A young philosopher writes:
I'm an untenured faculty member at [a PhD-granting department], and I'm writing because I think something needs to be done about the state of philosophy journals lately. I am powerless to do anything, but maybe if some attention is drawn to the problems (again) on your blog, the situation can be improved.
The problems, as I see them, are these. Junior faculty need to publish in "good" journals. But this is getting harder and harder to do. Currently THREE of the top six (according to the survey you did) philosophy journals are not currently accepting submissions (Nous, PPR, and AJP). The situation with AJP is a one-time only problem (the website says that the editor is ill), but it seems like Nous and PPR only accept submissions for about 6 months out of any given year lately. This has the effect of roughly doubling the number of submissions to the other top journals. These other journals are then swamped with submissions, and their review times slow. (As it is, when you send a paper to the Philosophical Review these days, six months go by before the paper is even sent to someone to read.) The editors of these journals pressure referees to be extra critical, so that they do not also acquire a long backlog of accepted papers. The editors also cut down on the number of referees who read each paper, since they have so many papers to send out. It seems to me that this does not lead to yet higher standards at these journals. Instead it just increases the amount of arbitrariness in the review process, so that it is more likely that even good papers will be rejected. Add to this the fact that the journals that are out of commission are the ones with good editorial practices and faster review times, and the result is that there are relatively few places to send your paper, you must wait a long time to find out whether it will be published, and the chances that it will be accepted are lower. For those under the time pressure of a tenure clock, this is a disaster. It is hard to imagine making the case to my dean that my paper was not published in a "good" journal because so many of those journals were out of commission for most of the last few years---even if that is a large part of the explanation.
What are the possible solutions? We either need more "good" philosophy journals, or we need the good ones to publish more often. The founding of Philosophers' Imprint was a big help here---not only is it a new journal, but because it is online-only it is not confined to publishing only four issues worth of papers each year. But no other general philosophy journal ranked in your survey has shown any signs of giving up the print-journal calendar and following this model. Why not? I'm not sure who is benefitting from the current set-up. In fact, there seems to be an opportunity here for some of the journals: journals ranked near the middle (say, the American Philosophical Quarterly) could re-invent themselves and increase their prestige by going online-only.
This seems like a smart, strategic suggestion. Of course, the logistical and financial support of an on-line journal is not a simple matter. But my correspondent is surely right that there is an opportunity here for an existing print journal to significantly expand its prestige and visibility by going on-line, following the PI model.
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