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Posting unpublished work online?

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 23–MORE DISCUSSION WELCOME

A reader writes:

[C]ould you encourage your blog readers to share their thoughts on posting unpublished articles online, like on platforms such as Philpapers (especially as a junior philosopher). Are there any potential drawbacks to consider?

One drawback is that it makes blind peer review more difficult, since the article is searchable.  But what do readers think?  (Given the time of year, I may move this to the front in January, depending on how much uptake there is to this question now.)

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18 responses to “Posting unpublished work online?”

  1. Simon

    I do this, because I want people to read and think about my research, and posting increases the chance of that happening.

    Reply
  2. Cameron

    I do this because the abject state of the journal system means that a completed piece of philosophy can easily be under review for multiple years, and one runs a serious risk of being "scooped", or of the literature simply moving on, if one keeps one's work under wraps for such a long time.

    Reply
  3. Ian

    Worth noting that work posted publicly will used to train large language models. If you're opposed to that, you may want to reconsider!

    Reply
  4. Mohan Matthen

    Let me highlight an issue different from speed. Often one is tempted to post a draft which needs considerable revision before referees would find it acceptable for publication. I have more than once found that drafts that I circulate or send to my friends contain errors or omissions that I revise before publication. And I have learned from bitter experience that one wants to be careful about multiple versions of one's work being in circulation. Somebody who has read the PhilPapers draft might be unwilling to put much time working on the PhiL Studies print version.

    Reply
  5. Rachel

    I do this, for the same reasons mentioned by the others.

    Reply
  6. Richard Baron

    The gold standard for such publication, albeit limited to mathematics and some of the sciences, is surely:
    https://arxiv.org/

    This wonderful site not only offers a place to publish work that is not or may not be final, but also has a good system for handling successive versions of papers. And it applies light-touch moderation to exclude work of no value:
    https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html

    Now if there were a site for philosophy that had all the systematicity and other virtues of the arXiv, that would be useful.

    Reply
  7. Michel Xhignesse

    I'm certainly happy to read unpublished material that's posted online, or otherwise circulated (e.g. sometimes I ask to read the paper version of someone's conference talk). If I get a a PhilPapers alert for an unpublished paper that sounds interesting, I will absolutely download it and have a look. In fact, I think I'm better about reading unpublished work promptly, since for whatever reason I don't seem to send it to the "to read" folder to die.

    That said, I expect that the main issue with this practice is circulation. Who's going to read it? I would guess relatively few people, although it might reach a few like me if it goes through the PhilPapers feed. If it's just posted directly on your website but not anchored to PhilPapers or some other dissemination mechanism, I don't expect it'll reach many eyes at all, since they'd have to stumble across it.

    For my part, I've decided not to do this, pretty much for Mohan's reasons above. I'm a perennial tinkerer, and my work improves significantly between drafts. I don't think I can allow myself to let a paper go out into the world like that unless it's at least been vetted by a couple/few people who don't feel obliged to be nice to me.

    I am tempted, however, to do something like this for some translation work I have in mind which will probably be a hard sell for publishers, but whose existence in English would be a great boon to my subfield. There again, however, I worry about the circulation issue: who's going to find it? The work I have in mind has interdisciplinary value, too, so I worry that my subfield network, large as it is, can't really ensure that the right people in cognate disciplines find it when they want it/don't yet know that they want it.

    Reply
  8. S.K

    The initial inquiry was mine, stemming from a different worry. A few years ago, I posted a paper online which was downloaded a lot. However, I noticed that some people were discussing my views without acknowledging or citing my work. I had the impression that, since the work wasn't formally published, they didn't feel the need to cite it. Secondly, as a junior philosopher, I was concerned that journal referees who Google you might find it easier to dismiss your work with a casual 'poof, what do these kids know?'

    Reply
  9. Dean C. Rowan

    As an academic law librarian, I am inclined to welcome wholeheartedly improved access to works in progress, but I also acknowledge the risks mentioned by others. Versioning becomes an issue, and early citations to versions not yet published in a journal or collection might, like broken URLs, fail to hit their target in the final published version. Certainly, there is no good reason *not* to cite a work not yet formally published.

    In my experience some legal scholars can be quite protective of their postings to SSRN, inasmuch as they discourage the library from promoting other sources for their work, such as the library's own institutional repository. They want to consolidate downloads on SSRN, thereby maximizing the numbers. Some IRs work to optimize search engine performance, which will help to solve Michel Xhignesse's concern about work being buried on a website not already recognized as a reliable source for new work.

    But most legal scholarship is not peer-reviewed, and I would guess that student law journal editors are not as likely to keep abreast of new literature in legal sub-disciplines as potential reviewers for other disciplines' peer-reviewed publications.

    Reply
  10. Samir Okasha

    I sometimes post my drafts on a pre-publication archive, for the same reasons as others.

    However I do have reservations about doing so, as on more than one occasion I've had my work plagiarized as a result.

    Reply
  11. David Rosenthal

    There are highly respected and widely used variants of https://arxiv.org/ for fields related to psychology (https://blog.psyarxiv.com/about-psyarxiv/) and biology (https://www.biorxiv.org/)–both relevant in slightly different ways to work in philosophy of mind and in cognitive science.

