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Open Access Journals in Philosophy: Why Aren’t There More, and More Better Ones?

Brian Leiter

Gualtiero Piccinini (Missouri/St. Louis) writes:

I’d love to see philosophers discuss open access philosophy journals.  

Some observations:  (1) In many sciences, some of the most prestigious journals are now open access. 

 

(2) In philosophy, only one open access journal (Philosophers’ Imprint) has a good enough reputation to be ranked among the 20 best philosophy journals (as per the ranking recently published in Leiter Reports); the top philosophy journals remain the usual ones.  

 

(3) Some commercial publishers, such as Bentham, are now trying to establish for profit, open access philosophy journals, but their quality is questionable.

 

High quality, open access philosophy journals seem to be both desirable and feasible – witness Philosophers’ Imprint, not to mention the many prestigious open access journals in other fields.  Why aren’t there more prestigious open access philosophy journals?  Why haven’t open access journals been able to threaten the dominance of the old philosophy journals in the way they have done in other fields?

 Comments are open; post only once. 

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31 responses to “Open Access Journals in Philosophy: Why Aren’t There More, and More Better Ones?”

  1. Brian Domino

    Public funding agencies in the sciences (e.g., US National Institutes of Health, the UK Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust) tend to require that the results of the research they fund be made freely available. For the scientists, an easy way to accomplish that is to publish in an open access journal. To the extent that the "best" scientists get grants from public funding agencies, there is pressure for the best journals to be open access. Moreover, there is grant money to subsidize the open access. The best philosophy journals have no such economic pressure, and philosophers do not depend on, or generally have access to, grants in the way that scientists do.

    Reply
  2. mark lance

    This is true, of course, about funding, but the arguments laid out by Philosophers Imprint are completely convincing anyway. Nothing of value is added by the publishers. We write the articles, referee the articles, do the editing — all for free. In the case of books there is some advertising done, but in the case of journals none that matters. Everyone knows what journals matter and only professional philosophers look at them. The cost to university libraries buying print journals is way higher than the cost of putting them professionally on the web. (And if you really really can't stand to print something out or read it online, one can contract with a print on demand agency for a fraction of the cost of a publisher.)

    So I think the question is there: what are we getting out of this deal?

    Reply
  3. Richard Chappell

    I imagine a large part of the problem is just inertia. (Mostly) everyone agrees that open access would be better. But fewer care enough to, e.g., pack up and move their editorial board to an open access platform.

    Some worry about the funding side of things, but it turns out that shouldn't be much of a barrier after all — as several librarians helpfully explained in comments to this post:
    http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/12/adopting-open-access.html

    Reply
  4. Mark van Roojen

    What Phil Imprint did right is to leverage the prestige of its editors and institution to become a place people would want to be published almost immediately. JESP seems to be on a similar track.

    I think the impression of prestige and being a real journal with serious refereeing matters a lot. Younger people would be foolish to send a publication to a journal that a P&T committee is going to disregard. More established folks are probably publishing to be read, and that requires getting past the filters people use in choosing what to read. One that lots of people use is the reputation of the journal.

    So I think getting people to regard an open source journal as genuinely equivalent to an older journal is going to be required of any open source journal that wants to be a success. Phil Imprint has shown that can be done, but it probably requires some thought about that goal to do it. (Phil Imprint clearly had it in mind from the beginning.)

    Reply
  5. Michael

    Not sure if this crowd will be a fan, but, there are a good number of quality open access journals dealing with recent European/continental philosophy. Some examples would be Cosmos and History, Parrhesia, and Phaenex. The first two being of a superb quality, and both being produced by Australian institutions. I can only speak for those working in contemporary European philosophy, but much of the work being produced in journals such as these (and, the new french/english online journal Nessiea:http://nessie-philo.com/) are putting out much more exciting research than many of the more 'established' print journals in contemporary European philosophy. It's also interesting that most of these on-line journals are usually filled with work from either very notable figures at the top of the field, or complete unknowns/graduate students. It creates a really nice mix.

    Reply
  6. Brian Leiter

    I do not have the impression that, even among those working in recent Continental philosophy, that these journals are especially well-regarded.

