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Philosophical Exchanges: A Plea for Suggestions

Thomas Nadelhoffer

I have considered creating a new open access, on-line journal
for several years now, but it was only recently that I started converting the
idea into action. Peter Ludlow’s compelling piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on open access and the Aaron Swartz
tragedy finally provided me with the extra motivation needed to try and get
something started. I feel like the time is ripe for a change. It’s unacceptable
that philosophers often publish in (and referee articles for) journals that
charge so much for subscriptions that many colleges and universities can’t
afford them. The success of Philosopher’s
Imprint makes it clear that there is a demand for first-rate, open access
philosophy journals. So, it is very exciting that several new open access
journals have been launched in the past few years—e.g., Ergo, Journal of Practical Ethics, and Philosophy & Theory
in Biology.

But there are still a number of otherwise useful
technological tools that are being underutilized—e.g., the multi-media
capacities of blogs or the ability of blogs to capture philosophy in action, so
to speak.  So, while the recent trend
towards open access philosophy is a positive one for our field (see here and
here for information on the open access movement more generally), I think more
could be done to help the movement grow by better utilizing the technological
tools we already have at hand.

The overarching goal of Philosophical Exchanges would be to create and sustain an open-access,
peer-reviewed, on-line philosophy journal modeled after the first two on-line
philosophy conferences (see here and here) as well as the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Philosophical
Exchanges would combine elements of traditional academic publishing with
elements from the blogosphere and the web more generally. Each article would be
officially published (in pdf format—with official headers and footers, volume
number, page numbers, etc.) along with invited commentary from two to three
commentators per article. The authors and commentators would agree to spend one
month (or two weeks, or whatever we decide is reasonable) participating in the
comment threads. The novelty is that the entire philosophical exchange would be
preserved for posterity. Comment threads would be (carefully) monitored by both
the editor(s) and the authors of the individual posts while the threads are
active.

 

One of the primary goals of Philosophical Exchanges will be to reach as wide of an on-line
audience as possible by striving to ensure that the journal is genuinely
committed from the start to philosophical pluralism (both in terms of content
and methodology). Hopefully, by welcoming submissions from scholars working in
all areas of philosophy—especially from philosophers working in fields and
approaches that have traditionally been marginalized—we can be more inclusive
than many of the top philosophy journals.

Another primary (and related) goal of Philosophical Exchanges will be to help address the discipline’s
shameful and increasingly visible problem when it comes to the
underrepresentation of women and minorities. Both because we will strive for
philosophical pluralism and because we have the ability to recruit invited
commentators, we will hopefully be able to do a better job ensuring that the
pool of authors and commentators who contribute to Philosophical Exchanges is as diverse as possible.

I am already working with several partners—e.g., our library
at College of Charleston, the Low Country Digital Library, and the Public
Knowledge Project—to set up the basic infrastructure of the journal using the
Open Journal System platform. Several philosophers have already generously
agreed to be on the editorial board (with more invitations in the works).  But as we continue putting some of the basic
technological pieces together (which is going to take a while), I thought it
made sense to use some of my time here on Leiter Reports this week to ask the
philosophical community what, if anything, they would like to see out of a new
journal like Philosophical Exchanges (if they would like to see anything at all).

I am going to post tomorrow about the budget, funding,
etc.—which is a tricky issue, as we’ll see. 
For now, I am mostly interested in hearing from people who have ideas
about ways to ensure that Philosophical
Exchanges better serves the philosophical community. There are several
issues that merit attention:  For
instance, does the community want and need a new journal of the sort I
envision?  If not, then it would be good
to know before we spend the time to get it up and running!  If so, what would keep people from
submitting (or conversely, what would encourage people to submit)?  Some other issues: should the
journal be both pluralist and interdisciplinary? Should the journal be generalist in addition
to pluralist? We are planning to have a homepage for the journal with a
separate dedicated blog. Does that seem problematic? What can we do to
encourage people to apply to a new journal with a new format?  Another issue I have been kicking around is
the recruitment of referees (the goal is to use triple blind review, by the way).
I have thought about having a registry of volunteers who sign up in advance via
the journal homepage (or blog). Setting
aside whether people would actually volunteer, does this seem like a good (or
bad) idea? 

Another important issue is how to ensure we accomplish the
two goals I mentioned above—namely, ensuring that we publish a wide array of
articles representing a plurality of philosophical approaches and ensuring that
we try to use the journal as a vehicle for pro-actively addressing the
underrepresentation of women and minorities in philosophy. How do we maximize
the likelihood that we’re successful on both fronts?  Or is there something problematic with trying
to use a journal to accomplish these goals? If so, what are the issues that arise on this front?

It would be great to hear the readers’ thoughts on these and
related issues.  If you’ve already had
experience publishing in some of the online journals that are already out
there, I welcome any thoughts about your experiences.  The same can be said for those of you who
have helped run an online journal.  At
this point, I am hoping to hear from as many folks as possible so that we can
work to make sure that Philosophical
Exchanges serves the philosophical community’s needs and interests.

p.s. If you’re interested in helping get Philosophical Exchanges up and running, please send me an
email.  We will need an army of area
editors (as well as a number of associate editors).

p.p.s.  I will be monitoring comments, so please be patient.  Signed comments are preferred.