    And people in those fields seem comfortable with those sites–sometimes putting up work before it appears in a standard journal and sometimes putting up work and simply letting people refer to it on the "arxiv" site. Similarly for https://arxiv.org/ itself for math and mathematically oriented sciences.

    But philosophy doesn't seem to be so enlightened yet–being still tied too closely to print journals and their reviewing, which like many I find often unreliable.

    Reply
  12. truly curious

    I am curious if there are any less established philosophers (early career, unknown, etc.) who have posted their unpublished papers (and not yet accepted papers) on line have EVER receive constructive feedback from a stranger. Please answer … someone. I am so skeptical. And if my skepticism is well founded, why on earth are such philosophers post their stuff on line?

    Reply
  13. David Zimmerman

    It is interesting that in the sciences there is something called a "preprint," i.e. a preliminary version of an article, which appears in the very journal it has been submitted to for final publication, but before peer review has been completed.

    That is not a real analogy to the sort of pre-official-publication public availability discussed here, but it might be another model for philosophy to follow.

    I can see some objections to it: notably, that it would take up a lot of time at the journal in question, with the initial screening and a commitment to "preprint" the article, which would take up space… and then to solicit the peer reviewers, and then (if it passes) to publish it yet again in final peer reviewed form.

    But the sciences manage to do it. Why not philosophy?

    Reply
  14. Michael Magoulias

    I work for a preprint platform called SSRN (https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/), which started shortly after arXiv in the early 1990s. Its focus has been in the social sciences historically, but covers early stage research across all disciplines now. Other similar platforms in Law and Sociology have been attempted in recent years, but have not succeeded. In the “platform economy” and the “network economy” success is predicated on the ability to deliver significant usage — network effects — consistently. Simply slapping up a website and displaying “content” is not meaningful at this point. For disciplines like Law, Computer Science, Economics/Business, which operate in various ways are outside of the traditional peer review journal system, a preprint platforms offer guaranteed accessibility (they do not require payments) and are therefore heavily used by policy makers and journalists. This in turn drives evidence for the “societal impact” of academic research, which is increasingly being demanded by assessors of higher education.

    Reply
  15. John Rapko

    Truly Curious at #12:

    I've posted several dozen unpublished pieces on-line, mostly in the philosophy of art and book reviews. I've only ever received a small handful of responses from people I don't know; and without exception all of those were from the authors of the books I reviewed, all saying that they appreciate a review, even if it is from an idiot, but that of course I'm wrong about my criticisms; and also they had already thought of them and had already planned on addressing them in their next book, so really why does an unknown doofus even bother?–On this point I'm always reminded of Alasdair MacIntyre's remark that a major aspect of professionalization is to learn who you're required to admire, who you must respect even if you disagree with them, and to whom you may condescend.

    Reply
  16. M. Dean

    It's interesting to read that some people post unpublished work to prevent being "scooped," while others don't publish because of the threat of plagiarism.

    I'm more sympathetic to the plagiarism worry because I'm not sure what recourse a junior scholar (or anyone else for that matter) would have if someone took an idea without obviously copying it word-for-word.

    Reply
  17. Harry

    I noticed recently — to my surprise — that the American Philosophical Quarterly "will not publish material that has already appeared elsewhere," in a sense that "precludes pre-publication with broadcast dissemination, alike in print or electronically in open-access forums such as Academia.edu" (and presumably PhilPapers is on all fours with Academia.edu here). Although I've never seen statements like this before in other journals, I'd be interested to know whether any others share this policy.

    Reply
  18. Michael Magoulias

    Here is a useful list of the bigger publishers’ policies about what constitutes “prior publication,” which is the concept that governs whether a paper is submittable to a journal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_publishers_by_preprint_policy

    APQ is owned by North American Philosophical Publications and published by University of Illinois Press, which is a genuinely non-profit-maximizing university press. (Not all university presses are.) I have to imagine that neither organization is rolling in surplus cash, and this step was taken in order to protect subscription revenues by limiting alternative access points.

    Historically, prior publication carried a sense that the paper had already been peer reviewed and possibly fell under another organization’s copyright. It was therefore not original research. The advent of early stage papers appearing on preprint platforms changed that, and since these papers are prior to peer review, the general feeling among journal publishers (and owners ) is that they are different in kind from the peer-reviewed versions and less valuable.

    This of course begs a lot of questions about what the results of the peer review process actually are. Studies have been appearing in the sciences indicating that the changes between the early and final versions of a paper are often neither numerous nor substantive.

    You can see how if you rely on subscription revenue and worry about the freely available preprint version not being significantly different from your final published version, you would be tempted to take a protectionist stance and mandate that no other versions be made publicly available.

    That is not workable in some disciplines at this point, but the humanities have not generally made much use of preprint platforms, though they have made use of the collaboration networks. (The main distinction between the two types platform is ultimately about copyright. A preprint is always under the author’s copyright. Academia and ResearchGate have a great deal of published papers on them, which usually fall under the publisher/owner’s copyright. Both have faced legal challenges because of this.)

    Most traditional publishers do not view presence on a preprint platform or the presence of a preprint on a collaboration network as a case of prior publication, but there are exceptions. Some publishers say it’s fine if a paper appears on a non-commercial platform, but not on a commercial one. This is incoherence masquerading as high-mindedness.

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