Baltic Journal of Modern Computing

About Baltic Journal of Modern Computing

About Baltic Journal of Modern Computing

The Baltic Journal of Modern Computing (BJMC) is a peer-reviewed, gold open access electronic quarterly journal in computer science, published by a consortium of Baltic universities and institutes led by the University of Latvia in Riga. Its print ISSN is 2255-8942, which is also its ISSN-L, and its electronic ISSN is 2255-8950. The journal's own description of its mission is to give established and emerging scholars worldwide a platform for professional and academic knowledge in computer science, software engineering, information technology, information systems, computer engineering, computing didactics and related disciplines.

BJMC is a genuinely regional journal with international ambitions, and it says so itself: although it concentrates mainly on research directions active in the Baltic countries, submissions are welcome from across all streams related to modern computing. That positioning — a consortium title built by Latvian and Lithuanian computing faculties, indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science, free to read, and publishing accepted papers online promptly — has carried it from a local university series to an established mid-tier European computing journal in little more than a decade under its present title.

At a Glance

• Full title: Baltic Journal of Modern Computing
• Abbreviation: BJMC; ISO 4: Balt. J. Mod. Comput.
• Country: Latvia
• Publishers / issuing bodies (ISSN Portal record): University of Latvia; Vilnius University; Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Latvia; Latvia University of Agriculture (now Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies); with Liepaja University also named among the publishing partners
• Print ISSN: 2255-8942 (also the ISSN-L)
• Electronic ISSN: 2255-8950
• First volume under this title: 2013 (volume 1); the publishing consortium's activity is dated from 2008 in partner and DOAJ records
• Frequency: Quarterly
• Language: English only
• Field: Computer science and modern computing in general
• Access model: Gold open access; authors retain copyright
• Licence recorded in DOAJ: CC BY-SA
• Article processing charge recorded in DOAJ: up to 1,000 EUR — check the journal's current author instructions before submitting
• Address on record: Raina Bulvaris 19, Riga LV-1586, Latvia

History and Development

The journal's own ten-year retrospective, published in volume 11 in 2023, explains where BJMC came from. Its ancestor was a series of scientific articles of the University of Latvia, Acta Universitatis Latviensis: Computer Science and Information Technologies, which published work from a single university. When that model stopped attracting enough strong material, the founders built a consortium instead: the University of Latvia and Vilnius University as the core, with the participation of the University of Latvia's Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies (then Latvia University of Agriculture) and Liepaja University, plus individual colleagues from the University of Tartu. Partner-institution pages date the consortium's joint publishing activity from 2008; the Baltic Journal of Modern Computing itself, under this title and with its present ISSNs, began with volume 1 in 2013, and the ISSN Portal records its dates of publication as 2013 onwards.

The founders' stated goal was ambitious: entry into the Web of Science and Scopus. The retrospective records the milestones plainly. Indexing in the Web of Science began in 2015 (in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, initially without an impact factor); Scopus indexing began in 2019; Scopus began calculating the journal's SNIP in 2022; and in 2023 the Web of Science began calculating an impact factor for the journal, while in Scopus the journal reached the third quartile for the first time. The retrospective calls that the achievement — and modest exceeding — of the original, seemingly impossible objective, and asks whether the second quartile is a sufficiently ambitious next step. That candour about its own trajectory is characteristic of the journal, and it gives authors a realistic picture of a title that has climbed steadily rather than arriving fully formed.

One recent chapter of the journal's history is stated openly on its homepage: following the Russian Federation's war against Ukraine, BJMC terminated collaboration with institutions of the Russian Federation and Belarus, while keeping the right to consider collaboration with individuals in exceptional circumstances. Readers assessing the journal's author and reviewer geography should be aware of that standing policy.

Scope and Subject Coverage

BJMC's scope is modern computing in the wide sense. The journal names its fields as computer science, software engineering, information technology, information systems, computer engineering and computing didactics, and it solicits original and unpublished work of several types: completed research, book and literature reviews, surveys, and high-quality technical notes from experts in the field. Articles are published in full on the journal's website, and the journal allows multimedia and supplementary material — audio, video and raw experimental data — which suits empirical computing research whose evidence does not fit a printed page.

OpenAlex topic data for the journal (source S4210204244, consulted for this profile) shows its centre of gravity in applied and language-oriented computing: natural language processing techniques form its largest topic grouping, followed by topic modelling, speech recognition and synthesis, neural network applications and model-driven software engineering techniques. That profile reflects the strong Baltic research schools in language technology and software engineering among its publishing institutions. The journal's coverage statement nonetheless remains general: any stream related to modern computing is in scope, and interdisciplinary applications — computing in education, healthcare and the social sciences among them — are a recurring feature of its contents rather than an exception.

