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Crisis at Journal of Political Philosophy: Wiley (the publisher) ousts longtime editor Bob Goodin (MULTIPLE UPDATES–INCLUDING A REPLY FROM WILEY)

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM EARLIER TODAY

A member of the editorial board writes:

Wiley has decided to remove Bob Goodin as Editor as of the end of this year and not replace him with any of the co-editors who were part of the journal's succession plan.  Bob notified the editorial board yesterday, and now several prominent members have resigned [6 as of this morning, including Jeff McMahan and Philip Pettit (an Associate Editor)].  I wrote Wiley for an explanation but they did not give one other than to say that the decision was not taken lightly.  It's a phenomenal journal — the most influential in political philosophy, I think — so they are really messing with success. I personally have not decided whether to resign from the board but am following this closely.

JPP's success is, by every account I've heard, due to Goodin's excellent editorial stewardship, and the huge amount of time he personally has invested in offering editorial feedback to authors.  So this is simply bizarre.  Wiley will have to offer a real explanation before this journal goes down in flames.  Comments are open for readers with knowledge about what's going on; comments particularly welcome from current or former Board members.   Full name preferred, and valid email address required (it will not appear).

UPDATE:  Anthony Appiah and Tommie Shelby are also among those resigning from the Board now.  The number is beyond six resignations.

MORE:   Amia Srinivasan (Oxford), an Associate Editor, has resigned, and she tells me she was not consulted before Wiley announced the decision to remove Goodin.  Sally Haslanger and Anne Phillips, also Associate Editors, have also resigned.  Other members of the Editorial Board who have resigned, beyond those already noted, are:  Derrick Darby, Bruce Ackerman, Jon Elster, Victor Tradros, Patrick Tomlin, Jane Mansbridge, Chiara Cordelli, Jonathan Quong, abd Pablo Gilabert.

ANOTHER:  Jeff McMahan kindly shared his resignation letter to Wiley, which is below the fold:

I am writing to resign from the editorial board of the Journal of Political Philosophy as of the end of 2023, when Bob Goodin will cease to be the editor-in-chief. I have been shocked to learn that he is being dismissed from the editorship of the journal. I am one of three co-editors of one journal, have been an associate editor of several journals, and am on the editorial boards of a great many journals. The JPP has consistently been the best-edited journal of which I am aware. Bob Goodin created this journal and, over several decades, has almost single-handedly made it into one of the leading journals in philosophy generally, one of the three best journals in moral and political philosophy, and the single best journal in the world in the area of political philosophy. Bob has exercised greater editorial control over JPP than most other editors exert over their journals. This, in my view, is the main reason that JPP has been so spectacularly successful. Bob is of course not infallible but his editorial judgment is almost invariably sound, which is what has enabled JPP to avoid the vicissitudes, vagaries, and consequent errors in editorial decision-making that plague other journals.

I know from my own experience that Bob is a person of the highest personal and moral integrity. He is also one of the most highly-respected political philosophers in the world. How he has been able to be such a prolific writer while devoting so much of his time and energy to JPP is simply beyond my understanding. But two points I do understand are that Wiley is making a catastrophic mistake and that it will be virtually impossible to reestablish JPP as the immensely distinguished journal it has become once Bob has left the helm.

Sincerely,

Jeff McMahan

Sekyra and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford

Radcliffe Humanities, Woodstock Road

Oxford, OX2 6GG, UK

ANOTHER (4/27/23; 13:14 CST):   Wiley representatives have offered the Board the following explanation for the decision:

There has unfortunately been a complete breakdown in professional communication with Professor Goodin. We were regrettably unable to address these communication issues and find a constructive way to work together as publisher and editor. It is essential for us as a publisher to be in good and regular contact with our editors, and for both parties to regard the relationship as positive and beneficial in respect to the working relationship and day-to-day business of the journal. It became untenable for the publishing team to continue to work with Professor Goodin.

We realize this has come as a shock to you all, but we are very open to working with the academic community for the good of the journal and have recently been in conversation with the current co-editors regarding potentially taking over and maintaining continuity.

I guess more details about the alleged communication breakdown will be needed to assess this claim.  (

ADDENDUM:  See the skeptical comments of Bill Edmundson and Jonathan Quong regarding Wiley's "explanation" in the comments, below.

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45 responses to “Crisis at Journal of Political Philosophy: Wiley (the publisher) ousts longtime editor Bob Goodin (MULTIPLE UPDATES–INCLUDING A REPLY FROM WILEY)”

  1. anonymous

    As a pre-tenure scholar who just submitted an R&& back to this journal, only to watch it implode – this is absolutely devastating. 12 months of trying to get a paper out at this prestigious outlet, and now who knows what will happen with my paper? Reeling.