    Reply
  7. Laurence B McCullough

    In many medical and scientific journals one is offered the opportunity of open-access publication, for a rather large fee. Journals that are all open-access often also change large fees. Our colleagues with NIH and other grants have a way to pay those fees (our tax dollars so usefully put to work, subsidizing these journals). Philosophers usually do not have grant or departmental funds to pay these fees. (One recently was $1500.) Perhaps it is simply the economics of open access (free to readers but not to authors) that is impeding their development in philosophy and other disciplines of the humanities. As the great philosophy Bob Dylan put it, While money doesn't talk, it swears.

    Reply
  8. Bryan McCarthy

    Actually, in reference to the last post, I just got a letter from a journal that is reviewing a paper of mine. In it, the journal requested that I consider open access while I await its decision. The price: $3,000. Details here: http://www.springer.com/open+access/open+choice?SGWID=0-40359-12-115394-0

    Reply
  9. Enzo Rossi

    There are obviously two separate issues here: (i) whether and new open access journals should take the place of the old journals, and (ii) whether old established journals should ditch their publishers and move to an open access platform.

    (ii) seems the most attractive option, but there also seem to be a number of economic obstacles. For example, who would pay for the sort of administrative support typically offered by publishers to successful journals? Even electronic submission systems don't maintain themselves. And what about the promotion that publishers organise (e.g. stands and free issues at conferences, etc.) All those things still give an edge to traditional journals, so they have at least a pro tanto reason to stick to the status quo.

    Finally, one of the underlying problems is probably that most of the people who are likely to cite articles from a given philosophy journal probably have access to that journal via their institution anyway, and the publishers (and many authors) don't care all that much about the other potential readers.

    There would also be a third way of sorts: open access with advertising (already pioneered by some, no doubt). But, aesthetic and ethical worries aside, that seems unlikely to go a long way in terms of covering costs.

    Reply
  10. Neil Levy

    It seems to me that Philosopher's Imprint is a failed experiment. I say this for two reasons. First, it has recently published its 50th paper. 50 papers in a little more than 8 years is not flourishing. Second, its prestige is lower than its selectivity would suggest. Its standards are, I think, as high as Nous or PPR, perhaps even higher, yet it only ranks 11 in the recent survey. These facts are related. It has published relatively little because it applies such high standards but receives (I conjecture) relatively few submissions of a sufficiently high quality. And the reason this is the case is because if someone has a choice of publishing in Nous or PI (say), only a high degree of commitment to the ethos of PI would would lead one to choose it. In choosing it, one chooses the less prestigious to the more. No one on the tenure track, or for whom prestige matters, would do so.

    Of course, if PI's reputation would lift significantly, that might change. But it would remain the case that those on the tenure track, for instance, would be wary. One salient difference between philosophy and the sciences is that philosophers publish relatively little, and therefore need to be more selective in where they publish.

    Reply
  11. Stephen Darwall

    Far be it from me to judge whether or not Philosophers' Imprint is a failed experiment, but I would like to offer a more fine-grained picture of the Imprint's publication data. 50 papers in 8 years averages about 6.25 per year–not a big number. However, in 2007 and 2008, PI published 9 and 12 papers respectively. And 2009 should turn out to be a banner year for publications, with many accepted papers in the pipeline. Moreover, submissions have also increased over the last few years at a rate that is noteworthy. It naturally took awhile for the Imprint to find its feet, so that in 2005, the fifth year of operations, submissions totaled 65. In 2008, however, we had 170 submissions, almost three times what we had received in 2005. And already in the first five months of 2009, Philosophers' Imprint has received 194 submissions, significantly more that we received during all of 2008. Finally, in considering publication statistics, it is worth bearing in mind that the Imprint publishes neither discussion pieces nor book reviews.

    Reply
  12. Roberta Millstein

    A new online, open access journal called Philosophy & Theory in Biology (P&TB) is starting up — website at http://www.philosophyandtheoryinbiology.org/. It will be very interesting to see how it does, especially since the audience is intended to be both philosophers and biologists. I predict that it will do well, and I hope that it does do well.

    Reply
  13. Mark Schroeder

    In contrast to Neil Levy, it's not clear to me at all (disclaimer: I've published once in Phil Imprint and 4x in Nous) that choosing to publish in Nous over Phil Imprint is a rational decision for someone 'on the tenure track'. If your paper is accepted in Phil Imprint, it proceeds directly to the publication process – mine for example was 'in print' within a month of acceptance. If your paper is accepted in Nous, on the other hand, you have on the order of 25-27 months to wait before it appears. 27 months is, last time I checked, well over a third of most tenure clocks. And as Neil notes, anyone who knows the publication standards at both journals will be just as impressed to see 'Phil Imprint' next to its title on your CV as to see 'Nous' there. So the 'prestige' issue must be only about capturing the good opinions of those who are less informed about the standards applied at the two journals. Phil Review, Mind, and JPhil have shorter lag times to publication, but they've all also had extraordinary problems recently in returning submitted work in an acceptable timeframe – unlike both Nous and Phil Imprint, to the best of my knowledge.

