In 1996, JACoW was set up for the on-line publication of EPAC and PAC conference proceedings. As this PAC/EPAC collaboration got underway, it was joined by APAC for its first conference, which took place in 1998, and gradually by other conference series: COOL, CYCLOTRONS, DIPAC, FEL, ICALEPCS, ICAP, ICFA ABDW, LINAC and RuPAC.

Each conference series agrees to adopt common templates, and to produce JACoW-compatible files of papers for posting at the site. They also agree to abide by terms of reference and boundary conditions which have been put in place to facilitate the training of editors through hands-on experience in processing during the PAC and EPAC conferences, and also through attendance at the annual JACoW team meetings where technical problems related to electronic publication are addressed.

JACoW has thus become a collaboration in electronic publication, with a steering committee composed of the editors of the past, current and future conferences in each of the above series. The Steering Committee reports through its chairman, CERN's John Poole, to the Scientific Program Committee chairmen of each conference.

More recently, the JACoW collaboration has developed a Scientific Program Management System (SPMS) based on Oracle software. The SPMS is capable of handling all contributions to a scientific conference from abstract submission through to the production of the proceedings.

SPMS is also used for delegate and vendor registration. Scripts developed by members of the collaboration are used to link all contributions into the final version of the proceedings for publication on the JACoW site and for the official publication of the proceedings through IEEE.