    Reply
  2. Jon

    Academic journals should stay with university presses, not with commercially oriented corporations such as Wiley. Academics provide extreme amounts of free labor——by refereeing and editing, to say nothing of research——to then have the fruits of that labor sold for profit by corporations whose chief obligation is to their shareholders. Would a university press have been so brash as to ditch Goodin in this way? Doubtful.

    Reply
  3. No

    Without more context and information, it is unclear to say how a university press would respond. But in light of what just occurred with OUP (see recent blog posts) I don't think we should assume that a university press will be more responsible than a commercial press.

    Reply
  4. Chris Surprenant

    What function do these presses serve at this point in terms of advancing what we're doing in philosophy? None of the reviewers are paid. Many times, most of the editors aren't paid. Often, it takes over a year for an accepted article to come. Why aren't we taking all of our journals and moving them online with open access? Just put up a website, cut out the presses, and put up the articles there. Even if the press claims that they "own" the journal, it would be easy enough for an editorial board to start a new journal similarly named and just move forward. What am I missing?

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  5. David Owen

    I think Jeff McMahan's comment are entirely true. Such a strange decision. I'd add the Bob has an excellent record if supporting young scholars as well.

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  6. a political theorist

    As an untenured political theorist (with undergraduate training in philosophy) who regards JPP as one of the major journals for my own field, I can say that this is terrible news for people like me working outside of philosophy departments as well. Though I've never landed a piece in the journal, I've submitted to it a few times, and I once got exceptionally quick and detailed feedback from Goodin on a piece that he desk-rejected, an experience that was more intellectually useful for my work than entire R&R+publication processes elsewhere have been. So I can attest to the fact that his editorship was renowned among political theorists, not only disciplinary philosophers; this is a shocking development with implications that redound beyond philosophy and into cognate fields. Regardless of the details here, the manner in which this decision seems to have been taken reflects extremely poorly on Wiley, and scholars in other fields will certainly be taking notice.

    Reply
  7. David Ross

    I'm EIC of a journal that left a publisher (Springer) and went open access. It is rather harder than most people realize. Besides the actual publishing infrastructure, in many cases publishing houses provide secretarial assistance, legal support, publicity and copyediting. In some cases they provide an important level of assurance to prospective authors of legitimacy. Indexers like SCOPUS hugely favor established publishers; getting an OA journal accepted is a big hurdle (it took my journal years). Crossref fees (for DOI assignment) are also necessary, and subject to economies of scale. Finally, while the everyday work of managing a small volume journal like mine is manageable on the side, if the volume is high (as I assume it is at JPP) to do it right in the absence of administrative support from a press can become a full-time job.

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  8. Bill Edmundson

    Wiley's reference to a "complete breakdown in professional communication" does not even begin to justify its conduct. Strother Martin's hypocritical lament to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke comes to mind. What we have here, indeed, is a failure to communicate. But of what? And by whom?

    Reply
  9. Jonathan Quong

    I am one of the editorial board members who wrote to resign from that role in protest of Wiley’s decision to remove Bob Goodin as editor. The response from Wiley, quoted above, is utterly inadequate. What caused the breakdown of professional communication? Were there particular substantive issues where Goodin and the publisher disagreed which caused the breakdown? If so, why didn’t the publisher defer to Goodin, given the extraordinary reputation of the journal that he built? If Wiley was having difficulties with the editor, why didn’t they communicate or consult with the editorial board prior to taking such a rash and disastrous decision? Wiley have only provided this vague, almost meaningless, explanation for their decision once they received a flood of resignation letters from the editorial board.

    Reply
  10. Eric Bennett Rasmusen

    Yes, journals are just tenure accreditors now.

    I'm a game theorist, but venturing in philosophy I have an article I presented at a philosophy conference have been procrastinating about submitting to a journal. I'm retired, and don't need publications, and today I realized I should just post it on my Substack. So now I'll procrastinate about doing that.
    “The Concealment Argument: Why No Conclusive Evidence or Proof for God's Existence Will Be Found.'' https://bit.ly/3vsAwhS. .

    Reply
  11. Publishing Veteran

    What’s being missed is all the infrastructure that is too complicated, expensive, and, frankly, boring, to be prominent in the minds of academics, but is nevertheless very real.