    So why might that make it rational for a tenure-track philosopher to prefer Phil Imprint to Nous even if Nous is more prestigious? It's hard to overstate how big a difference it makes early in your career to have your work out and being read. Philosophical academia is, whatever its other virtues, a slow world, and it takes a long time for things to happen. If someone reads your article the day it is published and cites it in a paper they are almost finished with, it's still fair to count, conservatively, on a year before it's accepted for publication – and easily as many as three years before it's in print (if it's published in Nous, for example). And though some people are responsible and read the journals and use resources like the philosopher's index or are good at finding new work available on the web, it's fair to say that the way people are most likely to be led to read your work is if they see it cited – so unless you have pre-publication buzz, it can easily be five years from your paper's acceptance to most people knowing about it. And never mind the time it took you to write and revise it, or the time it spent under review. Cutting out two years of sitting on a shelf is of value that I think should not be underestimated. The only reason I've published more in Nous than in Phil Imprint is that until very recently, Phil Imprint had a policy of not considering work by authors they had already published.

    This is not to say that prestige shouldn't matter; certainly journal prestige is one of the clues that we use in helping us to determine how good work is likely to be – for example, in evaluating CVs or in choosing what to read. But given high enough prestige, it makes perfect rational sense to accept exposure as part of a tradeoff with prestige, and that is part of what Phil Imprint offers. As more people come to appreciate this tradeoff, the standing of Phil Imprint will improve even further.

    Reply
  14. Tuomas E. Tahko

    I won't speculate about why there aren't more high quality open access philosophy journals, but I agree that there certainly should be. However, there are other open access online journals in addition to Philosophers’ Imprint that are worth mentioning, I would especially like to draw attention to the Australasian Journal of Logic: http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/ajl/ The most important factor for the success of such journals is surely that people read them and refer to the articles published in these journals. Of course, reflecting Neil Levy's comments above, people should also submit quality papers to these journals, but that will only happen if these journals become better known.

    Reply
  15. Gualtiero Piccinini

    Neil, you make some good points, but I disagree that Phil Imprint is a failed experiment because it ranks only 11th. When I (quickly) looked at the raw data of the survey, I got the impression that votes for Phil Imprints fell into two categories: some ranked in the top 5, while others ranked it at the bottom or didn't rank it at all. So it may just be those who know Phil Imprint already take it to be at the top, while some others are a bit behind the curve.

    So Michigan did it and in my opinion succeeded brilliantly. Why aren't other top departments following their lead?

    Reply
  16. Brian Leiter

    Regarding the earlier poll about journals: please note that Philosophers' Imprint was the youngest journal in the top 20, by a wide margin, and was effectively tied for 10th with Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. PI has already had two papers chosen as among 'the ten best' of the year in the Philosopher's Annual, far more than most of the journals that placed ahead of it in our on-line survey. I confess that Neil Levy's comment struck me as so bizarrely wrong-headed, that I was tempted not to approve it, but he did sign his name to it and it has now generated appropriate responses. The real question is how other on-line, open access journals can be as successful. As has already been noted, the key seems to be to get the backing of high-status editors and departments.

    Reply
  17. Jamie Dreier

    Neil, I don't have a big problem with most of what you say, but your conclusion (FAIL) seems wrong to me. As BL says, Philosopher's Imprint is still young, and I'd add that of all journals in the top twenty in reputation, it surely has the highest chance of rising in reputation over the next decade.

    I agree with Mark Schroeder about the great value of publishing in Philosopher's Imprint. The newer and less-known JESP (http://jesp.org/) gets its contributors well over 500 downloads in the first few months of publication. Even allowing that some people will download and not read, that's an exposure that no print journal can compete with. I'm sure Imprint provides even more exposure.

    JESP has USC sponsorship and the financial support of the Annenberg Center. Commitment from a very substantial organization is certainly crucial to success, since otherwise potential authors are going to be afraid their work will disappear. I don't know whether JESP's lack of affiliation with a philosophy department has kept it (us — I'm a member of the editorial board) from having a bigger reputation. The journal does have plenty of high profile contributors, though, and a good reputation within the ethics community, so I'm confident its fortunes will rise.

