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Journal Problems, Redux: Not Enough Space at the Leading Journals…So Why Aren’t More On-Line?

Brian Leiter

A young philosopher writes:

I'm an untenured faculty member at [a PhD-granting department], and I'm writing because I think something needs to be done about the state of philosophy journals lately. I am powerless to do anything, but maybe if some attention is drawn to the problems (again) on your blog, the situation can be improved.

The problems, as I see them, are these. Junior faculty need to publish in "good" journals. But this is getting harder and harder to do.  Currently THREE of the top six (according to the survey you did) philosophy journals are not currently accepting submissions (Nous, PPR, and AJP). The situation with AJP is a one-time only problem (the website says that the editor is ill), but it seems like Nous and PPR only accept submissions for about 6 months out of any given year lately. This has the effect of roughly doubling the number of submissions to the other top journals. These other journals are then swamped with submissions, and their review times slow. (As it is, when you send a paper to the Philosophical Review these days, six months go by before the paper is even sent to someone to read.) The editors of these journals pressure referees to be extra critical, so that they do not also acquire a long backlog of accepted papers. The editors also cut down on the number of referees who read each paper, since they have so many papers to send out. It seems to me that this does not lead to yet higher standards at these journals. Instead it just increases the amount of arbitrariness in the review process, so that it is more likely that even good papers will be rejected. Add to this the fact that the journals that are out of commission are the ones with good editorial practices and faster review times, and the result is that there are relatively few places to send your paper, you must wait a long time to find out whether it will be published, and the chances that it will be accepted are lower. For those under the time pressure of a tenure clock, this is a disaster. It is hard to imagine making the case to my dean that my paper was not published in a "good" journal because so many of those journals were out of commission for most of the last few years—even if that is a large part of the explanation.

What are the possible solutions? We either need more "good" philosophy journals, or we need the good ones to publish more often. The founding of Philosophers' Imprint was a big help here—not only is it a new journal, but because it is online-only it is not confined to publishing only four issues worth of papers each year. But no other general philosophy journal ranked in your survey has shown any signs of giving up the print-journal calendar and following this model. Why not? I'm not sure who is benefitting from the current set-up. In fact, there seems to be an opportunity here for some of the journals: journals ranked near the middle (say, the American Philosophical Quarterly) could re-invent themselves and increase their prestige by going online-only.

This seems like a smart, strategic suggestion.  Of course, the logistical and financial support of an on-line journal is not a simple matter.  But my correspondent is surely right that there is an opportunity here for an existing print journal to significantly expand its prestige and visibility by going on-line, following the PI model. 

Comments open; comments must include a valid e-mail address.  Full name in signature line preferred, esp. from faculty.  Please submit your comment only once; it may take awhile to appear.

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44 responses to “Journal Problems, Redux: Not Enough Space at the Leading Journals…So Why Aren’t More On-Line?”

  1. another young philosopher

    since January 2001, when Philosophers' Imprint published its first article, it has published only 61 articles – in ten years. I'm sure the open-source online-only model is valuable and can address some of the above problems, but PI doesn't show that.

    Reply
  2. Brian Leiter

    I believe PI has been publishing more articles almost every year. The goal, of course, is not just to publish a lot, but to publish good work, which (allowing for my conflict of interest, having published there), I think PI has been doing. As more young philosophers get used to this publishing model, and start submitting their best work to PI, I expect PI will publish more.

    Reply
  3. Gregory Wheeler

    This is an excellent suggestion, but opening up more space in top journals might only solve part of the problem of making a tenure case in the not too distant future. This is because opening up more space to publish in top venues will not address the growing pressure from deans and funding agencies to demonstrate evidence of "research impact". For many departments in a typical dean's portfolio, it won't wash simply to publish in a top venue; one has to show evidence that the candidate's publications are impacting that field, and they do this by using (and misusing) bibliometrics. That's the trend, like it or not, and I doubt that the recent news out of the UK is an isolated event.

    But to be in this game, a field has to have strong habits of citing relevant work along with timely publication channels. If instead you have a field with generally weak citation habits and a dismal publication system whose top publications aren't even in the main citation indexes, well, one can imagine the Power Point slides for austerity plans that ranks departments by "impact".

    Reply
  4. Mohan Matthen

    It won't be of any use to presently untenured faculty to say so, but there is at least as much fault in the way universities assess people for tenure. There are so many different ways of communicating research today — blogs, on-line collections of papers, on-line conferences, and so on. In many cases, the work that is posted to these forums is not "polished" — nevertheless, they seem appropriate for vigorous discussions of gestating ideas, and one would hope that untenured faculty would be full of such new thoughts. Deans, department chairs, et al ought to be interested in assessments that are more broadly based than just publication in prestige journals. Doesn't it make more sense to make tenure-assessment practices conform to current publication trends than to try and reform publication practices to meet the needs of the tenure system?

