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Online, open access philosophy journals

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED NOV 26-MANY MORE OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS THAN I KNEW ABOUT!  IF YOU CONTRIBUTE, MAKE SURE THE JOURNAL ISN'T ALREADY MENTIONED, AND INCLUDE A URL FOR THE JOURNAL HOMEPAGE (NOT NECESSARY TO FORMAT IT)

Philosophers' Imprint was the first mover here, and has been quite successful; more recently it has been joined by Ergo, another generalist journal.   There are several specialty journals:  I believe Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy was first; there's also Journal of Modern Philosophy, and now Philosophy of Physics.  I imagine I'm forgetting some.  If you know of other online, open access philosophy journals, please post links in the comments.

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50 responses to “Online, open access philosophy journals”

  1. Sebastian Lutz

    There's also
    – Informal Logic (https://informallogic.ca/), which went open access a while ago.
    – Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology (https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ptpbio/)
    – Studia Philosophica Estonica (http://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/spe), which currently seems to focus on special issues.

    Reply
  2. Evan

    The Journal of Ancient Philosophy is an online, open-access journal. And there is no fee to submit or publish.

    Reply
  3. Michel Xhignesse

    In aesthetics, I know of:

    1. Estetika: https://estetikajournal.org/
    2. Debates in Aesthetics: http://debatesinaesthetics.org/
    3. Contemporary Aesthetics: https://contempaesthetics.org/
    4. Evental Aesthetics: https://eventalaesthetics.net/
    5. Nordic Journal of Aesthetics: https://tidsskrift.dk/nja/index
    5. Rivista di estetica: https://journals.openedition.org/estetica/?lang=en

    Reply
  4. Postdoc

    The Journal of Social Ontology went full open access recently: https://journalofsocialontology.org/index.php/jso/announcement/view/82

    Reply
  5. Ayokunle

    There is Journal of Practical Ethics: https://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/
    There is also (if we are magnanimous enough to count it as a philosophy journal): https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/

    Reply
  6. Nik

    European Journal of Analytic Philosophy: https://eujap.uniri.hr/

    Reply
  7. B

    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy went open access recently: https://www.pdcnet.org/tht/Thought:-A-Journal-of-Philosophy
    Though they now charge a publication fee of $1500: https://www.pdcnet.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Thought_OA_publication-agreement.pdf

    Reply
  8. Brian Leiter

    Curious. I'd say charging a publication fee, especially an astronomical one, is not open acess. Many journals allow you to pay up front to make an individual article open access.

    Reply
  9. Wesley Buckwalter

    I would highly recommend Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (PhiMiSci):

    https://philosophymindscience.org/index.php/phimisci/about

    Reply
  10. A

    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy: https://jhaponline.org/jhap/about

    Reply
  11. Brian Leiter

    What is the URL for Journal of Ancient Philosophy? And just to reiterate: any journal charging a fee to publish is not open access.

    Reply
  12. Howard Sankey

    Logos and Episteme:

    http://logos-and-episteme.acadiasi.ro/

    Symposion:

    http://symposion.acadiasi.ro/

    Reply
  13. Howard Sankey

    Filozofia Nauki – The Philosophy of Science:

    https://www.fn.uw.edu.pl/index.php/fn/index

    Reply
  14. Matt Lister

    The journal _Philosophy and Public Issues_ is an open-access journal that, unsurprisingly, focuses on the area within its title. http://fqp.luiss.it/ It seems to mostly have themed issues, but the ones I've looked at have been pretty good. (I should note that I contributed to an issue devoted to Gillian Brock's book _Justice for People on the Move_.)

    Reply
  15. Howard Sankey

    Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology:

    https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/principia/about

    Reply
  16. Terence Rajivan Edward

    Turkish journal ETHOS: https://ethosfelsefe.com/

    Reply
  17. Edouard Machery

    Philosophy of Medicine

    https://philmed.pitt.edu/philmed

    Reply
  18. Gabriel Gottlieb

    Symphilosophie: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism

    https://symphilosophie.com/

    Reply
  19. Vitor

    Here's the URL for the Journal of Ancient Philosophy:
    https://www.revistas.usp.br/filosofiaantiga

    Reply
  20. Yuri Balashov

    Manuscrito
    https://www.scielo.br/j/man/

    Reply
  21. Daniel Layman

    Locke Studies is open access. Check it out here: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/locke/

    Reply
  22. author

    /dialectica/ has recently become online open-access: http://dialectica.philosophie.ch.

