as usual if authors so desire. If you wish to
withdraw your paper from the old journal and resubmit to the new 
journal, then I can assure you that it will be processed without 
delay.

Finally, Springer may attempt to keep the old journal going, 
though experience has shown that once an editorial board leaves, 
the old journal typically ceases operation within a few years. 
You can find out what happend in the journal called Topology,
about 10 years ago. If they do attempt to keep the journal going, 
they will try to recruit a new editorial board.  Well, if you 
are a student, this probably doesn't concern you. But if you 
are an established mathematician, I would like you to keep 
in mind that joining the old journal will make it harder 
for the new one to thrive.

Akihiro Munemasa