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17 responses to “Philosophical Exchanges: A Plea for Suggestions”

  1. Matt

    A robust commenting system that facilitates debate would be welcomed. Similar to Disqus. Or perhaps a discussion/debate forum similar to the Economist could be used. http://www.economist.com/debate/debates/overview/263

    Matthew Labarge
    Part-Time Verbal Jouster and Bar Room Philosopher
    Full Time Pilot aboard Fleeting Flights of Fancy

    Reply
  2. Elisa Freschi

    This is a great idea and I think that your motivations make it even better!

    1) I have been working for an open access journal (RiSS, on South Asian studies in general, although I mainly work on Sanskrit Philosophy) and our main problem was securing enough funding. Basically, since we did not want to charge authors, we had to look for institutional fundings, which, however, might entail more restrictions on the journal's independency. Another project of mine (the "Coffee Break Conferences" and their proceedings) only works because of the group of volunteers we managed to make passionate about the project.

    2) As for the absence of women and minorities, I noted that, whatever the reasons for the initial exclusion of them are, there is always the risk of a vicious circle: once there are no women (I guess the same could apply to other underrepresented groups, I use here women just because they are not a minority, but more than 50% of the human population, so that their underrepresentation might be considered even more striking than that of other groups) in a certain team, it is hard for newcoming women to feel confortable in an men-only team, hence they do not join. Thus, although the original reasons for the exclusion might be hard to be adressed, inviting speakers or commenters who are not just men/white/of Christian background/dealing with "hard-core" philosophy/etc. will certainly help. At least, other people will see that the journal does not exclude them a priori.

    3) The idea of a homepage+blog of the journal seems great to me. I think it would make the difference in spreading ideas and showing their relevance.

    4) I can imagine that some scholars may be reluctant to submit their work, especially if they enjoy solitary work on highly specialised topics and do not enjoy ongoing conversations on blogs and the like. I do not have any solution for that, but I am sure that you will get enough submissions from people who enjoy lively philosophical discussions. Perhaps a further help could be "lowering" the acceptance bar, i.e., being sure that solid papers, even if controversial, are accepted, and then leave to responders and blog-readers the burden to show whether their conclusions are sound. (By "solid" I mean well-construed and not neglecting the relevant sources and secondary literature).

    Reply
  3. Joe Hatfield

    I like the idea. One way to entice people to submit quality articles is offering a robust ability to link authors' institutional profiles to the articles they write. Not only would authors get to dialogue via the online format, but interested readers could learn more about the author and find (possibly later to cite) additional articles in their CV.

    Reply
  4. Charlie Huenemann

    Thank you for leading the charge! Two suggestions – you might contact Pete Binfield, editor of PeerJ, who knows every good practice to be known in quality open access journal publishing; and you might check out what physicists are doing with ArXiv.

    Reply
  5. Kenny Easwaran

    One thing I've often fantasized about while writing papers is an ability to use html and hyperlinks effectively in creating a different sort of article structure. Rather than stating a premise, then defending it, then responding to objections to it, and then finally getting around to using it in one's main argument (perhaps after having done the same with the other premises), one could state the premise and then immediately use it, but with a clickable link by the premise to open a sub-paper containing a motivation for that premise, and links going to further sub-pages dealing with each of the objections to it. When we understand the structure of a philosophical argument properly it's not really a linear thing, so it's unfortunate that we're stuck with a linear format for presenting one.

    Now maybe there isn't an effective way to do this. But I'd like to see some attempts (and would like to try creating some myself – perhaps after tenure) to see if this might be able to work better.

    Reply
  6. Kenny Easwaran

    Also, what is the distinction you are drawing between "generalist" and "pluralist", when you ask if the journal should be both, or just one?

    Reply
  7. Expat Grad student

    This certainly sounds like a great idea. As a graduate student, I would be heistant to submit until it was clear that your journal would be well regarded by hiring committees. This seems to have happened fairly quickly with Imprint, but the new format my cause problems with less technology oriented philosophers. That said, I think the sort of discussion you are proposing will be particularly beneficial to early career philosophers/ grad students, etc.

    Reply
  8. Joe Hatfield

    What about having people submit a video abstract (along with text version)? It would be kind of neat to click on an abstract and have the author herself tell you in a few sentences what the article is about and why we should care.

    Reply
  9. LJ

    Similar to the ideas that Kenny has suggested, the journal could benefit technologically if each section of an article is placed in a clickable drop down container. It is often a pain for the reader to scroll backward through an article to find an earlier point and return back to where she left off. Having the drop down containers could make it easier on the reader by leaving open the section and paragraph that the reader left off while allowing her to click and browse previous sections.

    To do this, however, an HTML version of the article would be needed. Although it may seem like more work, I don't think creating HTML versions would be too difficult to manage once an HTML template with a little Javascript is developed.

