Latin American Journal of Mathematics

About Latin American Journal of Mathematics

Latin American Journal of Mathematics — a diamond open-access mathematics journal from São Carlos, Brazil

The Latin American Journal of Mathematics, usually shortened to LAJM, is a peer-reviewed electronic journal of pure and applied mathematics published in Brazil and hosted by the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar, the Federal University of São Carlos), through its Department of Mathematics. Its electronic ISSN is 2965-0798, the identifier recorded on this JournalsWorld record and on the journal's own site. The journal's own description calls it a diamond open-access title: reading is free, publishing is free, and there are no submission fees and no article processing charges of any kind. That single fact shapes almost everything else about LAJM — who it is for, how it is funded, how it reviews, and why a young journal based at a Brazilian federal university can plausibly aim at a genuinely international authorship rather than only a regional one.

LAJM is a young journal. OpenAlex, resolving the title through its ISSN endpoint at the time of checking, records a first publication year of 2022, and the journal's own archive had reached Volume 5, Number 1 in 2026, which fits a first volume in 2022. In other words, this is not a long-established title trading on a century of back files; it is a new, university-run journal building its reputation article by article, in full view, under a licence that lets anyone read and reuse what it publishes. For authors weighing where to send a manuscript, and for readers weighing how much trust to place in what they find here, that youth cuts both ways, and this profile sets out both sides plainly: a completely barrier-free publishing model and a clear institutional home, set against a still-small citation record that the journal itself does not hide.

Journal at a glance

Identity and history

The journal's name makes a deliberate claim. Latin America has a deep mathematical tradition — strong schools in dynamical systems, geometry, mathematical physics, algebra and analysis, spread across Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and beyond — yet much of the region's best work has historically been published in journals owned and edited far from the region. A journal that carries the region's name, is edited from within the region, and charges neither readers nor authors is a statement about where mathematical publishing can be anchored. At the same time, LAJM is careful, in its own self-description, not to present itself as a regional-only venue: it describes itself as an international journal aimed at researchers, educators and students both nationally and internationally, and it welcomes contributions from researchers worldwide. Graduate students are explicitly encouraged to submit work based on a master's thesis or a doctoral dissertation, which is an unusually welcoming signal for early-career authors and one that fits the journal's teaching-university home.

The institutional setting matters here. UFSCar is a Brazilian federal university in São Carlos, a city in the state of São Paulo with a dense concentration of universities and research institutes, and mathematics is one of its established strengths. The journal is published by the university's Department of Mathematics, and its correspondence addresses sit on the university's own domain. University-published journals of this kind are funded as academic infrastructure rather than as commercial products: the costs of the platform, the editorial work and the hosting are carried by the institution and by the volunteer labour of editors and referees, which is exactly what makes the diamond model possible. The journal runs on the Open Journal Systems platform — OpenAlex also flags the title as an OJS journal — the same open-source publishing software used by thousands of university journals around the world.

Because the journal began only in 2022, its history is short enough to state completely. Its first volume appeared in 2022; it has published one volume a year since, reaching Volume 5 in 2026, with articles released on a continuous flow rather than held back for a bundled issue. Alongside its regular flow, the journal has begun to run guest-edited special issues tied to international conferences — its site carried calls linked to a conference on recent advances in mathematics and its applications organised with Tripura University in India, and to a conference on algebra and topology with applications in artificial intelligence organised with MNNIT Allahabad — a sign of a young journal deliberately building international editorial networks rather than waiting for submissions to arrive on their own.

Scope and subjects

LAJM's stated scope is broad by design: it publishes articles resulting from original research, as well as outreach articles, in pure or applied mathematics. Its current about page phrases the same remit as high-quality original research articles and surveys in all areas of pure and applied mathematics. In practice that breadth means the journal does not ask authors to fit a narrow subject list. Work in algebra, analysis, geometry, topology, dynamical systems, mathematical physics, probability, combinatorics, number theory, differential equations, optimisation and the mathematical foundations of computing and artificial intelligence all sit naturally inside a remit written this way — and the journal's own special-issue calls, which name algebra, topology, analysis and the mathematical foundations of AI, show that breadth being used rather than merely declared. Readers should judge fit by the articles the journal has actually published in recent volumes, which are all freely readable on its site, rather than by the scope sentence alone.