    Reply
  5. David Chalmers

    Hiatuses are really a symptom rather than the source of the problem. The basic problem is that the amount of publishable philosophy being submitted has increased a lot and the space in good journals hasn't increased commensurately. The result is that journals either have to apply uncomfortably high criteria for publication or have to employ other means (hiatuses, slow processing) to reduce submissions. New journals and newly online journals help a bit, but the real bottleneck is with the prestigious journals. Experience shows that it's hard for new journals or even old journals to join the prestige group — and I don't think it's realistic to think that moving a midrange journal online will make it more prestigious.

    The obvious solution is for the prestigious journals to publish more. This has already started to happen in recent years, with most of the leading journals increasing their capacity. But perhaps there can be more. I know from experience that journal publishers are often extremely keen to have their journals publish more issues or more pages, because then they can increase their subscription fees. Editors and boards are sometimes resistant because they want to maintain high standards. But the hiatuses signal that well-run prestigious journals are now getting more high-standard submissions than they can publish. The other big obstacle is increased workloads for already-overworked editors. The workload problem is also a primary factor with the infamous slow journals (I'm not sure that everyone appreciates what an extraordinary and supererogatory job the editors of the well-run journals are doing). I suspect that in the long run there has to be some reworking of the editorial system to deal with these things. But it's a nontrivial problem.

    Reply
  6. Harry Brighouse

    Having recently sat on a divisional committee, I would say that online-only journals in other fields have a hard time convincing committees that they should be taken seriously. This is NOT a reason not to publish in them, but it is a reason for department chairs to explain, very clearly, in letters to divisional committees what prestige the online journal has. In addition, for example, the journal might publish very visibly its acceptance rate (I imagine, given the quality, that PI has a low acceptance rate) so that divisional committee members can see it when they poke around on the internet to figure out what's going on (which they do). That would encourage pre-tenure people to submit.

    The puzzle is this — why is the status order of philosophy journals so fixed, if your correspondent is right? Shouldn't the quality of the journals to which submissions are being diverted be improving, and shouldn't that be recognisable to the field?

    A conjecture: a lot of high quality stuff is in specialist journals, and the status of those journals is ignored by people outside the specialty, and the profession is lazy about revising its long-held assumptions about what is where in the status heirarchy.

    Reply
  7. Steven Hales

    Part of the problem is surely that the top five or six journals are utterly and perpetually swamped with submissions. Publication in any of the top two dozen journals is a very fine and respectable thing. But as long as hiring and tenure committees and submitters only care about the very, very best we will always have this problem. It's like not being willing to play major league ball unless your team is in the playoffs. C'mon– just making the show is pretty excellent. I don't think the problem is a lack of online journals, or a lack of good journals. Fine work is published in venues outside the top five and we should treat the lesser, but very good, journals with more respect.

    Reply
  8. Justin C.

    Although having more good journals and/or more online journals might help, I suspect there is another underlying cause of these issues that should be mentioned, namely, the extremely high emphasis on publication for getting a job and for tenure and promotion. This emphasis is bad for a number of reasons, I think, including the fact that it puts a huge strain on the journal system.

    The pressure to publish for graduate students is especially regrettable. In order to get a job, much less one with better than a 5-5 teaching load, graduate students at lower ranked departments are almost forced to publish at least one paper before completing their graduate work. Although graduate students no doubt publish some fine work, I think the rush to publish while still in school is by and large regrettable as it can (though of course it needn't) distract students from focusing on getting a good education, developing their ideas and in general become better, more well-rounded philosophers.

    Reply
  9. Brandon N Towl

    I'm not sure what the solution to the stated problem(s) are, but I'd like to share my similar experiences.

    I had one paper, submitted to a highly regarded journal, that got a "conditional acceptance"; the comments from the three reviewers were generally positive, and the criticisms were easily enough addressed. I revised and resubmitted the paper, only to be told that it would not be published "due to space limitations". A follow up with the editor indicated that the reconstruction was on target, and that it really was a "space" issue. This paper has been trying to find a home since May 2009; since then, four reviewers were positive about it, and only one has panned it.

    I sent another paper to another highly regarded journal. It was sent to only one reviewer, but had a glowing report from that reviewer. The decision was that the reviewer's response was /too/ positive, and not detailed enough about potential problems, and thus could not be published because a case could not be made to the editorial board that the paper was "truly in the top 5% of papers received".

    Again, I'm sure part of the problem is mine– some of my work just isn't in that groundbreaking 5%. But there do seem to be some systematic problems as well. These are particularly frustrating given that I am on the job clock, which runs a tad bit faster than the tenure clock.

    And, though tempted as I am to do so, it will not help to list journals with good editorial practices and fast turn-around times. As the original poster mentioned, this just creates a sudden back-log at journals that are processing papers in a timely number. These journals then become "problem journals" as everyone rushes to publish in a journal with a quick turnaround time. A couple of years ago, folks were advising me that Phil Review and AJP were good places to submit to– and now, they are examples of the backlog.

    Maybe its time for outside help… the problems with journals have been noted for some time, but no one really picks up the ball on this. Perhaps we need to get some journal editors from other fields where publication is not a problem and get their advice? I've heard that some of the sciences, like chemistry, have a really efficient system in place.

