The journal was established in 1994 by Herbert Wilf (University of Pennsylvania) and Neil Calkin (Georgia Institute of Technology).

The following people have been editors-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics: In addition to publishing normal articles, the journal also contains a class of articles called Dynamic Surveys that are not assigned to volumes and can be repeatedly updated by the authors.

[5] Since its inception, the journal has operated under the diamond-model open access model, charging no fees to either authors or readers.

Since its inception, the journal has left copyright of all published material with its authors.

[6] Since 2018, authors have been strongly encouraged to release their articles under a Creative Commons license.