    Everyone thinks it’s easy and cheap — until they start their own journal.

    You can’t do all the work yourselves, so you need some people. Are they going to work for free? No. You want your papers to be cited. First, they have to be citeable. Are the senior editors dab hands when it comes to metadata? Have they dealt with CrossRef?

    Let’s say you want to do real copyediting. Any volunteers without personal responsibilities who don’t have anything to do on the weekend? How are you going to get papers for a journal that no one has ever heard of? How are you going to get it into university libraries?

    The”Field of Dreams” approach to publishing never existed. Just because you build it, doesn’t mean that anyone will come. You’re going to need a lot of social media to establish a presence, for starters. You can’t just rely on Twitter now. How are you going to get your journal indexed by the big services like Web of Science and Scopus? A presence there is essential for legitimacy. It’s a process that takes time and effort.

    This is just a scattershot representation of the iceberg’s tip. Brian had a post a while back about a newish open access journal that was self-operating. They had to go on hiatus because they couldn’t handle the work. I’m sure they thought there was not much more to producing a journal than some genteel red pen work. They went on hiatus.

    None of this is a justification for the pricing of a lot of products aimed at the higher ed market. But the idea that it is effortless and cost free is sheer nonsense.

    There is a reason that universities don’t take on much digital publishing — the number of university presses that publish journals is quite small, incidentally — and some of those that have later exited. Stanford had an electronic journal platform called Highwire. They don’t now. It’s resource-intensive work and the expectations for constant technological improvement make it a difficult to predict enterprise that is in constant danger of failing to cover its costs.

    Reply
  12. Charles Blattberg

    Nobody's claiming that it's effortless or cost free. But enough faculty are *already working for free*, and so being exploited, in order to produce prohibitively expensive journals. And for what? To fill the already prodigious coffers of the commercial academic publishing industry?

    All editors of commercially published journals should resign and start up equivalent journals that would be open access on the net, produced by their academic associations, and run as non-profits.

    Reply
  13. Dean C. Rowan

    This is spot-on. "Just put up a website" is absurd, or at least grossly naive. Scholars are used to having relatively seamless access to content, which means they have zero idea of how difficult it is to manage bibliographic content and metadata.

    But "a complete breakdown in professional communication" is a lame excuse. Communication 101 provides for a transmitter and a receiver. Ergo, both parties are potentially the cause of breakdown. Publisher, heal thyself.

    Reply
  14. Anna B Stilz

    I am also a member of JPP's Editorial Board who wrote earlier today to resign. But I'd like to share my perspective as well as Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy and Public Affairs, another Wiley-owned journal. P&PA has experienced escalating unreasonable demands from Wiley, including a demand that we massively increase the number of articles per year that we publish, essentially abandoning our editorial judgment and our control over the quality of our content. A few years back we only succeeded in getting Wiley to back down from this demand by threatening to file a lawsuit. I have heard from Editors at JPP that they were experiencing similar unreasonable demands from Wiley. That's all to say that whatever difficulties in communication there may have been between Wiley and Bob Goodin, those difficulties weren't occurring in a vacuum.

    All political philosophers and theorists who care about the health of the journals in our field have an interest in showing Wiley that it can't get away with this. I suggest we need to create sufficient negative publicity around the JPP affair so that any academic with a decent reputation who is approached to edit JPP in the future will feel considerable social pressure to refuse. Wiley will then either have to come back to the Co-Editors of JPP and allow them to run their journal on their terms, or it will own a much less valuable journal going forward.

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  15. Roger Albin

    These comments are certainly correct, but also a bit misleading. "…infrastructure that is too complicated, expensive…" Compared to what? The infrastructure involved is actually relatively modest and readily scalable. Much of the quality control and editorial work is performed by peer reviewers without monetary compensation. It's no surprise that publishers like Elsevier have fat profit margins.

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  16. Sara Dorman

    Yes, starting your own journal is difficult but there are multiple ownership models, many of which do not allow a publisher to fire an editor: http://deceasedcanine.blogspot.com/2017/09/journal-ownership-models.html?m=1

    Reply
  17. Chris Surprenant

    Thanks, David. Yeah, it'd certainly be a lot of work to manage it, and it'd be hard to see how an open access journal could generate the revenue to cover those costs. You'd hope that universities would cover submission fees if it was done in place of subscriptions, but we know the finances don't like that.