Two features of the scope deserve emphasis. First, the journal explicitly makes room for survey and outreach writing alongside original research. Surveys that give a critical, comprehensive account of a topic are a named submission category on its submissions page, and outreach articles are named in its own description of what it publishes. For a mathematics journal this is a meaningful editorial choice: it values exposition and synthesis, not only new theorems, and it gives established researchers a place to write the kind of broad account that helps a field teach itself. Second, the language policy is genuinely trilingual in orientation. Papers are preferred in English, but Spanish and Portuguese are also accepted. That policy lowers a real barrier for researchers across Latin America and the Iberian world, while the English preference keeps the journal's content reachable for an international readership.

Article types and who should submit

The journal's submissions page distinguishes, at minimum, research articles presenting original and unpublished results, and surveys presenting a critical and comprehensive author's view of a topic across a broad time span. Special-issue sections sit alongside those regular categories when a call is open, with their own eligibility rules — for example, restriction to registered conference participants for conference-linked issues — and their own submission windows, while still passing through the journal's standard independent peer review. Authors should check which sections are open at the moment of submission, because special sections open and close on their own dates while the regular research and survey flow is continuous.

The intended authorship is wide. The journal addresses itself to researchers, educators and students, nationally and internationally, and it singles out graduate students as welcome contributors, encouraging submissions drawn from master's and doctoral work. That invitation should be read accurately: it is not a promise of easy acceptance — the journal applies double-blind peer review and describes its aim as high-quality research — but it is a promise that a manuscript will not be dismissed for coming from a student, a small institution, or a country whose researchers often face fee barriers elsewhere. In a diamond open-access journal, the author's institution does not need a subscription for colleagues to read the work, and the author does not need a grant line for publication charges. For researchers at institutions with thin library budgets, that combination is the whole point of the model.

Editorial process and peer review

LAJM states that it employs a double-blind review process: authors and referees are kept anonymous to one another, and manuscripts should be prepared with that in mind, removing identifying material from the manuscript file itself. The journal maintains a named editorial team page on its site, listing its editors and their affiliations, and it publishes the standard apparatus of a serious open-access journal: editorial policies covering focus and scope, the peer review process, publication ethics and malpractice, copyright and licensing, publication fees, and a digital preservation policy. The presence of a written publication-ethics and malpractice statement, and of a preservation policy, matters for a young journal, because those are the documents that govern what happens when something goes wrong — a disputed authorship, a suspected duplicate submission, or the long-term survival of the archive — rather than merely describing what happens when things go right.

On timing, the journal's continuous-flow model means an accepted article does not wait for an issue to fill; it is published as part of the current annual volume once it is ready. Authors used to commercial mathematics journals, where a year or more can pass between acceptance and appearance, should note the difference. Exact review durations are not published as a verified figure in the sources checked for this profile, so authors who need a timeline for a thesis defence, a job application or a grant report should ask the editorial office directly rather than rely on third-party estimates.

Metrics — read them in context, and only from their source

For a journal founded in 2022, citation metrics are necessarily small, and this profile reports only figures that could be traced to a named source at the time of checking. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint (source S4404663358), recorded 37 works and 11 citations for the title, with an h-index of 2 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.2, and coverage running from 2022 to 2026. Those are OpenAlex's counts, built from its own graph, and they will grow as the journal's articles accumulate citations; they are not a Journal Impact Factor, and LAJM has no Clarivate impact factor figure that could be verified from the sources checked. The journal's own website displays a CiteScore 2025 figure of 0.3, at the 5th percentile, drawn from Scopus data — again, a small number that simply reflects a very young journal whose earliest articles have had little time to be cited. The older JournalsWorld template text for this record quoted an h-index of 1; the difference between that figure, OpenAlex's 2 and the CiteScore display is a useful reminder that every metric belongs to a specific database, a specific date and a specific counting method, and none of them should be quoted without naming which.

What should an author make of these numbers? Mainly this: LAJM is not yet a journal anyone chooses for a metric. It is a journal an author might choose for its model — free to publish, free to read, properly peer reviewed, institutionally hosted, licensed for reuse — and for the fit of the manuscript, the quality of the refereeing and the audience it reaches across Latin America and beyond. As its volumes accumulate and its special issues draw in international authors, its citation record will either grow or it will not; the honest position at the time of writing is that the record is short, verifiable and still being written. Authors whose institutions require publication in a journal carrying a particular ranking should check their institution's current list directly before submitting, rather than assuming this young title appears on it.