Editorial Approach and Peer Review

The journal describes itself as peer reviewed, and its instructions for authors set out the practical terms of that process. Papers must be submitted on the condition that they have not been published elsewhere (except as an abstract or part of a published lecture, review or thesis) and are not under consideration by another publisher. Only articles written in English are accepted, in United States or British spelling, but not a mixture. Authors must give the ORCID identifier in their affiliations. The journal does not edit submitted manuscripts for style or language, and reviewers may advise rejection of a manuscript whose grammar compromises it, so authors are advised to write clearly and have the article checked by colleagues before submission. Authors of revised manuscripts must outline separately their response to the reviewers' comments, including the changes introduced. Copyright stays with the authors, who retain publishing rights without restriction.

Editorial leadership is drawn from the consortium institutions. The managing editors named in the journal's ten-year retrospective are Jolita Bernatavičienė, Ēvalds Ikaunieks, Raimundas Matulevičius and Kuldar Taveter, supported by a large international editorial board whose membership the journal lists on its site. Board composition in consortium journals rotates, so authors should consult the journal's current editorial-board page for the present line-up before corresponding. The Directory of Open Access Journals records the journal's review model simply as peer review, with links to the journal's own instructions and board pages.

Metrics and How to Read Them

Several distinct metric systems cover this journal, and they do not use the same quartiles, so each figure below is tied to its source. The journal's own homepage reports its Scopus CiteScore position for 2025 in the category Computer Science: General Computer Science as rank 174 of 241, the 28th percentile, quartile 3. SCImago, using Scopus data, reports an SJR of 0.184 and a Q4 position for the journal (2025 figures in its Latvia listing), with about 50 documents in the 2025 count it displays. The stored Journals World record lists an H-index of 12 and a coverage window of 2019 to 2025 — that window is the Scopus era of the journal, not its lifespan, since the title began in 2013. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN-L record (source S4210204244), reports 477 works and 2,089 citations, an H-index of 18, an i10-index of 43 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.59 at the time of checking, with its own coverage of the journal starting in 2015.

The spread between these numbers is instructive rather than alarming. H-index values of 12 and 18 for the same journal simply count different corpora over different windows. The quartile difference is a difference of instrument: CiteScore's category percentile placed the journal in the third quartile of its Scopus category in the year the journal reports, while SJR's prestige-weighted ranking places it in the fourth quartile of SCImago's ordering. Authors whose institutions specify a quartile should therefore ask which instrument the institution means, and verify the current figure in that instrument directly. The journal also holds a Web of Science Journal Impact Factor, calculated from 2023 according to its own retrospective; this profile does not quote a specific impact-factor value, because none was verified from a primary Journal Citation Reports source at checking time.

Indexing and Visibility

Partner and journal pages list the journal's indexing as including the Web of Science Core Collection (Emerging Sources Citation Index), Scopus, EBSCO, ProQuest, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Google Scholar, VINITI, the Directory of Research Journal Indexing and Open J-Gate. The two anchor listings are Scopus (from 2019) and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (from 2015), both described in the journal's own retrospective; the DOAJ listing is confirmed directly from the DOAJ search API for this profile, which records both ISSNs, the University of Latvia as publisher, the CC BY-SA licence and an author charge as detailed below.

Publishing in the Journal: Guidance for Authors

Submissions follow the journal's Instructions for Authors on its official site (bjmc.lu.lv). The practical points authors most need are these. Language and presentation: English only, consistent United States or British spelling, an ORCID identifier in the affiliation, and no expectation that the journal will copy-edit the manuscript — language quality is the authors' responsibility, and reviewers may recommend rejection on grammar grounds. Originality: the work must not be published elsewhere or under consideration elsewhere, and all co-authors must have approved publication. Length: there is no explicit limit on article length, though editors may recommend condensation where appropriate, and accepted camera-ready manuscripts are published online immediately, which makes the journal's time from acceptance to visibility short. Supplementary material: audio, video and raw experimental data may accompany an article.

On charges, the DOAJ record for the journal states that it has an article processing charge of up to 1,000 EUR and links the journal's author instructions as the source. Charges and waivers in consortium journals change over time, so authors should treat that figure as the DOAJ-recorded position at checking time and confirm the current amount, and any waiver policy, on the journal's instructions page before submitting. Published articles are openly licensed; DOAJ records the licence as CC BY-SA, and the journal's own terms confirm that authors hold the copyright and retain publishing rights without restrictions.