    Reply
  10. Enzo Rossi

    I'm sympathetic to the above proposal. In fact I'd like to see all journals move to online, open-access, not-for profit publishing. Thinking about it in non-ideal terms, however, a 'middle of the way' solution comes to mind: some journals could publish all their book reviews, editor's notes, survey articles, discussion pieces etc. only online, in order to leave more pages for research articles in the paper edition. It would only be a small change, but probably better than nothing.

    Reply
  11. Gualtiero Piccinini

    I couldn't agree more with "young philosopher". As Brian also points out, I'm sure there are challenges involved in switching from a traditional publishing model to an online-only, open access model. But it's been done before! If Philosophers' Imprint could start from scratch and gain more prestige than most well-established philosophy journals, there is an opportunity there for existing journals to raise their profile.

    Also, keep in mind that many of the best philosophers, especially young ones, are no longer submitting to journals with the worst editorial practices, such as J. Phil. They are looking for the next best journals!

    Reply
  12. another young philosopher

    two proposals:

    i) established philosophers – or maybe even everybody with tenure/permanent – stop publishing in journals and just update their work on PhilPapers. that will decrease the number of submissions, but then again it will inevitably challenge the role/quality of journals. which leads to the second proposal

    ii) we all stop publishing in journals, and only update our work on PhilPapers. quality/rank will then just depend on quantity/quality of citations, and on the actual content of an article. and these could also cover the 'publications' part of the criteria for employment/tenure.

    Reply
  13. Colin McCaffrey

    As libraries are forced to cancel journals due to reduced budgets and increasing prices, I expect the situation is likely to get worse. Increased professional and institutional demands to publish have not been matched by increased institutional and professional investment in both producing and consuming these publications. This has been exacerbated, more so in the sciences, but increasing in philosophy as well, by the heavy involvement of large commercial publishers.
    It does cost money to publish journals even, online only-journals. The printing and distribution is a fairly small portion of the overall cost. Open Access journals like Philosopher’s Imprint are a promising and encouraging development, but they do cost money to produce. Costs turn out to be less than at commercial publishers, but they are significant costs nonetheless, though some of these may piggy-bag on existing institutional infrastructure and labor (libraries, academic departments). I’m not sure we can expect them to bear much of the load of the oversupply of philosophical papers without a significant investment by universities in publishing operations of this type. And, considering the current fiscal situation of many universities, this seems unlikely in the near future.

    Reply
  14. bill wringe

    'a dismal publication system whose top publications aren't even in the main citation indexes'

    A while back PI was, despite its widely acknowledged quality, included in the Arts and Hiumanities Citation Index.

    Does anyone know if this is still the case? And is it symptomatic of a more general problem with not for profit, on-line journals?

    If so then this might present a problem
    for the proposed solution, especially if Gregory Wheeler is right about thbe increased use of bibliometric data.

    Reply
  15. tomkow

    I continue to be astonished that academics fail to understand that the new technologies mean the end of business as usual. It is obvious to everyone now that journalism schools are doomed because the popular journals– newspapers– are doomed. This should be the occasion for every academic discipline to reflect on the extent to which it has become just another j-school, albeit for specialist (that is to say, unpopular) journals.

    It's not just that hardcopy philosophy journals are obsolete Online journals are already obsolete. At best an online journal is just a table of contents: a set of links to web pages that someone thinks are worth reading. At worst, it is a set of links that you have to pay a University Press to click. But anyone can publish their own work and invite the world to link to it. If you want to see the future of online "journals", look at the Philosopher's Carnival.

    In the very near future every intellectual's body of work will begin and end on with his or her web site. The philosophy paper will be replaced by the post. The book will be replaced by the tag and conference by the thread. To coin a maxim: "Le blog est l'oeuvre".

    "But how will anyone know what's worth reading?" . This is not a new problem in the internet. It has a variety of solutions, Google is one, FaceBook another, there are many more. If professional philosophers don't want to get lost in the wilderness they had better start thinking of more original solutions that hoping virtual editorial boards will tell them what's good.

    And I am struck by how profoundly anti-intellectual this whole preoccupation with journals is. If this student wants to publish philosophy nothing at all prevents him or her from doing so. Blog space is free. If the stuff is any good, people will pay attention and come tenure time he or she can solicit its readership for letters of support. "But the really prestigious referees don't read blogs!" Sad if true and, anyway, how long do you think that will last?

    Would faculty tenure committees pay attention? It doesn't matter. They don't have the real power anyway. Increasingly it is deans and lawsuits that decide tenure. Deans love having faculty who are popular bloggers and good luck to your university lawyers trying to explain to a jury why a Technocrati ranking is less meaningful than the opinion of anonymous journal referees.

    This young philosopher shouldn't be worrying about finding journals to publish in. He or she should be worrying about whether he or she has anything worth saying.

