CHE has a story on the controversy here. (Thanks to George Rainbolt for the pointer.) I confess I've been so busy, I've not followed this carefully, though I've asked one philosopher who has been following this to write something up about the issues for the blog. Students often inquire about the relative prestige of journals, but this exercise isn't simply about establishing a prestige hierarchy. As one scholar quoted in the article notes, a real worry with this particular enterprise is that it is meant to displace peer review of scholarly work at the tenure or promotion stage: e.g., Deans can just say, "Professor X published in six A-level journals, therefore we don't need any review of those articles." That would obviously be unacceptable at the best departments (NYU, Princeton et al. might well turn someone down for tenure who had published in Phil Review and Nous etc.), though might actually work fairly well as a way of streamlining the tenure process at most places (assuming the A-level journals really have meaningful peer review in their editorial process).
In any case, I hope to have more on this before too long.
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