    Reply
  23. Cory Wright

    Philosophical Issues in Science:
    https://zfn.edu.pl/index.php/zfn

    Reply
  24. Robb

    I believe the SGIR Review (the Journal of the Society for German Idealism and Romanticism) fits the bill.
    https://www.thesgir.org/sgir-review2.html

    Reply
  25. Tomasz Żuradzki

    Diametros – A Journal of Philosophy
    https://diametros.uj.edu.pl/diametros

    Reply
  26. Sergio Tenenbaum

    Feminist Philosophy Quarterly (https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq)

    Reply
  27. Paolo Santorio

    Semantics and Pragmatics (https://semprag.org/index.php/sp) is open access and is one of the very top journals for work in formal semantics/formal pragmatics/formal philosophy of language.

    Reply
  28. David Ross

    The usual way the term "open access" is used in these discussions is to signify free reader access, without specifying whether or not _author_ access is free. When both are free the common term is "diamond open access". I'm a supporter of diamondOA (my journal, the Journal of Logic and Analysis, is diamondOA), but operating a quality journal, especially one that is Plan S compliant, requires a revenue stream from _somewhere_. Finding one that is neither the author nor the reader can be difficult.

    Incidentally, I was surprised to see that there were no philosophy journals on the Free Journal Network list: https://freejournals.org/current-member-journals/

    Reply
  29. Brian Leiter

    Interesting point. I take it "free" author access means no fee for submitting and of course no fee for publishing. A few "open access" philosophy journals have modest submission fees, but any journal that requires the author pay a huge sum to publish their article "open access" for readers is not open access by my lights, and I take it that is the standard usage. But I'm happy to be corrected.

    Reply
  30. Jörg Schroth

    Zeitschrift für praktische Philosophie: https://www.praktische-philosophie.org/zfpp

    FILOSOFISKA NOTISER (with papers in Swedish and English): http://www.filosofiskanotiser.com/gamlanummer.htm

    Reply
  31. R

    Journal of Analytic Theology (https://jat-ojs-baylor.tdl.org/jat) is also open access (without submission fees) and is highly regarded in philosophy of religion

    Reply
  32. Cora Diamond

    Cora Diamond

    The Nordic Wittgenstein Review, https://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/, is open access. It is supported by Bergen Open access Publishing.

    Reply
  33. David Ross

    Yes on the first part. I've been in conversations about submission fees, often the goal is not to fund the journal so much as to smooth the work of the editors. For example, we get many submissions which are well outside our scope (as it doesn't cost anything to submit), as well as multiple nominally on-topic submissions from cranks (eg, of the "disproof of Cantor's Theorem/Godel Incompleteness/Independence of AC" variety); a small submission fee would cut the former, and possibly the latter, down considerably.

    Large page charges are common in some STEM fields where there is more of an expectation of grant support for the research. This would be somewhat justifiable if there was commensurate value added to the publication, for example high quality professional copyediting. My experience is that this is not the case, and so I agree that this violates the spirit, if not the technical meaning, of open access.

    Reply
  34. Allen Hazen

    Australasian Journal of Logic: https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ajl

    Reply
  35. David Ross

    (*) I want to soften what I wrote a bit. Not all the "disproof of Cantor" etc. authors are really "cranks", many or even most are sincere people with some or even substantial math training who simply don't accept diagonal arguments. There is of course a long tradition of rejection of a mathematical principal leading to something interesting.

    Reply
  36. Charles Pigden

    Surely this publication fee is going kill Thought dead. Unless you work at a wealthy institution or or are personally wealthy, the costs of publication in Thought – at least the costs of publication so as to be widely accessible – are now prohibitive. I had thought of it a potential venue in the past. No longer.

    Reply
  37. Teresa Marques

    Disputatio has always been open access: https://sciendo.com/journal/DISP. You can check it in SCImago journal ranks: https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=21100202749&tip=sid&clean=0

    It has been slowly gaining more visibility and improving its impact.

    Reply
  38. Joona Räsänen

    Etikk i praksis https://www.ntnu.no/ojs/index.php/etikk_i_praksis

    Canadian Journal of Bioethics https://cjb-rcb.ca/index.php/cjb-rcb

    Reply
  39. Thomas Senor

    Faith and Philosophy has been open access for the past three years. https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/

    Reply
  40. David Wallace

    Just descriptively, I don't think 'no page charges' or 'no large page charges' has anything much to do with whether a journal is open access. The definition of open access has always been on the reader side: a journal is open access if its articles are openly available on the internet. In the sciences it has always been understood that the costs of an open-access journal are then met by the author through a publication fee. Indeed, in the UK a lot of the controversy around the government moving to mandate open access has been about the fact that charges to the author will make it difficult for many academics to publish. This is also why the move to open access has led to a profusion of predatory and shady journals: if you charge for publication, you're incentivized to publish indiscriminately.

