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All editors (except the EIC) and the entire editorial board of Philosophy & Public Affairs resign, and will start a new open access journal

Brian Leiter

The public announcement is here:  Download Philosophy Public Affairs Public Letter of Resignation –.   PPA was also a Wiley journal (like the now-defunct Journal of Political Philosophy), and comments by the  EIC of PPA in 2023 foreshadowed this development.  (The EIC has a separate contract with Wiley, and was not part of this mass resignation.)  Whereas JPP was founded and strongly identified with its lead editor, Bob Goodin, PPA has been around for a half century, and none of the current editorial team founded the journal.  But their mass migration to a new journal should suffice to sustain the reputation of the PPA successor journal, as of yet unnamed.

As we learned during the JPP crisis, not all editorial experiences with Wiley as a journal publisher have been bad.  Wiley still publishes a number of other prominent philosophy journals, including Analytic Philosophy, European Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, among others.  

ADDENDUM:  One of the resigning editors tells me that, "The founding editors (including Marshal Cohen, Tom Nagel, and Tim Scanlon) were consulted about this decision and have given their full support to it."

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6 responses to “All editors (except the EIC) and the entire editorial board of Philosophy & Public Affairs resign, and will start a new open access journal”

  1. Max Khan Hayward

    As the Editor of Analysis Reviews, I should point out that Analysis is published by Oxford University Press!

    BL REPLY: Thanks for correcting that, I meant "Analytic Philosophy" not "Analysis"!

    Reply
  2. Joona Räsänen

    Analysis is published by OUP – not Wiley.

    Reply
  3. Matt

    Also, isn't The Philosophical Quarterly also published by OUP? OUP has done it since at least 2017 (glancing at a hardcopy issue I have from then).

    Reply
  4. Brian Leiter

    Indeed, it was published by Wiley, but not anymore. Thanks.

    Reply
  5. David R.

    Max, when I published in Analysis (this was back when Jimmy Carter was POTUS) they were published by Blackwell (now a Wiley company, but I think not then). Out of curiosity, do you know why the journal switched publisher?

    Reply
  6. Gregory C. Mayer

    The meaning of "publisher" seems to have changed in the not too distant past. Journals owned by scholarly societies have long been thought of as "published" by the society, and I still think of them that way. Printers like Wiley (I'm not sure about OUP) have taken to claiming to "publish" these journals, but I don't think this is correct. The society owns the journal, selects the editors, and contracts with a printer; when the contract expires, they can move to a different printer. Printers increasingly provide auxiliary infrastructure to societies for editorial purposes. Some printers, like Allen Press, which prints many society-owned journals in biology, continue to describe themselves as printers, while providing these services. The journal Evolution, on whose editorial board I have served, is owned by the Society for the Study of Evolution, and it recently switched printer from Wiley to OUP. This involved no non-normal changes in the editorial board, and the journal, to my mind, did not change publisher– it's always been the Society.

    The Scots Philosophical Association describes itself as "joint owner" of the PQ; the other owner is, I believe, the University of St. Andrews. So I would say the Association and St. Andrews are joint publishers of the PQ; the printer they hire has changed from Wiley to OUP.

    To me, the key issues are ownership and control over selection of the editorial board: publishers have it, printers don't.

    There are, of course, journals owned by for-profit companies (Wiley, Elsevier, Springer, etc.), and these companies may be truly said to be the publishers of these journals.

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