    Reply
  16. Kevin Klement

    I am really hoping that a number of leaders in our discipline finally choose to make, probably unpopular, but heroic decisions soon, and realize that the stigma against all-online is an unwarranted prejudice, and certainly not worth the huge cost that print journals published through the big publishers create, not only for junior faculty struggling to get their voices heard, but for our library budgets, when the alternative of open-access online publishing is already very feasible (and the costs easily manageable if even a small fraction of funds from journal acquisitions could be diverted).

    Once the review standards for online journals is up to the standards of traditional journals (which P.I. shows is possible), what arguments remain for keeping the traditional format? Better typography and professional typesetting? My recent experiences tell me that a philosophy grad student with minimal LaTeX training could do a better job than what I've been getting with my work from so-called professionals lately. Copy editing? Not as big a concern when typos can be caught and fixed after initial publication. (Not that they do that great of a job as is.) Ease of perusing? This can be done better with RSS feed aggregators or similar methods anyway.

    Gregory's point about Bibliometics is well taken, but there's already evidence that material easily available online gets read *much* more frequently that material that is not. Surely, the move towards online publishing only helps with research impact.

    Reply
  17. Kevin Parson

    I have a few naive questions about the desirability of publishing (often spoken of as a need to publish) in the top journals: is it true that, in general, papers published in, e.g., Phil Review are better than those published in, e.g., Phil Studies? I ask because I'm wondering about the motivation to put one's paper in a top journal. Given that there is a bottleneck at some of the top journals; given that pre-tenure faculty are under time constraints; and even if the answer to my question above is "yes," is it really true that a pre-tenure faculty's paper is evaluatively diminished because it is published in what is generally believed to be a second- or third-tier journal?

    Behind these questions are some fairly obvious concerns about the role that pedigree (in one's training) plays (or should play) in assessing someone, and what role the perceived prestige of a journal plays (or should play) in assessing someone's published paper. If a paper should be contextually judged on its own terms–i.e., the words on the page (against the background of the extant literature)–then I wonder what else of real substance has been added to a paper if the author gets it published in a top journal, as opposed to a second- or third-tier journal. Again, I understand that this will all sound naive, but I think there's a genuine question here about whether a paper is thought to be good because it is published in Phil Review, or whether it is merely that the prior probability that it is good increases because it's published in Phil Review. My worry is that many are in the grips of the first, criterial, view, which in turn creates the perception among junior faculty that they really must put their work in the top journals if they are to get tenure, which in turn is part of the explanation for the bottleneck at these journals.

    Reply
  18. Charles B. Cross

    "The problems, as I see them, are these. Junior faculty need to publish in 'good' journals. But this is getting harder and harder to do. Currently THREE of the top six…philosophy journals are not currently accepting submissions (Nous, PPR, and AJP)."

    I wonder whether the severity of the problem is overstated. Although these three journals have taken hiatuses, there were sixteen other first-rate general philosophy journals on the survey list, and more than 40 philosophy journals (including specialty journals) received "A" ratings in the European Science Foundation survey. If you are in the sort of department in which the tenured faculty make up their own minds about the quality of your work, your having published in the highest ranked journal will not help you if your tenured colleagues don't think your work is good. On the other hand, if your tenured colleagues really do take the quality of the journals in which your work appears into account, so that the same paper gets more credit if it appears in a better journal, then they will know how difficult it is to publish in the top four or five journals, and they will rarely tenure anyone if getting tenure requires publishing in one of that handful of journals. As for publications in journals other than the very top ones, there really is no good reason to make a distinction between publishing in the #6 journal and publishing in the #16 journal. The class of "good"-but-not-absolutely-top journals is not exhaustive of philosophy journals, but it is pretty large (and includes at least the 40+ ESF "A" journals), and the differences in quality among journals in that large class are not worth fretting about.

    Reply
  19. Andrew Jorgensen

    Many people would like to see the system change. That doesn't mean anybody should do anything about it. There's a good chance the system will sort itself out naturally as people who need to publish send their work elsewhere. If the problem is that too many excellent papers are chasing too few places in the top journals this dispersal will result in an increase in the average quality of what is published in the other journals. The problem may go away, too, as philosophers who can't get a permanent job in the current climate bow out of the race, thereby reducing the numbers of submissions.

    For my part, I would like to see a change of attitude regarding ranking journals in the first place. Judging an article on the basis of where it's published is judging it on the basis of the reputation of other people's work. There's something wrong with that.

    I hope the consequence of this current tension will be the weakening of the age-old hierarchy.

    Reply
  20. Jason Stanley

    One thing I've noticed is that there is an unfair distribution of subject areas in journals over the last six to eight years ago. I suspect that either certain subject areas have a very high preponderance of generous referees or many subject areas have a high preponderance of ungenerous referees. I wonder how that factors into the problem – if you're working in one of the many areas with ungenerous referees you will have an especially hard time publishing, since the journals are filled up with papers in fields with more generous referees.

    Reply
  21. JPS

    I agree with some of what tomkow says. We are importing real-world constraints into a digital age. The only legitimate problem that journals solve at this point is quality assurance/search.

