Professor Goodin discusses the JPP fiasco, noted previously, although legal liability constrains what he can say:
I can’t say much about that episode, or dealings with Wiley around the journal more generally, without rendering myself liable to lawsuits for breach of ‘commercial-in-confidence’. Not, I hasten to add (to avoid other lawsuits), that they have made any specific threats in that direction. But the very fact that the possibility occurs to me tells you something about the nature of the ending, I suppose.
Wiley was not contractually required to give any explanation of why they fired me as jpp editor, and they gave me none. So I can only guess as to their reasons. Thinking that there may have been commercial imperatives at work, I asked around among other publisherfriends about those in a general way. I’ll summarize those conversations below. As I say, I have no idea whether any of that was actually what was behind Wiley’s behaviour vis-a-vis jpp. (Lawyers: note well that litigation-proofing disclaimer!)
Still, the general is probably of more interest than the particular, anyway. Based on what I have gleaned from sitting on editorial boards of other journals and from those conversations with other publishers, here is what I think has been going on in the larger world of journal publishing. Up to (and in some cases through) the end of the last century, publishers sold subscriptions separately for each journal. Librarians subscribed or not to any given journal on the basis of their (or their local advisers’) perceptions of journal quality. Hence, back in those days, the publisher’s commercial interest in maximizing subscription income aligned perfectly with the editors’ interest in publishing an academically high-quality product.
In the years since, publishers began selling their journals to libraries packaged in a ‘bundle’. In that world, the quality of any given journal matters less, and the sheer volume of what was in the bundle comes to matter much more. Often those bundled products are sold to purchasing consortia of many libraries, further reducing the power of any given librarian to exercise quality control via purchasing decisions. The Open Access beat-up has, inadvertently, been the death knell of quality academic publishing, driving a fatal wedge between the incentives of publishers and those of journal editors.
There are various different models that publishers are employing to come to grips with the Open Access world, and each of those models has its own implications for what pressures publishers are incentivized to put on the editors of their journals. Abstracting from particularities, one fact seems to dominate almost all of those approaches, directly or indirectly. That fact is just this. The profits of commercial publishers are increasingly a function of ridiculously large Open Access fees, whether paid by the author, the grant-giver or (nowadays most typically) the author’s home institution or national government through ‘Read and Publish Transformative Agreements’. The way to maximize those profits is to maximize the number of articles a journal publishes – and to do so without regard to quality. (As I have said, given bundling and consortia, no library can unsubscribe to an individual journal of diminishing quality anyway, so a journal’s quality is no longer a commercial concern to publishers seeking to maximize profits.)
In that New World of journal publishing, publishers are incentivized to pressure editors to increase, sometimes radically, the numbers of articles published. They may pompously pretend that doing so is in the interest of ‘good science’, given the greatly increased number of papers being written every year. But that argument assumes that all of that new stuff is of the same average quality as the old – which a publisher has no way of knowing, and which in my experience as jpp’s editor is radically untrue. jpp experienced multiple doublings of its submissions over my time as editor. But the number of ‘really good’ submissions always remained almost literally constant, in absolute terms; the extra submissions virtually all fell in the unpublishable tail of the distribution. I say that as an editor famous for publishing good first pieces from unknown authors just starting their careers, and as someone whose journal publishes more articles from non-Anglophone authors than any comparator. So I say that not out of Ivy League snootiness. (Indeed, I consistently reject more of their articles than I publish.) It is a quality assessment, pure and simple.
Blogosphere is full of bleating that journals should increase the number of articles being accepted, on the grounds that ‘my article was no worse than the worst article appearing there that year’. In most cases that is simply untrue. (I do freely admit, however, that in some years jpp published an article or two that we would not have done had we not been contractually obliged to publish a certain number of articles per year.) But suppose the claim were true, and just do the maths. Publishing more articles that are equally bad as the worst articles published would automatically reduce the average quality of articles in the journal – that is an unavoidable fact of simple arithmetic. Of course, each author of an almost-as-good article has an interest in their own article being accepted – but only theirs. If every almost-as-good article were published, the value of publishing in the venue would nosedive, to the chagrin of all authors publishing there. It is a classic collective action problem. In that Tragedy of the Commons, the role of the editor is to be The Enforcer, against both self-serving authors in the blogsphere and self-serving commercial publishers in the share market.
This seems to me an astute and accurate diagnosis, but I'd be curious to hear from other journal editors on the issues raised by Professor Goodin. (As an aside, I was astonished by his claim about legal philosophy: "I’m old school in thinking that political philosophy is fundamentally normative – ethics applied to politics, both the processes of political rule and the problems that can be solved (or caused) through politically concerted action. Legal philosophy is the same, ethics applied to legal rule." This odd conception of legal philosophy probably explains why JPP, despite its excellence in political philosophy, has published almost nothing of note in philosophy of law.)