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  18. Paul Kelly

    I’ve been involved (editing) two journals including one Utilitas from start up. Whilst the transformation to on line and open access is happening it is not cost free as university presses doing this will know. One can’t just chuck stuff on the web – that’s not how the academic publishing can or should work. On Bob – who I’ve known all my academic life of 40+ years. I can only say he has been an enormous force for good in my part of the academic world following in footsteps of Brian Barry his one mentor. Bob deserved better and Wiley need to think hard about what they want here. A tarnished brand is of limited value to anyone.

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  19. Jim Johnson

    Wiley will be unable to publish JoPP going forward without referees.
    One simple response to this mayhem is to coordinate a strike. Unless there
    is an acceptable settlement refuse to referee for the journal past the
    end of Bob's term. (Obviously there are details to provide on the coordination
    and relevant judgements of this, but you get the gist.)

    Reply
  20. Attila Tanyi

    Without aiming to defend Wiley, it may be worth nothing that, at least in my limited experience, philosophy differs from other disciplines in that journals often publish extremely few articles annually. Both JPP and PPA offer good illustrations. So while what Wiley has done might well be wrong, there is something to the claim that these journals could publish more. I really don’t think that this would destroy their reputation or question the quality of their editorial process.

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  21. Richard Bellamy

    Wiley did something similar with the European Law Journal – the board resigned en masse and leading scholars refused to serve or submit to it – though I see there is some slippage on that of late. The team moved to CUP and created there a new open access journal …

    Details here: https://www.ejiltalk.org/what-a-journal-makes-as-we-say-goodbye-to-the-european-law-journal/?fbclid=IwAR3aj9ZMFIs_8tRUiOFJvDal22vbgeXQVpjO3mEWZ8pU7_-x2rRV5BopR4M
    New journal here:

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-law-open

    I should say that at CRISPP we came under a number of similar pressures but so far have managed to resist them, though the editors did go on strike for a month to resist one administrative nightmare they were trying to enforce upon us. Publishers seem driven to increase number of articles due to open access and to tighten often bizarre ethics and privacy rules due to (in my view largely spurious) worries about litigation

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  22. James

    I'm sorry to hear that Bob is going. I also agree that the statement provided by Wiley given above is vague. However, if it is true that Wiley wants an increase in the number of pieces published in JPP (and for PPA), I think this is something as a political phil community we should, in fact, support.
    As it stands, JPP, PPA, and Ethics — the top three in pol phil — publish very few pieces overall each year. This makes it much harder for political philosophers to compete with those in other affiliated disciplines. For instance, the top journals in IR and Pol Science publish a lot more, e.g. APSR, ISQ, etc., and this means that in open job positions, research bids, promotion cases, it can be much harder for pol phils to make a strong case, since they are unlikely to have hit the top journals as many times, if at all. (Consider, by comparison, how much easier it is for someone doing quants in Politics to hit the big journals. This has led to the huge expansion in the number of quants colleagues).
    This seems to me to be collective self-harm by political philosophers. We are getting left behind by other fields.
    Some will say it’s important to maintain standards, etc. But for what end? Who benefits from this?
    Most of the high-quality papers that are rejected by PPA, JPP, Ethics will get published elsewhere in the end. But the authors won’t have the top journals in their field on their CV.

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  23. Publishing Veteran

    I’m afraid that just isn’t true. What’s misleading is the unexamined assumption that all the work is done by a small number of editors and reviewers. Academics without experience of running all aspects of a journal always overestimate the amount of work done by peer reviewers and editors. That work is important — though there are serious reasons to question whether peer review is really doing anything much these days across all disciplines — but it is only a part of what is needed to get a journal established as a viable player in a field with a large number of participants. Plenty of reasons have already been given supporting this. The relevant infrastructure is too expensive to do oneself or to try to get one’s institution to pay for vs. outsourcing the heavy lifting to a third party. The traditional journal model offered a path to self-sustainability by charging subscriptions. (Add sales and negotiating contracts with thousands of libraries to the list of necessary activities. You think part-time editors and reviewers are either willing or able to do that work?) The Open Access model offers no such path unless the money comes from authors or some other source. Both of those sources have their own vulnerabilities and don’t make much sense for the humanities. No one is making fat profits from journals in the humanities, by the way.

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  24. Craig Larson

    This comment is tangential to the PPL issue, but relevant to the issue of journal management and academic publishing. You might recall several years back that Fields Medalist Sir Timothy Gowers led a boycott in math of Elsevier journals. He's been active on several fronts, and is an editor of a high-quality "arXiv overlay journal", Discrete Analysis (https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/). Most mathematicians post pre-print versions of their articles on arXiv.org (pronounced "archive").