    So let's say everyone with a PhD/Masters gets to link their papers on a site like PhilPapers. We need some sort of search/ranking system as you cannot possibly read everything that gets posted. A good keyword-system can solve part of that poblem, but not all. Maybe have everyone with access downvote/upvote articles, like on Digg/Reddit? User-generated moderation has proven surprisingly successful on the web. Having a lot of referees is probably better than having one or two, and random incompetence may well 'wash out'. And the system can be tuned so that upvotes are weighted in various ways, etc.

    Problems:
    1. If voting is anonymous it is too open to abuse, I think.
    2. If not anonymous, things could get too awkward in the community, socially speaking.

    Deans/faculty-committees can figure out to what to think of the new system in their own time. The tail should not be wagging the dog anyway. Maybe they can rely exclusively on citations. Or upvotes, for that matter.

    Can anyone do better?

    Reply
  22. David Chalmers

    Numerous people have suggested that PhilPapers try a peer review system along the lines JPS suggests, and we have thought semi-seriously about it. The obstacles to a serious system are pretty huge.

    The biggest problems (in order): (i) institutions are conservative and won't give this sort of public peer review significant weight in the near term; (ii) if anyone can review, the results can't be taken seriously for professional purposes, and if only experts can review, it will be near-impossible to get enough reviewers to do the work (and either way, if reviewers can volunteer, the system is too easily corruptible); and (iii) many authors may be reluctant to subject their articles to such a public review process.

    The problems interact: if we were in a world where institutions gave the system the kind of weight they give peer review in journals, then it would be easier to get reviewers and authors to participate. But we're not in that world and it's not clear that there's any easy path to get there.

    Perhaps there are reasons to trial some sort of feedback system in any case (say, for readers to give other readers some guidance about articles worth reading). But I don't think it's realistic to see this as playing the institutional roles of journal peer review any time soon.

    Reply
  23. David Velleman

    Thanks to all of those who have offered kind words about Philosophers' Imprint. Here are some remarks from an editor's point of view.

    1. Philosophers' Imprint is made possible by the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, which provides copyediting, typesetting, indexing, page-imaging, and web hosting. These services are provided by the University of Michigan as part of its mission of making scholarship more widely accessible. (Michigan has been a leader in the development of JSTOR, in the Google Book project, and now in print-on-demand publishing.)

    We have no idea how an open-access online journal might be run without support of the kind that we receive from Michigan. I will ask the Scholarly Publishing Office to give me an estimate of the costs.

    The idea behind the founding of the Imprint (as expressed in our Mission statement) was that academic libraries would spend far less on journals if they shared the burden of making them openly accessible online, thus collectively freeing themselves from the necessity of subscribing to them on paper. Michigan is doing its part in this cause, but it has unfortunately not caught on.

    2. I agree with Justin C. that submissions by graduate students are clogging the publication pipeline. But the worst is yet to come. This year my department's Ph.D. program has received several applications for admission from undergraduates who have published in philosophy journals. The absurd over-professionalization of undergraduate philosophy majors already deprives the discipline of talented students who discover philosophy too late in their undergraduate careers. It is only a matter of time before the competition for admission to graduate school makes undergraduate publications a sine qua non. I don't know how to stop this trend toward premature professionalization.

    3. I understand where tomkow is coming from, but I think s/he doesn't fully appreciate what journals do. To begin with, journals accept very few articles as-is. The peer-review process provides authors with anonymous criticism that, however infuriating it may be in individual cases, raises the overall quality of the published literature significantly. (Notice how many articles contain acknowledgments to referees.) Moreover, copy-editing is not just a matter of spell-checking. Copyeditors make prose more readable, citations more intelligible, cross-references more reliable; in short, they too improve the quality of the published literature. None of these functions can be replaced by smart mobs: sometimes you really do need referees and editors.

    Reply
  24. Adam

    To David Velleman's #2: holy crap. Are these applicants publishing in professional journals, or special journals for undergrads?

    [BL comment: I hope David Velleman will weigh in on this. I have not done PhD admissions in several years, so perhaps things have changed in that short time, but while I recall occasionally seeing a publication an undergraduate journal–which is utterly meaningless and irrelevant (the fact of it being published, that is)–it was extraordinarily rare to see a publication in a real peer-reviewed journal by someone applying to graduate school. Undergraduates thinking about going on for advanced study in philosophy should NOT be trying to publish anything!]

    Reply
  25. Jonathan Weinberg

    Just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if one way around the status problem for start-up online journals would be for various of the professional organizations to start their own, and given them their imprimatur? There is already precedent with dead tree publications, like the ASA and JAAC, the PSA and Phil Science, and the Hume Society with Humestudien. Why couldn't the APA or its regional divisions start up some official journals, or the SPP, or the SEP? The societies do have at least a bit of an income stream that could maybe offset the costs of online publication?

    Another obvious source of prestige for a new start-up online journal would be the sponsorship of a top department, on the model of Michigan's sponsorship of Phil Imprint.

    Reply
  26. Reginald Williams

    A compounding problem that I don't think gets nearly enough attention is the very strong tendency to think that "worthy contributions" must go on and on and on: way past the point at which they made their contribution.