    Reply
  18. David Wallace

    There's one other factor in the sciences – or in physics, at any rate – that doesn't seem to turn up much in philosophy: in physics, journals in general are much less useful because there is a centralised preprint database (www.arxiv.org) which is sufficiently policed for cranks that most stuff on it is worth looking at, and almost everyone gets their papers from there. It's pretty much literally true now that the only value in publishing a physics paper in a journal is prestige: it has next to no effect on readership.

    I find it quite odd that philosophy hasn't made the same kind of move. It has many of the virtues that make this model work for theoretical physics (notably, a largely a priori methodology and a tendency for a fairly large fraction of a paper's intended readership to be experts). But even in philosophy of science, where there is a reasonably functional preprint archive (philsci-archive.pitt.edu), it still seems to be relatively lightly read compared to the print journals. Several years after making the move from physics to philosophy, I still keep having to remind myself that lots of people even in my subject narrowly construed will only see a paper once I've actually got it into print.

    Reply
  19. Eric Schwitzgebel

    It's perhaps worth noting that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is another shining example of open-access philosophy.

    In broad strokes, SEP is built on the same model as Philosophers' Imprint: substantial support from a prestigious institution, admirable time commitments from leading philosophers dedicated to the project, and a commitment from the beginning to very high quality standards. As far as I'm aware PI is entirely funded by Michigan, while SEP has sought supplementary funds from other sources, with some success.

    Reply
  20. Paul

    Just to add to what Eric Schwitzgebel said, I have found the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews to be a very nice and useful resource. I don't know how it is funded, but it is free and the quality is certainly high.

    Reply
  21. Mark Engleson

    Why is the journal model so sacrosanct? In law and social science, we have databases like SSRN. There are rough measures of quality like readership, but this could be improved by adding a rating system. Some philosophers have already done a great deal of work assembling phenomenal lists of online papers.

    Why not create something along the lines of a structured list or database system where papers are added based on some system of recommendations and further reviews? If we centralized the whole thing, it might even be more efficient and less demanding than the current system under which top journals compete for and share the limited resource of top talent? We might even establish quality tiers, so that more papers could get publish, but acknowledge which are the best. And, where the current system determines everything by an editor and two reviewers, once something is put online, we could also allow readers to score it too, so that a paper that readers felt was over- or under-rated was recognized as such.

    Reply
  22. Rick Grush

    FWIW, my own little personal initiative, including reasons I have decided to no longer support, by publishing in, refereeing for, or otherwise giving my labor ours to, commercial interests::

    http://commercialfreephilosophy.org/

    Reply
  23. Patricia Marino

    Some university libraries are developing open-access archives of their own for faculty to put pre-print or post-print versions of their papers. At least this allows some open access to papers published with traditional journals.

    Journals vary with respect to what form of pre- and post- publication web-posting they allow; the site
    http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ has information about a range of publishers and what their policies are.

    I hope in addition to developing more open-access journals, we might pressure more closed-access journals to allow open online posting (say, on our own websites) after some appropriate time has passed — five years, or something.

    Reply
  24. Neil Levy

    Let me add to my comment, since it generated such a response. On the data available to me (the number of papers published, and the disconnect between their quality and the journal's ranking), it seemed reasonable to say that PI is a failed experiment. The extra information added by Stephen Darwall heavily qualifies that verdict. In the light of that information, I would say the experiment is ongoing. The data Gualtiero Piccinini mentions is interesting: if that's right (he said he only glanced at the data), then there is significant disagreement about PI among philosophers, perhaps reflecting an outdated animus to online publication, or a commitment to open-access on the other (or both).

    I should add that my remark reflected my own decision-making processes: on the rare occasions on which I have had a paper I thought good enough to be accepted by PI, I have tried elsewhere first, because it has seemed to me that a paper in the Leiter top 5 would be worth more to me, and more widely read too, than a paper in PI. I assumed others in my position were making the same choice and that it would therefore be self-fulfilling. I would be very glad to learn I am wrong. I do not think the data shows that I am wrong, merely that the experiment is not yet over (and the signs are hopeful).

    Reply
  25. Neil Levy

    Just to add one further point: an extra piece of data that would be helpful here is how the proportion of submissions from people on the tenure track (or otherwise, like me, without job security) compares across journals like PI, PPR and J. Phil.