    The published versions then have the imprimatur of vetting, but all the results are on arXiv for anyone to access. Its free to post there and free to download articles. The innovation of Discrete Analysis is to referee articles for that journal and then simply link to the journal-vetted version on arXiv. There is still plenty of work involved in editing and refereeing – but a lot of the "value" the big publishers supposedly provide is circumvented. The real value isn't the publishers themselves, but rather the quality of the editors and the imprimatur their vetting provides.

    Props to my colleague Sean Cox for telling me about this amazing idea of "arXiv overlay journals". Rhetorically, what do Springer and Elsevier, Wiley, etc, provide a mathematician (or philosopher) beyond what she can get by publishing in Discrete Analysis?

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  25. Roger Albin

    You may be correct about Humanities journals but your comments are not correct about publishing in the sciences, which is where I have experience, actually quite a bit of experience. Again, what is your comparator? Compared with what most philosophers or historians do in their working lives, and I'm not intending to be snide here, because I value what philosophers and historians do, it may seem like a lot of work and infrastructure, but in the larger scheme of academic work, it's not very complex. Have you ever been involved in a multi-site, international clinical trial? Worked on maintaining a database for international scientific collaborations? Dealt with managing an electronic medical record system serving a large, academic medical center? Those are the standards for a lot of infrastructure, not journals processing a few hundred manuscripts per year.

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  26. Publishing Veteran

    Experience writing papers, and conducting experiments, etc. is not the same thing as publishing journals. You can say that it is much more difficult, and I won’t argue that point. Mainly because it is not not meaningful in the context of the present discussion. A heart transplant is more complex than fixing a serious plumbing problem. If you don’t know anything about plumbing and haven’t actually fixed that problem before, you will still have flooding and a big bill to pay. Many hours of your time will have been wasted in dealing with a problem you were not trained to take on but blithely thought you were superior to. Tell you what, start your own journal and report back to us in 18 months.

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  27. jean

    the editors or council should immediately hire a lawyer . As Anna Stilz noted thats what helped her save PPA and it is what helped us at Constellations as well. Hire a lawyer that concentrates publishers minds.

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  28. Anna Stilz

    On the comment above that top philosophy journals should publish more: Wiley's specific demand of P&PA at the time of our crisis with them was that we accept 35 articles within 60 days. P&PA has historically published 12-16 articles per year. We could debate about whether that number should increase somewhat. But at the rate Wiley was demanding, we would be publishing 210 articles per year. This is an absolutely unreasonable demand; on that, I see no room for debate.

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  29. Andrew

    You say that no one is making fat profits from journals in the humanities, and since you're in a much better position to know, I'm happy to take your word for it. But as a librarian, I do know what the publishers are charging, and eye-watering doesn't begin to cover it: when I explain this to committees of academics, I have more than once been asked if I haven't put the decimal point in the wrong place. So I wonder where the money is going.

    One place I'm fairly sure it isn't going is to copy-editors and indexers: I've done both jobs, and they were amongst the most stressful and least well-remunerated I've ever had: a major university press wanted to pay me in discounted books… (Monograph authors: consider how vital a good index is; probably AI will be able to do it perfectly soon, but I'm sure it can't now.) I've been responsible for assigning ISBNs and DOIs, and while it's not trivial in terms of time and cost, it's not that expensive either. So I wonder – just wonder – what value the publisher is really adding apart from an imprimatur halo-effect. (Long term digital archiving is not something I know anything about, but I'm happy to believe its costs are substantial – though diminishing, perhaps; adding metadata, pace most librarians in the world, is really not that hard to do – but yes, of course somebody has to do it.)

    Profit margins in 2015: Reed-Elsevier 37%; Springer 35%; Sage 28.2%. For comparison: Apple 29%; Google 25%; Rio Tinto 23%; BMW 10%.

    I find it hard to disagree with Jason Schmitt:

    “Academic publishing is the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs. I, as the researcher, produce the scholarship and I want it to have the biggest impact possible and so what I care about is the prestige of the journal and how many people read it. Once it is finally accepted, since it is so hard to get acceptances, I am so delighted that I will sign anything  —  send me a form and I will sign it. I have no idea I have signed over my copyright or what implications that has — nor do I care, because it has no impact on me. The reward is the publication.”

    There has to be a better way.