    As much as philosophers, particularly analytic ones, claim to esteem concision and clarity, it astounds me how many times referees have criticized a paper of mine for "not being as long" as the "typical" philosophy paper (whatever that's supposed to be).

    I'm all for demonstrating knowledge of the literature, I'm all for being painfully clear in what I'm arguing, and so forth. But if it takes only 15 pages to develop your argument, to situate it in the literature, and to defend against every good objection a referee musters, then why carry on for another 15 pages, particularly given the issue we're addressing? Why make every possible distinction on your topic, when your argument will not rely on most of them or need to rely on most of them?

    Stating, in 30 pages, an argument that requires 15 doesn't strike me as erudite or sophisticated or the slightest bit impressive; it's like keeping your students after class. From what I can tell, a lot of journals practically require such wordiness, or they simply require that you write on issues that cannot be dealt with in less than 30 pages. The problem is that some important work doesn't require 30 pages. Gettier comes to mind.

    It would be nice if more journals would follow the lead of Analysis and publish good papers whose authors know when to pinch it off. We could get 10 good papers in an issue that now publishes five or six.

    Reply
  27. Mike Otsuka

    There are a couple easily correctable things having to do with page numbering that distinguish Philosopher's Imprint from traditional journals, and in a manner that might deter people from submitting to PI:

    (1) One can't cite work posted there in the way one standardly cites work published in traditional journals: by volume number, year in parentheses, and a colon followed by page extent. One can't do this because every article begins on page 1. That problem would be solved if the first page number of each article were one higher than the number of the last page of the previous article posted in that volume (i.e., year).

    (2) There are nearly twice as many words per page as there are on a typical journal page — which provides one further reason for bean counting administrators and academics who review cases for promotion to discount someone's publication in such an online-only journal.

    I wonder whether the editors of PI might consider changing these two things to bring their journal more in line with traditional journals.

    With the advent of 'online early' publication and searchable electronic web pages, there are various respects in which the web pages of traditional journals have been converging on the format of PI.

    With minor alterations to PI's web presence such as the two I've suggested above, such convergence could be completed from the other direction without any loss on PI's part, I think.

    Reply
  28. Neil

    Charles Cross thinks the problem is overstated, because there are plenty of good journals outside the top six. Perhaps he is right, but some people believe that publishing outside the top six does more harm than good. Over at Brains, for instance, Gualtiero Piccinini wrote that publishing in Phil Q leaves some people indifferent "or worse", and publication below this level scores you "negative points" with good departments. I don't know if this is true, but if it is the problem is acute.

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  29. Neil Sinclair

    The original post asks: "What are the possible solutions? We either need more "good" philosophy journals, or we need the good ones to publish more often."

    One potential problem with both of these suggestions is that, if implemented, they may make it even harder for researchers to keep up with all 'good' publications in their field, which would exacerpate the already damaging ghettoization of philosophy, as fewer researchers are able to speak informatively outside of the (increasingly archaic) sub-disciplines of philosophy.

    An alternative might be to urge appointment committees to reprioritise: to look carefully at quality of output rather than quantity, and to assess the potential of their appointees rather than their existing publication record.

    Although from the point of view of a job-seeker in the current climate it would obviously more helpful to have more good places to publish, one must also consider the potential damage the general implementation of this practice would have to philosophy as a whole.

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  30. Chris Bertram

    Whilst I sympathize with the need that young philosophers have to publish (and, given the REF in the UK, not just young philosophers), it seems clear that from another standpoint there is just too much stuff being published. Having just worked my way through 250+ job applications (and you could have staffed a very decent department imho, just by picking 12 people at random from the list, so good were the applicants) I confess to a real sense of depression about the amount of perfectly good, highly competent (but often unexciting) material being published by young people, material that no-one is ever going to read. We have incentivized overproduction. I'm far from sure how to turn this around, but making more publication-space available makes things worse, not better.

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  31. Christopher Gauker

    On a side issue: The scarcity of high-impact philosophy journals may in part explain the proliferation of edited collections in recent years. Many of the best-known mid-career philosophers publish most of their articles in these collections. The proliferation of edited collections has an upside and a downside. The upside is that some of the papers in these collections achieve a level of originality that the current journal culture actively discourages. The downside is that the process of getting published is less democratic, relying on personal connections to the editors. Also, more than a few of the papers in these collections are pretty bad and would not have survived the refereeing process at a journal. And I am afraid that the availability of these outlets to the best-placed people diminishes the pressure on the profession to get a hold of the journal situation (which is not to say that we should reduce their number as a means).

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  32. David Velleman

    In response to Adam and Brian:

    One publication in the Australasian Journal. One in an Oxford Handbook. One in a Palgrave Handbook.

    These are the ones I can find without too much rummaging. But maybe I exaggerate: it's not yet enough for a trend.