    Reply
  26. Matt McAdam

    If one is concerned with how widely read one's paper will be, then this certainly seems to speak in favor of submitting to PI given that (as occurred today [coincidence?]) they send an email announcing the publication of each new paper.

    Reply
  27. Mark van Roojen

    Patricia Marino writes:

    I hope in addition to developing more open-access journals, we might pressure more closed-access journals to allow open online posting (say, on our own websites) after some appropriate time has passed — five years, or something.

    It used to be routine that journal contracts in philosophy let authors retain the right to republish articles in a collection of their own work. Not long ago contracts for some journals started sneaking in "printed collections" to forbid people from collecting their work on a website, I presume. Now at least some Kluwer journals (or whatever the name of the conglomerate is now) have an even more restrictively worded contract that doesn't even seem to give permission for printed collections. I for one find this unilateral redefinition of the terms of a relationship annoying as all Hell.

    So I very much agree with Patricia that we should urge journals to grant routine permission to put a publication on a website, but I think that 5 years is way to long to wait. It didn't used to be like this. And given how much of the actual work is done for free by those of us who referee, I just can't see an argument that they need the exclusive right to make money or deserve it for services rendered.

    Reply
  28. Andrei Marmor

    Like Jamie Dreier, I am one of the editors of JESP (together with Julia Driver and David Estlund). Let me give you some facts about the journal that might help to form an informed judgment: though our journal specializes in a certain field, we get about 2 or 3 submissions a week. We normally make an editorial decision within 6 to 8 weeks of submission. Our acceptance rate now stands at about 6% of submissions. Articles published get an average of about 1,200 downloads during the first year and about 900 downloads a year afterward. We do not publish many articles. But this is one of the main advantages of online journals: they are not constrained by the need to issue printed volumes, therefore they can publish only those articles that they deem worthy of publication whenever they are ready. Our copy editing process takes no more than a week, so it only takes a week or two from the time of acceptance to actual publication.
    Far from failure, I am convinced that online publication is the future and sooner or later, journals will have to follow this model. Only financial constraints prevent this process from moving faster.

    Reply
  29. Mike

    The announcement that the former Cambridge UP journal "Medieval Philosophy and Theology" was moving to open access format sponsored by Cornell University Library seemed like an interesting venture. The website is fancy, but there hasn't been a posting of new material since the publication date of 2003:

    http://cip.cornell.edu/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&page=current&handle=cip.mpat

    The demise of a good journal is troubling; perhaps it will undergo a phoenix-like resurrection. I wonder if this (apparent) failure to make the move from subscription to open access is keeping other journals from attempting such a move.

    Reply
  30. Stevan Harnad

    12 OA STATISTICS AND SOME CONCLUSIONS

    (full text: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/591-guid.html )

    #1: The vast majority of current (peer-reviewed) journal articles are not OA (Open Access) (neither Green OA nor Gold OA ).

    #2: The vast majority of journals are not Gold OA.

    #3: The vast majority of journals are Green OA.

    #4: The vast majority of citations are to the top minority of articles (the Pareto/Seglen 90/10 rule).

    #5: The vast majority of journals (or journal articles) are not among the top minority of journals (or journal articles).

    #6: The vast majority of the top journals are not Gold OA.

    #7: The vast majority of the top journals are Green OA.

    #8: The vast majority of article authors would comply willingly with a Green OA mandate from their institutions and/or funders.

    #9: The vast majority of institutions and funders do not yet mandate Green OA.

    #10: The vast majority of Gold OA journals are not paid-publication journals.

    #11: The vast majority of the top Gold OA journals are paid-publication journals.

    #12: The vast majority of institutions do not have the funds to subscribe to all the journals their users need.

    CONCLUSION 1: The fact that the vast majority of Gold OA journals are not paid-publication journals is not relevant if we are concerned about providing OA to the articles in the top journals.

    CONCLUSION 2: Green OA, mandated by institutions and funders, is the vastly underutilized means of providing OA.

    IMPLICATION: It is far more productive (of OA) for universities and funders to mandate Green OA than to fund Gold OA.

    Stevan Harnad
    American Scientist Open Access Forum

    Reply
  31. Roberta Millstein

    The new online, open access journal Philosophy & Theory in Biology (that I mention above) is now live at:

    http://philosophyandtheoryinbiology.org/

    Reply

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