[1] The current editors-in-chief are Francis Bach (Inria) and David Blei (Columbia University).
In 2001, forty editorial board members of Machine Learning resigned, saying that in the era of the Internet, it was detrimental for researchers to continue publishing their papers in expensive journals with pay-access archives.
The open access model employed by the Journal of Machine Learning Research allows authors to publish articles for free and retain copyright, while archives are freely available online.
From its inception, the journal received no revenue from the print edition and paid no subvention to MIT Press or Microtome Publishing.
[1] In response to the prohibitive costs of arranging workshop and conference proceedings publication with traditional academic publishing companies, the journal launched a proceedings publication arm in 2007[3] and now publishes proceedings for several leading machine learning conferences, including the International Conference on Machine Learning, COLT, AISTATS, and workshops held at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.