Back in 2006 when the wider machine learning community was becoming aware of Gaussian processes (mainly through the publication of the Rasmussen and WIlliams book). Joaquin Quinonero Candela, Anton Schwaighofer and I organised the Gaussian Processes in Practice workshop at Bletchley Park. We planned a short proceedings for the workshop, but when I contacted Springer’s LNCS proceedings, a rather dismissive note came back with an associated prohibitive cost. Given that the ranking of LNCS wasn’t (and never has been) that high, this seemed a little presumptuous on their part. In response I contacted JMLR and asked if they’d ever considered a proceedings track. The result was that I was asked by Leslie Pack Kaelbling to launch the proceedings track.

JMLR isn’t just open access, but there is no charge to authors. It is hosted by servers at MIT and managed by the community.

We launched the proceedings in March 2007 with the first volume from the Gaussian Processes in Practice workshop. Since then there have been 38 volumes including two volumes in the pipeline. The proceedings publishes several leading conferences in machine learning including AISTATS, COLT and ICML.

From the start we felt that it was important to share the branding of JMLR with the proceedings, to show that the publication was following the same ethos as JMLR. However, this led to the rather awkward name: JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings, or JMLR W&CP. Following discussion with the senior editorial board of JMLR we now feel the time is right to rebrand with the shorter “Proceedings of Machine Learning Research”.

As part of the rebranding process the editorial team for the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (which consists of Mark Reid and myself) is launching a small consultation exercise looking for suggestions on how we can improve the service for the community. Please feel free to leave comments on this blog post or via Facebook or Twitter to let us have feedback!