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  30. Richard Bellamy

    That proposed increase is indeed ridiculous. To put in perspective, CRISPP (published by T and F/ Routledge) which has 7 issues, including book symposium with quite short articles, short debate pieces, review essays and 3 book length special issues (they are in fact also published as books), publishes on average 56 articles a year. We have quite a big back log – over two years worth of copy – and agreed with the publisher to experiment with going up to 69 – so a 23% increase, but which will be met largely by bringing down the back log and may be having more debate pieces and review essays.

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  31. Richard Bellamy

    A further contribution of information re expanding articles in some journals. The acceptance rate of normally submitted articles to CRISPP is not easy to calculate – the figure on the journal website isn't correct because its based on all the articles we publish – and although all are refereed the rejection rate for symposia and SIs is understandably rather less than for normal submissions. My guess its ts about 25% – plus or minus 5% in any one cycle. Because we have so many articles, some of a kind less likely to be cited than others, citation metrics in my view are misleading for us too. But usage is pretty high relative to most journals in the field – we had 57102 downloads in quarter 1 of 2023 – and it has increased every year since we've been on line. So I guess that means quite a lot of people find what we publish worth reading (or at least planning to read …). I should add that quite a few people who have published in P&PA have also done so in CRISPP – including the editor (and the same goes for JPP). So one should perhaps regard a number of journals as belonging to an ecosystem – that of applied analytical political philosophy in this case – some accepting more than others, in part because they do different things. It is a pity that publishers don't appreciate more they have these different types of journals and need to cultivate them all in appropriate ways.

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  32. Skeptical of the value of publishers

    Library sales are irrelevant on the open access model. What are the relevant costs? Genuinely curious. Hosting a website and relatively small database of papers is not that expensive. The only useful service I’ve seen offered by the journals is formatting and typesetting, but authors are willing to do that if it’s required to move the paper from accepted to actually published. I’ve published at an open access journal where I had to do the formatting and typesetting (logos and episteme).

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  33. Eric Schliesser

    The following can both be true:
    1. JPP and journals like it should increase the number of papers they publish significantly.
    2. Wiley's actions are badly explained and violate editorial independence in troubling ways.
    On 1: I basically view such journals as in the business of prestige production and that, as structured, actually undermine advancing and disseminating scholarship in a timely fashion. They also create a weird lottery for junior scholars and way too much pressure on referees because entirely adequate papers end up being refereed at too many journals before they find a home.
    On 2: it's my understanding that publishers are being pushed into their stance by their open access agreements with universities and (national) grant agencies, which understandably want slots where publicly funded research can appear. One can be critical of the content of these agreements (I think they are flawed in lots of ways).
    I certainly don't support a sudden regime change where journals have to publish tenfold on a short notice. That is undoubtedly harmful and unwise. But existing acceptance rates in philosophy are comparatively low and if publishers get us to change this, it will ultimately be for the better.

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  34. Dean C. Rowan

    "Library sales are irrelevant on the open access model." This does not compute. Libraries are vigorously promoting OA. My own campus library has struck deals with publishers (Elsevier, Wiley) to shift the model from subscription to subsidization of APC. This allows scholars to publish OA without having to absorb the cost of publishing, and it opens the content to everybody. Thus, a library "sale" is a payment to the publisher to shift to OA without foregoing the revenue the publisher would have obtained from a traditional subscription.

    "Hosting a website and relatively small database of papers is not that expensive." No, it isn't, but why would we want a completely decentralized body of scholarship. As it is now, complementary and competing vendors (the publishers themselves or third-party aggregators) make discovery and access difficult. On top of that, many research universities are operating their own institutional repositories. With adequate SEO it's possible to retrieve a good number of works by a researcher or about a topic, but the system is nowhere near comprehensive.

    It has been said above that the value of a good journal is, in part, reputation. A small database of discoverable, accessible papers does not per se assure a respected reputation.

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  35. Skeptical of the value of publishers

    Thank you for the information about library subsidies. I am still not sure that it affects the broader point about costs, however, since paying someone to do library "sales" for an OA journal would be for the purpose of subsidizing *other* costs, of which I am still not aware other than web hosting.

    I do not think that moving journals away from the publishers results in decentralization. Is anyone accessing articles by searching a Wiley database, for example? I highly doubt it. The only aggregator that really matters in philosophy is philpapers, to my mind.

    I also think that people on the publishing side of things do not really understand what yields prestige in the field. Certainly it does not come from being hosted by Springer, etc. or having nice formatting on your articles or being indexed in various databases. If a bunch of big names come together and form an OA journal and tell their big name friends about it who publish in the journal, that journal will very rapidly become prestigious.