    Reply
  10. James Camien McGuiggan

    This sounds like a great idea.

    1. I wonder how feasible the scope of the remit is. It sounds too much like someone proposing to start a journal of 'reasonable approaches', too blind to the inevitable biases it will have. It might be more feasible to acknowledge them and work with them.

    2. I didn't quite, I think, follow how the format would be, but if there are going to be comment threads as in the present blog, I would highly recommend getting the tech people to give it nested comments, in the style of Reddit or LiveJournal. The way this works (if it's not obvious by looking at the link below) is that a reply to a comment will appear directly below that comment even if it is not the very-next-posted comment. Additionally, it is indented by an inch or so. Ditto for replies to this comment in turn. This format allows conversations to be grouped together, which makes complicated philosophical arguments much easier to follow: you don't have to hunt through the webpage to find the comment to which another comment is responding to remind yourself what the disagreement is. LiveJournal used to have a very busy philosophical community, posts on which often had hundreds of comments. I miss its comments system badly, it's orders of magnitude better than the system most philosophy blogs use!

    Here's the link: http://philosophy.livejournal.com/1948764.html. Don't concern yourself with what's said too much: just look at the format.

    Reply
  11. James Camien McGuiggan

    I just tried that link: it works if you take out the period that somehow found its way into the hyperlink.

    Reply
  12. Elisa Freschi

    In fact, typepress is among the worst systems as for comments. Discus is great and you can use (as far as I know) on each platform. WordPress is already good enough for the purposes you highlight (i.e., you do not have to hunt for subcomments, they are listed below the comment they refer to).

    Reply
  13. Thomas Nadelhoffer

    Thanks both to those of you who posted suggestions and to those of you who emailed me to offer us assistance as we tentatively plan to move forward with the journal. As I will explain in a follow up post, funding is clearly one the major hurdles in running an open access journal long term. But that's just one of several hurdles to clear. In order for a project like this to succeed, we will need a lot of help from the philosophical community. So, it's comforting to know lots of people seem willing to help.

    I will respond to the emails soon. In the meantime, I just wanted to respond to Kenny's earlier request for clarification. A generalist journal would be a journal with lots of pieces written for non-specialists. A pluralist journal, on the other hand, would have articles on a wide variety of issues but the articles would still be written for specialists in the respective areas. While I am committed to making sure the journal is pluralistic I am not committed to having it be generalist as well (although I am open to the idea). I am curious to see what other readers think. There was a recent discussion of these issues over at NAPPS:

    http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/06/on-so-called-generalist-journals-and-the-japa.html

    Reply
  14. tomkow

    The idea of a "on-line journal" seems to me retrograde and pointless.

    There *is* a need for for a well produced philosophy content aggregator which is quite a different different thing.

    I would suggest you direct your efforts in that direction.

    Reply
  15. Ralf

    I agree on what tomkow says: we don't need another one of these online journals for general philosophy.

    But I would also like to add a point to the list of what "there *is" a need for". I think it would be interesting and worthwhile to dedicate the project to experiment with forms of online-deliberation on philosophical topics/for the philosophy community. Maybe we could even go further and develop procedures that also might work in other contexts.

    The invited commentaries might be a first step in that direction. Also the hint (in one of the first comments)to the economist's experiment with translating debating to an online environment is useful: http://www.economist.com/debate/debates/overview/263

    I would try to go further in that direction.

    Best,
    Ralf

    Reply
  16. Joe Berendzen

    It strikes me as obvious that the profession would benefit from more high-quality open access journals (whether that means creating new journals or having existing journals shift their formats). From the perspective of the avant-garde, this probably is retrograde–but for some of us, journals are a key part of how we make a living…

    On another note, I think that a philosophy journal modeled on BBS is an awesome idea. I wonder if Philosophical Exchanges might work better if it were a bit closer to BBS than what (I think) you are proposing. Specifically, I think something closer to their open peer commentary (which isn't actually open in the way a blog thread is) would be better than having a couple official commentators and an open comments thread. One could still have the peer commentary be more dynamic/interactive by using the online format. But I suspect that limiting the discussion to the author and a few commentators would both be less onerous for those involved and likely to result in better philosophy.

    Reply
  17. Alex Dunn

    I'm not sure what LJ meant by 'drop down container', but it's true that for an online journal there's no point in restricting yourself only to PDFs. HTML versions of papers allow much easier navigation and are readable on more devices. If the original paper in written in one of the standard plain-text formats, it's relatively straightforward to convert it to HTML with John MacFarlane's pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/). I did this myself with my undergraduate thesis: http://baruffio.com/docs/thesis.html

    On a more general note, I'd take my cues from the Phil & Theory in Biology website, as opposed to Ergo or Journal of Practical Ethics. PTB has a blog, RSS feed, and Twitter account, while JPE has only an email list and Ergo has nothing as far as I can tell. Don't make people navigate to your site just to check if there's new content.

    Reply

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