How This Journal Compares With Similar Titles

BJMC's natural peer group is the Baltic and Central European general computing journal sector. Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly, published by Riga Technical University, is its closest Latvian neighbour, with a narrower informatics-and-modelling remit and a comparable SCImago band. Transport and Telecommunication, also Latvian, serves the applied transport-computing niche. In Lithuania, Informatica (Vilnius) sits above BJMC in citation profile and is the region's flagship computing title, while TASK Quarterly in Poland and Mokslas: Lietuvos Ateitis publish related general technical and computing material at similar scale. Computational Science and Techniques is another regional comparator in applied computing. Against that group, BJMC's distinguishing features are its multi-university, cross-border consortium ownership — Latvian and Lithuanian institutions publishing jointly — its Baltic concentration combined with open international submission, and its documented climb from a university series into both Scopus and the Web of Science.

Research Themes Readers Will Find

The journal's contents reflect the research strengths of its founding institutions. Language technology is the clearest signature: Baltic language resources are small by global standards, so speech recognition, synthesis, machine translation support and corpus methods for Latvian and Lithuanian are active local specialities, and BJMC publishes that work for an international audience. Software engineering forms a second pillar — modelling, process analysis, testing and enterprise-system research from the Riga, Vilnius and Tartu groups — and computing didactics a third, covering how programming and informatics are taught in schools and universities across the region. Applied papers connect computing to education, public services, health and business processes. A reader who works through a recent volume gets a fair cross-section of what Baltic computing faculties actually research, which is one of the journal's quiet functions: it is a shop window for a regional research community as well as a venue in its own right.

For librarians, the cataloguing essentials are the ISSN-L 2255-8942 (the print ISSN), the electronic ISSN 2255-8950, the start year 2013 for this title, and the consortium publisher statement headed by the University of Latvia. Coverage windows in citation databases that begin in 2019 describe the Scopus era only; the Web of Science record reaches back to 2015 and the title itself to 2013. The journal should not be confused with the Baltic Journal of Economic Studies or other Baltic-titled periodicals from different publishers, which share geography and naming style but nothing else.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Baltic Journal of Modern Computing? Print ISSN 2255-8942, which is also the ISSN-L, and electronic ISSN 2255-8950, as recorded by the ISSN Portal and DOAJ.

Who publishes Baltic Journal of Modern Computing? A consortium led by the University of Latvia with Vilnius University, the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the University of Latvia, and the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies; Liepaja University is also named among the publishing partners. The numeric publisher code in some database records is an internal catalogue value, not a publisher name.

Is Baltic Journal of Modern Computing open access? Yes — it is a gold open access electronic journal, listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals under a CC BY-SA licence, and authors retain copyright.

Does Baltic Journal of Modern Computing charge an article processing charge? Its DOAJ record states an APC of up to 1,000 EUR. Confirm the current charge and any waivers in the journal's Instructions for Authors before submitting, because the DOAJ figure is a recorded maximum at checking time.

Is Baltic Journal of Modern Computing peer-reviewed? Yes. It is a peer-reviewed journal; its author instructions describe reviewer assessment, revision with a point-by-point response to reviewers, and the possibility that reviewers advise rejection, including for language quality.

When did Baltic Journal of Modern Computing start? Volume 1 appeared in 2013 under this title. The publishing consortium's joint activity is dated from 2008 in partner and DOAJ records, and the journal succeeded a University of Latvia computer science series.

Where is Baltic Journal of Modern Computing indexed? Its pages list the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (from 2015), Scopus (from 2019), DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, Google Scholar, VINITI and others. The journal reports a Scopus CiteScore rank of 174 of 241 (28th percentile, quartile 3) in General Computer Science for 2025; SCImago reports SJR 0.184, Q4. Verify any single service directly before relying on it.

What subjects does Baltic Journal of Modern Computing cover? Computer science, software engineering, information technology, information systems, computer engineering and computing didactics, with strong representation of natural language processing, speech technology and software engineering in its published output.

Conclusion

Baltic Journal of Modern Computing is a worked example of the consortium route to a credible regional journal: five Baltic institutions pooled their authorship and refereeing base, replaced a single-university series with a joint title in 2013, and reached the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2015, Scopus in 2019 and a Web of Science impact factor in 2023. It is quarterly, English-only, gold open access under CC BY-SA with copyright retained by authors, and charges an APC recorded in DOAJ as up to 1,000 EUR. For computing researchers — especially, but not only, those in the Baltic region working in language technology, software engineering and computing education — it offers prompt online publication after acceptance, genuine international indexing, and a readership rooted in the institutions that built it. Authors should prepare manuscripts carefully, since the journal does not copy-edit and reviewers may act on weak language, and should confirm the current charge and board details on the journal's own site before submitting.