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  36. Richard Bellamy

    I should say that CRISPP has traditionally published only slightly more regularly submitted papers than PP&A – roughly 20 a year. Also I know from referees (who tell me they have looked at them before) that quite a high proportion of those had previously been submitted to JPP, Ethics and PP&A – so all part of the ecosystem I think. Also – given there are quite a few good journals in the area (especially if you include general politics and Philosophy journals), it may be there just aren't enough good pieces around for all of us to expand numbers dramatically.

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  37. Publishing Veteran

    The Open Access model has not universally taken over. It can’t for the simple reason that no single body is willing to foot the bill to cover all the costs for all papers. There is nothing analogous to the NIH, NSF, Wellcome Trust that is going to fund research in the humanities and most of the social sciences.

    The White House has been happy to mandate OA for all research funded by federal agencies in excess of $100 mil. annually. I’m sure they feel very noble. They conspicuously neglected to provide any extra funding for the publication fees. The penchant for magical thinking goes straight to the top.

    We live in a hybrid world where there are both subscription models in place and pay-to-publish models. It will stay that way for the journals whose brands are so powerful that they can affort to capitalize on both models. Nature and Lancet titles are the prominent examples in the health and life sciences. Nature’s APC of $11,000 for one paper makes it difficult to see how this is an improvement overall. Maybe librarians feel better about shifting the burden to authors. How do the authors feel?

    There is one big gap in all the comments, reflecting the default setting that authors are atomized knowledge workers making all the magic happen independently.It’s a strangely libertarian fantasy. You’re forgetting that nonprofit academic societies are a core component in the journal publishing world. They have only three legs to the stool of financial viability: subscription revenue from the journals they own, membership dues, and the fees that come in from their conferences. They might start up an OA journal in a sub-discipline, but they are not going change their flagship journals unless it involves high APCs.

    In the past, almost all of these societies published their journals themselves. They’ve all contracted with the big commercial firms or the larger university presses. They did this because the costs and complexities of publishing became too much for them to keep up with. All the publishing skeptics should ponder on that.

    Here is an about as comprehensive a list as one could wish for on the topic of “What Publishers Do.” Do they all do all of these things equally well? Of course not, but the good ones come pretty close. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/02/06/focusing-value-102-things-journal-publishers-2018-update/

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  38. Against boycott

    Those of you who advocate for boycotting the JPP must be pretty sure that:
    1) You can win this battle to get Goodin and the rest of the editorial team back, instead of just destroying one of the best journals in political philosophy, or else you can set up a journal which is as good and renowned as the JPP.
    2) Wiley knows nothing about how to run its journals, and without the former editorial team the JPP is going to collapse by its own weight (not by the pressure of the boicot itself).
    Even if the cause were just, if you are not sure you can put something better in place, then you better not boycott the JPP.

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  39. Dean C. Rowan

    I'm not clear what "boycott" means in this situation. In a way, the editorial exodus is a kind of boycott, but so would be a refusal to subscribe, which would be a decision made at an institutional level in most cases, or a refusal to submit articles.

    Just a few years ago, UC Berkeley declined to renew its license with Elsevier, which was a big deal. Within a couple years the parties had come to terms favorable to both, but also to authors, libraries, and readers. So it seems to me that if the problem is that Wiley is succumbing to purely ideological demands not to publish submissions, then pressure would have to be applied at the publisher and not the journal level to have an optimal effect. Otherwise, JPP will no longer remain "good and renowned."

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  40. Skeptical of the value of publishers

    What exactly are all the costs for the papers? I've yet to be given anything except the costs associated with maintaining and developing a website. I'm willing to believe that there are more costs, but I still am waiting to hear what these are.

    I would be very unhappy with a fee of $11,000. But I highly doubt that the fees for a responsibly-managed, minimalist journal would approach anything like that. Philosopher's Imprint charges a fee of only $25 per submission, for example.

    Do you have any examples of these important societies in philosophy that crucially rely on journal revenue? The only one I have been a part of is the APA, and my understanding is that they are largely funded by member fees. I would also mention that this point assumes your previous point, that going open access without a big publisher will not be financially viable without an exorbitant author fee.

    Are you aware of what years these journals became incorporated into big publishers? I looked up the info for Phil Studies, for example, and it became a part of what is now Springer all the way back in 1972. That was before the internet, when all communication and publishing had to be done by paper and phone. It makes complete sense to me that the logistics of running a journal in those days were such a headache that it would have made sense to outsource it to a publisher. That doesn't at all show that publishers still have the same value today, when the logistics are much simpler and cheaper. Indeed, my guess at the history that led to the current state of the publishing industry would be as follows: that publishers once provided very useful services, that these services became far simpler and less valuable due to technological progress, and that publishers have been able to ratchet up their profits due to this technological progress while maintaining a stranglehold by a combination of institutional inertia and large market shares.

