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More on Wiley as a journal publisher

There's a stunning comment on the earlier thread from Professor Anna Stilz, a political philosopher at Princeton who is the EIC of Philosophy & Public Affairs, that deserves wide notice:

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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5 responses to “More on Wiley as a journal publisher”

  1. For some idea of what Wiley looks for, see the fairly recent advertisement for a new editor of “Philosophical Investigations”:

    https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/14679205/homepage/cfa-eic

    The most interesting thing in their list is Key Performance Indicators. I have no idea whether the editor who was being replaced objected to the business model that is reflected in the Wiley list. The journal has had, under the editorship of Howard Mounce, a very distinguished history.

  2. This bears some similarities to my own experience with Wiley. The business ethics center at my university (I'm currently its director) owned the journal Business & Society Review for many years. We had a multiple-year publishing contract with Wiley which required the production of 4 issues per year. When it came up for renewal a few years ago, Wiley asked that we consider going to 5 issues per year, and would we mind throwing in a special issue from time to time (as in: regularly)? But they didn't push too hard. I think one reason is that Wiley was just the publisher, and they knew we could shop the journal around to find a more agreeable publisher if it came to that. We ended up transferring ownership of the journal to a center at a different university and they are now publishing more issues per year — no doubt with Wiley's encouragement.

    Another journal with which I'm associated — Business Ethics Quarterly — has a similar arrangement with Cambridge UP. It's similar in the sense that Cambridge doesn't own, but merely publishes, the journal. The journal is owned by the Society for Business Ethics, which gives it power to decide how much to publish, not to mention who will edit it. All of this is spelled out (so far as I can remember) in the publishing contract.

    I love the idea of true open-access journals, where academics are fully in control. But publishers do a lot of work to get eyeballs on papers. If we need publishers, then ideally we will hire them, as opposed to them hiring us.

  3. Oh, no! That's terrible to hear! I loved Philosophical Investigations, under H.O. Mounce, and published several pieces there myself!

  4. I would like to hear from Bob Goodin before rushing to judgment, but on the basis of the information that's emerging, I for one would support a boycott of JPP until this mess is sorted in a good way.

  5. Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini

    There was a similar situation in linguistics in 2015, where the leadership of the journal Lingua resigned en masse to protest high fees charged by Elsevier and set up an open-access journal called Glossa. This seems like a possible solution in this case, too.

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