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  33. Darrell Rowbottom

    '[S]ome people believe that publishing outside the top six does more harm than good. Over at Brains, for instance, Gualtiero Piccinini wrote that publishing in Phil Q leaves some people indifferent "or worse", and publication below this level scores you "negative points" with good departments. I don't know if this is true…'

    If it is true, it's truly pathetic. (And I'd have to question what sort of notion of 'good' is operating here. Does a department falling outside Leiter's top 50, for instance, not count as 'good'? I worry that it's not supposed to. This fills me with a mixture of sadness and anger.)

    Some people seem to be suggesting that it's not clear what we can do. But the change can start with you. When you look at someone's CV, or even just visit their webpage, don't scan through where they've published and make some sort of evaluation of how good they are. If you really want to do that, try reading their work. Carefully. (And challenge your colleagues, or those in management, if you hear them making assessments purely on the basis of publication venue! Do so at every available juncture.)

    Plenty of good stuff appears in journals that don't have an 'A rating' on that damnable ESF list. Often it doesn't refer to the right people, say the right things, isn't in a 'hot area', or what have you. Publishing in the top places is partly a result of effective gaming; and some people who are very clever and have worthwhile things to say are not as adept at that as others.

    In short, the kind of elitism hinted at in your quotation only serves those at the very top; those who are already 'in the club' and/or their chosen successors. It disgusts me. It can even lead proficient people who are doing something that they enjoy (or once enjoyed) to doubt whether their work is really worthwhile. Incidentally, I'm one of those people. I guess I'm not alone, and hope that this confession comes as solace to readers who feel similarly.

    (I'd also like to voice agreement with related points made by Mohan Matthen, Harry Brighouse, Steven Hales, and Andrew Jorgensen. And horror at Velleman's #2. I feel so sorry for those students.)

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  34. Harry Brighouse

    Like Velleman, I've seen a number applications to grad school with publications in serious places. Unheard of 20 years ago (well, almost).

    There is a market, you know, and with the right editor, advisory board, and backing, a journal can break into the top echelons. Journal of Political Philosophy became a top journal in the field almost immediately (its better than Political Theory, which I presume Goodin sees as the main competitor, and rivals PPA and Ethics at the points where it intersects with their interests). Goodin is an unusually good editor, and that explains some, but not all, of its success. PI has done much the same, with a very different business model. There's room to do it, its just a matter of getting the approach right.

    In what departments are people left indifferent to a publication in PQ? Really, if that's true, people need to think about what they are trying to accomplish.

    I agree wholeheartedly with Chris Betram's point. Any academic discipline needs to get the right balance between individuals being able to pursue their own interests and careers and fostering collaboration to make progress on difficult problems. We can all think of senior people who have contributed enormous amounts to our collective understanding without publishing a lot or even much; we'd be better off if we provided more incentives for people to think more and publish less. This is not something over which we have no control: hiring committees can decide to value good philosophers and good teachers over volume publishers.

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  35. Tom Hurka

    Let me second Reginald Williams on the excessive length of papers (while acknowledging that I've sinned myself).

    In the 1980s the standard length of a paper was (if I remember correctly) around 25 double-spaced pages, and papers longer than 30 pages were unusual. (I sent a 35-page paper to ETHICS and was told by Brian Barry to cut it by 60%. Best advice I ever got.)

    By the time I stopped being an editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy in 2002, it wasn't uncommon to get 50-page submissions in small font. And looking at recent issues of ETHICS, which has a lot of words per page, I see many papers that run over 30 journal pages. Most of them don't need to be that long — there's a better 20-page (or less) paper hidden inside them.

    I think one culprit is the very review process David Velleman lauds. While that can indeed improve papers, it also often leads authors to add extra material answering some fussy objection from a referee that most readers wouldn't think of or care about. The result is a paper that takes up more space and whose central idea is harder to see because it's buried under more inessential detail.

    I have a co-authored paper coming out in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, which told us their upper limit for papers is 10,000 words. I don't know how strictly they enforce that, but it seems an excellent rule.

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  36. Fritz

    I won't join Darrel Rowbottom in feeling "so sorry" for the undergraduate students who manage to get blind-refereed papers accepted at good journals including AJP and Phil Studies. The half dozen or so I know who have done this in the past 20 years include philosophers who are now senior faculty at top departments in the UK and USA and graduate students currently doing quite well at top PhD programs. Most papers like this come out of advanced majors level courses at strong undergraduate teaching departments and at places where the best majors sometimes take graduate courses for credit. Though it's rare enough that a student will have the ability to pull it off, it's no shock very well done papers coming out of such courses might be publishable even at a good journal. I don't think we're in any danger that the journals are going to be flooded by undergraduate submissions by those seeking to gain an admissions advantage.

    So I think David's second thought is right: we haven't reached a point where we have a problematic trend.

    Undergraduates publishing in weak journals, in non-refereed collections (usually as minor co-authors), and in undergraduate-only journals are a bigger group and I don't see any reason to think such studetns gain an advantage through such publications in admissions at my large and pretty good department. And I don't see it being an importantly relevant factor at the wide variety of PhD institutions to which my students regularly apply.