Indexing and discoverability

Discoverability for LAJM rests on several concrete pillars that could be verified. The journal is published on the Open Journal Systems platform with standard article-level metadata, which makes its content harvestable by scholarly search engines and aggregators. OpenAlex indexes the title and resolves it by its ISSN, as the figures above show. The journal's own site displays Scopus CiteScore information for the title, indicating that Scopus tracks it for CiteScore purposes. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by the journal's ISSN, made at the time of checking for this profile, returned no record; authors for whom a DOAJ listing is a formal requirement should re-check the directory at the moment of submission, because listings change and a search result on one date is not a permanent verdict on a young journal. Beyond formal indexes, the practical discoverability of a mathematics paper today also runs through author self-archiving and preprint circulation, and the journal's CC BY licence places no obstacle in the way of either: anything published in LAJM may be redistributed freely, with attribution, by anyone.

Fees, licensing and author rights

The fee position is the simplest of any journal in this batch to state, because the journal states it itself, repeatedly: the Latin American Journal of Mathematics supports free access to scientific knowledge and is free of cost for both readers and authors; it operates under the diamond open-access model, with no submission fees and no article processing charges. There is no waiver system to apply for, because there is nothing to waive. Content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, which permits copying, redistribution, adaptation and reuse — including commercial reuse — provided appropriate credit is given. Copyright and licensing information is carried on the journal's site under the university's name. Authors should still read the journal's own copyright and licence page before submitting, since that page, not any third-party profile, is the governing text; but on the evidence of the journal's own statements, the model is exactly what diamond open access promises: the institution pays the costs, and neither side of the scholarly exchange is charged at the point of use.

How to submit

Submissions are made through the journal's own website, which runs a standard journal-management workflow: create an account, follow the submissions page, and file the manuscript under the correct section — research article, survey, or an open special-issue section if the work belongs to one and falls inside its window. Prepare the manuscript for double-blind review, with identifying information removed from the file itself. Manuscripts may be written in English, Spanish or Portuguese, with English preferred. There are no fees at any stage. Authors should follow the journal's published guidelines and template where the submissions page calls for them, particularly for special-issue sections, where the journal states explicitly that manuscripts must comply with the official LAJM guidelines and template. Questions can be directed to the editorial office at the contact address published on the site, lajm@ufscar.br. As with any journal, authors should confirm that the work is original and unpublished and is not under consideration elsewhere, in line with the journal's publication-ethics statement.

Similar journals and how LAJM compares

Authors in Latin American mathematics often weigh a set of regional and international options side by side. Long-established regional titles with deep back files carry the weight of history; large commercial mathematics journals carry the weight of rankings; society journals carry the weight of their communities. LAJM's offer is different in kind rather than in degree: it is a young, university-hosted, fee-free, CC BY journal with a deliberately broad pure-and-applied remit and a trilingual door. A doctoral student in São Carlos, Bogotá or Buenos Aires with a solid chapter of a dissertation, an educator with a well-built survey, or a research group that wants its work readable by every colleague in the region regardless of library budgets — those are the authors for whom this journal's design makes the most sense today. Authors who need a long citation history behind the venue, or a specific commercial ranking, will look elsewhere for now, and the journal's own transparent metrics display suggests it would not pretend otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Latin American Journal of Mathematics free to publish in? Yes. The journal states that it is free of cost for both readers and authors, with no submission fees and no article processing charges, under the diamond open-access model.

What is the journal's ISSN? Its electronic ISSN is 2965-0798. It is an electronic journal; no separate print ISSN is recorded on the record checked for this profile.

Who publishes it? The Department of Mathematics of the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar) in São Carlos, Brazil, hosts and publishes the journal.

What languages can I submit in? English is preferred; Spanish and Portuguese are also accepted, as the journal states.

How is peer review handled? The journal states that it uses double-blind peer review. Special-issue manuscripts pass through the journal's standard independent peer review as well.

Does the journal have an impact factor? No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor could be verified from the sources checked. The journal's site displays a CiteScore 2025 of 0.3, and OpenAlex recorded an h-index of 2 with 37 works and 11 citations at the time of checking — figures that reflect a journal founded in 2022.

Is it listed in DOAJ? A DOAJ search by ISSN at the time of checking returned no record. Re-check the directory before relying on this either way, because listings change.

Can graduate students submit? Yes — the journal explicitly encourages graduate students to submit work based on a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation.

Profile prepared for JournalsWorld from the journal's official website, its OpenAlex source record resolved by ISSN, and a DOAJ search by ISSN, all checked in October 2026. Figures are attributed to their sources as at checking time and change as the journal grows.