    I looked at about 20 of the 102 services listed on your link, and my impression is that, with the exception of 1 of these, they were all either not valuable or not better served by a publisher model rather than an academic-run OA journal. To comment on just a couple:

    (1) Audience / field detection and cultivation: This strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that academics are in a much better position to know about and act on than someone at a publishing company.

    (3) Create and establish a viable brand (including filing, protecting, and maintaining trademarks): Not valuable. The only branding a journal needs is a name, a statement of what kinds of papers it is looking for, and a list of editors. I could care less about protecting trademarks (I doubt I'm going to fall for an imposter journal) or visual branding. Does Mind have a visual brand? I don't know. Do I care? No.

    (9) Solicitation of materials: Again, better done by academics than publishers. People ignore solicitation emails from Wiley and Springer. They don't ignore them from their colleagues.

    The only one that struck me as somewhat plausible is (11), cascading of rejections across journals. This would be genuinely helpful if one journal could say "we don't think this works here, but it would be a good fit here" and then pass along reviews and verdicts. And I can see how it would be logistically easier if it was all within a publisher, rather than across independent journals. But publishers don't currently do this. Instead, they offer to send your paper along for a completely new round of reviewing at another journal. That is at best a very minor convenience of saving me a few minutes of making a new submission myself.

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  41. Dean C. Rowan

    I am reminded by this of the more or less frequent challenges to public libraries that arose during the '90s (when I was employed by one) from local citizens who were confident that the Internet had eliminated the need for libraries. They of course wanted to reduce their local taxes. The reasoning then, as here, was blunt and simplistic. It's easy to assert that "The only branding a journal needs is a name." I doubt there is readily available evidence to support such a statement.

    I don't buy the academic-or-publisher distinction. In academic publishing, many publishers are academics.

    It seems that the Internet really solved all the problems SOTVOP once observed. The Internet, by the way, started around 1968. It wasn't publicly available, but historically speaking it was around a long time before we ordinary folks were cognizant of it. Frankly, I marvel that anybody could truly believe it has solved or could solve the monumental problem of assuring integrity of scholarly communication.

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  42. Wojciech Sadurski

    As an ex-member of JPP Editorial Board I can attest that I am yet to see an Editor who would put so much of his time, passion and effort into running the journal as Bob did. Wiley's judgment is shocking – but in view of what they did with the European Law Journal (with which I had been also associated), not surprising (see the first comment by Richard Bellamy in this thread). Scholars such as Bob Goodin should be praised and cherished (how many new great books would he have written in the time he devoted to his Journal?) rather than treated with contempt, Wiley-style.
    Wojciech Sadurski

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  43. Jensen

    Let’s say academic publishing were accepted as integral to the purpose and functioning of universities, and that universities decided, collectively, that academic publishing should not be controlled by parasitic firms. In 2023, the combined endowments of US universities summed to US$700b. Assuming 0.06% annual growth, US endowments earn a combined annual income of US$42B. Universities could decide to direct 5% of this income to non-profit academic journals, i.e., US$2.1B. An intervention of this kind could rapidly undermine the business models of the big five commercial publishers as well-resourced non-profit journals rise to challenge the incumbent commercial journals. Universities could simultaneously stipulate that where their faculty provide services to for-profit journals, they would be required to charge the standard university-determined external consultancy fee, i.e., a minimum of US$200 per hour. Univerisities could return a share of this new revenue source to their endowments, although it would inevitably decline over time as the commercial publishers lost their market share and then eventually collapsed.

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  44. Jensen

    Also note the significance of this university-led model of publishing for the budgets of libraries, especially in developing countries. Non-profit publishers would not run for free – they may levy some charges, but the purpose of doing so would be to cover costs and ensure ongoing viability, not pay shareholders, or executive bonuses.

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  45. Ken Newton

    I am not a political philosopher but I had first hand experience of the European Journal of Politival Science some years ago. The publisher owned the title with the result was that we did most of the work and the publisher took most of the money. I learned that the same was true of another political science journal published by a University press. The solution was either to publish a new journal on our own or buy out the title. This would have cost between £250,000 and £330,000, and this was a fairly small circulation journal and in the early 1990s.

    Journals do not have the market they used to but publishers still make serious money out of them.
    Ken Newton

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