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  37. Harry Brighouse

    Tom Hurka's right.

    Here's a thought for editors. Allow authors to please referees in the way that Tom describes. Then ask them to write an 8,000 word paper for publication, which may, or may not, please the referee.

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  38. Derk Pereboom

    The original post mentioned a long response time at the Philosophical
    Review. We were indeed behind last year, but we’ve caught up. Of the 383
    submissions we received in 2009, we’ve sent decisions to the authors of
    all but about 10, and we'll begin to send out decisions on January
    2010 submissions soon. Right now we’re returning initial decisions in
    8-12 weeks after receipt. Also, since January 2008, over half of the
    authors of our regular articles were graduate students, post-docs, or
    assistant professors (or the equivalent) at time of acceptance — 18, by
    my count, by contrast with 12 who were tenured professors.

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  39. Clayton Littlejohn

    "I think one culprit is the very review process David Velleman lauds. While that can indeed improve papers, it also often leads authors to add extra material answering some fussy objection from a referee that most readers wouldn't think of or care about. The result is a paper that takes up more space and whose central idea is harder to see because it's buried under more inessential detail."

    So, I have this friend who likes to defend A-ism about B and knows that most referees think that C, D, and E are really damning objection to A-ism. He's addressed C, D, and E in print but cannot think of a good way to let blind referees know this without curing them of their blindness. My friend's papers become quite bloated because he's found that if he doesn't address C, D, and E in every discussion of A-ism it's a rule that a referee will say that the paper ought to be rejected for failing to address C, D, and E. I wonder if editors would allow this friend of mine to attach an addendum where common objections that don't have to be addressed in every discussion of A-ism about B are addressed. The refs can decide whether the responses are adequate, editors can decide how much of this addendum should stay in the paper if accepted, and the papers would be less bloated. Seems like an easy fix, but I don't know if it's the sort of thing that is allowed.

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  40. Gualtiero Piccinini

    Re: "Over at Brains, for instance, Gualtiero Piccinini wrote that publishing in Phil Q leaves some people indifferent "or worse"."

    My statement should be understood in the context of what I was talking about. I was talking about how publications before finishing your Ph.D. help you on the job market. The point I made was simply that the more prestigious the journal in which you publish, the more people your publication will impress. The reference to Phil Q was entirely arbitrary. The whole statement about Phil Q was, "Early publications in journals like Phil Quarterly impress most people at most departments, while leaving some people indifferent or worse." I would expect everyone to agree that Phil Q is a good place to publish in, but there may be a few people who will not be more attracted to a job candidate just because she has published in Phil Q. For a less presigious journal than Phil Q, the number of unimpressed people will increase. I hope that puts my statement into a more reasonable perspective.

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  41. Derek Bowman

    Clayton,

    Perhaps I'm being naive, but couldn't your friend, Mr. X, cite his published answers to C, D, and E the same way you or I would – e.g. "As Mr. X has shown…" Presumably those references could be changed back to the first person after emerging from the blind review process.

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  42. Gualtiero Piccinini

    Clayton,

    It's time for your friend to realize that much refereeing is only nominally blind. If he's addressed C, D, and E in print, he should refer to his previous papers [references omitted]. If referees then decide to find out who he is, so be it. It may hurt him but it may also help him. There is a good chance that if the referees want to find out who he is, they can do that anyway, without needing for him to tell them that he's already published on that topic.

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  43. Tim O'Keefe

    Clayton, might the following sort of footnote work?

    "I realize that many think that C, D, and E are really damning objection to A-ism about B. I do not address C, D and E here, but readers interested in how an A-ist can respond to these problems should see [references to previous publications of mine redacted for purposes of blind review]."

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  44. Darrell Rowbottom

    'The point I made was simply that the more prestigious the journal in which you publish, the more people your publication will impress.'

    It's that very fact (in this peculiar employment-related context) — and I'm afraid I have to agree that it is a fact — that I think is depressing.

    The issue is the relative merit of job candidates. Take two such candidates, one with a single publication in PQ and another with a single publication in a 'more prestigious journal'. It doesn't follow (with any plausible premises you care to insert) that the publication of the latter is superior, in quality or any other intrinsic scholarly respect, to that of the former. Furthermore, I question whether the (objective) probability that the publication of the latter is superior to that of the former is any greater than 0.5.

    It's easy to see why I would question this; for example, many candidates, especially at an early career stage, wouldn't submit to the most prestigious journals because the process can be so slow. And again, the gaming ability of the candidates is relevant. Plus their connections. As is, bluntly, their luck. (On several occasions, I've had papers rejected and subsequently accepted by more prestigious journals. From what I've heard, this isn't uncommon.)

    Furthermore, there are so many other relevant factors in such a judgement that to presume in favour of the publication in the more prestigious journal is simply not fair. That is, unless one has access to all kinds of information that I believe is not generally available. (One should take into account the average quality of submissions, the publication to submission ratio, the average quality of the reviewers, the nature and quality of the editorial process, and so on, and so forth.)

    But I'll rest my case.

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