    In the sciences (and notwithstanding genuine concerns about exploding costs) page charges aren't too much of a problem because science is generally grant-funded and you pay the page charge from your grant (as David Ross notes). There is an ongoing and unsolved puzzle as to the right model in the humanities. (Even if you don't produce a printed journal, and even if you are non-profit, there are non-trivial costs associated to a journal for copyediting, typesetting, web hosting, content management, stable archiving, and probably other things I haven't thought of and will be unpleasantly surprised by in the next few months.) In philosophy most open-access journals seem to use a mixture of charges at point of submission (which can be much lower, assuming a low acceptance rate) and philanthropy. (Philosophy of Physics is transiently subsidized by our publisher, LSE press, and will transition to a model based on Philosophy of Physics Society subscription fees.)

    It's normatively desirable to have a journal model where neither author nor reader is financially prevented from access to the journal. And it might be descriptively helpful to have a name for journals that adhere to that model. But that name isn't 'open access': that term is already taken for something else and I think trying to reclaim it will just be a source of confusion.

    Reply
  41. Pete Murray

    The Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org/) has a searchable database of OA journals across disciplines, and the searches can be filtered to exclude journals with author processing charges (APCs).

    Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion get lumped together in the DOAJ taxonomy of journals, but here is a link (https://bit.ly/3gItFiE) to a "No APC" search of the DOAJ database that returns 327 results when (inclusively) filtered for the most obvious philosophy-specific topics in the DOAJ taxonomy:

    Subject: Philosophy (General)
    Subject: Aesthetics
    Subject: Ethics
    Subject: Logic
    Subject: Speculative philosophy [includes epistemology and metaphysics]

    Each result includes a link to the homepage of the relevant journal, and the search results can be further filtered by language(s) of publication, license types, peer review type (blind, double blind, etc.), country of publication, publisher, and year added to DOAJ database.

    DOAJ also attempts to encourage "best practice[s] in long term preservation, use of persistent identifiers, discoverability, reuse policies and authors' rights" by awarding a "DOAJ Seal" to journals that meet seven OA best-practice criteria. More information about the DOAJ Seal criteria can be found at the following link: https://doaj.org/apply/seal/

    Filtering the philosophy search results linked above by "DOAJ Seal" yields 8 journals: https://bit.ly/3FiRxTH

    Reply
  42. David Ross

    There is a standard terminology for this. "Diamond" and "green" open access both mean free to authors and readers; the difference is that with greenOA the journal retains copyright. "Gold" OA is free for readers, not for authors. Submission charges don't show up in this classification.

    Taking JLA open access (we had been Springer) was a real learning experience. We're now 14 years into operating this way, and it still feels like an experiment.

    Reply
  43. Dean C. Rowan

    UC Berkeley's wonderful Scholarly Communication Services group has a handy guide to common OA models and practices: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/research/scholarly-communication/open-access

    In 2021, the main library system at Berkeley concluded an agreement with Elsevier: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/elsevier-deal

    In brief, the agreement affords campus-wide OA access to a huge number of Elsevier journals by shifting subscription costs to Article Processing Charges for articles by UC Berkeley authors. So, yes, there are big ticket APCs, but the library and campus no longer pay twice for its own researchers' intellectual efforts.

    Reply
  44. David Ross

    W/r to the DOAJ, they index many more good journals than get the seal. In our case, we don't get the seal because unlike some other indexers they do not automatically harvest metadata, and I am too lazy to create and upload an XML file of metadata every issue.

    Reply
  45. Juan Pablo Bermúdez

    A lot of Latin American philosophy journals are Open Access, and none charge author fees that I know of. Here's a few:

    Crítica: https://critica.filosoficas.unam.mx/index.php/critica
    Ideas y Valores: https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/idval/index
    Filosofia Unisinos: https://revistas.unisinos.br/index.php/filosofia/index
    Estudios de Filosofía: https://revistas.udea.edu.co/index.php/estudios_de_filosofia

    Reply
  46. Juan Pablo Bermúdez

    https://www.journals.usp.br/filosofiaantiga/index

    Reply
  47. Anon

    Teorema: https://www.unioviedo.es/Teorema/English/

    Reply
  48. Shawn Loht

    Film-Philosophy
    https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/film/index.php/f-p

    Philosophy in Review
    https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/pir

    Reply
  49. Nicolas Delon

    Essays in Philosophy
    https://www.pdcnet.org/eip/Essays-in-Philosophy

    Politics and Animals
    https://journals.lub.lu.se/pa

    Klēsis – Revue Philosophique
    https://www.revue-klesis.org/

    Reply
  50. Jozef

    If I can plug in: Organon F is a general journal for philosophy in analytic tradition, including history of philosophy. https://www.organonf.com/
    It is published by the Institutes of Philosophy of both SLovak and Czech Academy of Sciences.

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