I’ve had only one experience with the *Australasian Journal of Philosophy*, a rejection, but it was excellent. The process was swift and the comments I received were thoughtful and constructive. They desk-reject very few papers and still manage to turn in verdicts usually under three months, it seems, usually with comments.

AJP and Ergo are the best. I almost always get rejected by them. But I always get helpful, quick feedback. Those two journals are an amazing bright spot in our profession.

My experiences at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and the British Journal of Aesthetics have always been superb. The verdicts have always been timely, and the comments have always been meticulous, fair, helpful, and kind–including for rejections. When I get verdicts back from them, I’m confident that the referees read and carefully considered the entire paper, footnotes and all.

I’ve only ever sent a single paper to Synthese, but my experience there was superb as well. I received three sets of comments, each of them extremely helpful and very meticulous. And I got them very quickly (in a little over two months). I felt like the referees were on my side and really wanted to do their best to help me publish the paper, there or elsewhere. Likewise, I very much enjoyed my single experience with the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

I’ve had lots of good and very good experiences, too. I’ve been pretty lucky!

Since people were mentioning ancient philosophy journals in the other post, I thought I would say that I always had good experiences (meaning fast turnaround) with the following journals: JHP, Apeiron, Phronesis. I don’t mind irritable or poor referee reports, as long as my paper gets back to me quickly. And, in cases where I have published with these journals, working with the editors and staff was easy.

I’ve only ever had good experiences with the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and the Southern Journal of Philosophy, which have accepted some of the things I’ve submitted. BJP is particularly remarkable in that they desk reject very little and still manage to get reviews done in a timely fashion. (The BJP will gently and politely and but very, very persistently remind referees if they don’t get their reviews in in about ten weeks. Ask me how I know….)
I also agree with the love Ergo and Journal of the APA are getting. I’ve no complaints even though I’ve gotten nothing but rejections from both. Ergo’s system with its distributed review system, which makes sure the editor actually knows something about the area you’re writing about, triple anonymity, and the dashboard that lets authors know exactly what’s happening with their papers is a model for the profession.

Ergo is the best I’ve experienced so far. The system provides sufficient information, and for my submission that went out for review, it was 6 days until the first two reviewers were sought; after reviewers refused the task, subsequent reviewers were all sought in one day or two. The decision also came quickly. It arrived the same day the last report came in, and the decision on the revision in three days after resubmission.

Another paper was desk rejected in three days.

Lots of people supporting the journal of the APA. My experience has been very different. I had an R&R. 11 months ago, I sent page proofs. I heard nothing for 10 months. I then received an email saying “We sent you the proofs, we need to know if you accept the changes.” But I never received the proofs, and no one followed up for 10 months (they gave me 3 days to send the proofs, and didn’t follow up for 10 months!). During this time, I emailed the editor twice. Both times he told me that I should be patient, that the pandemic has put everything on hold. And yet I received a message after 10 months saying that my article was on hold because they never received the proofs … which they did not send to me. So the editor told me to be patient without checking with the publisher (Cambridge), who would have told him that they never received the proofs (again, because I never received them). I brought this to the attention of the editor, and he was fully unsympathetic. I thought an apology or an explanation was due. He offered nothing of the sort, and told me I was out of line for asking about the article again. I finally received an apology from the production company (Cambridge), but still nothing from the editor.

Medicine, Health Care & Philosophy. After receiving the acceptance letter, I received the proofs of my article the next day. After returning the proofs, the paper was published online the next day. So it took two days for them to publish the accepted paper. Maybe this has more to do with the publisher (Springer) than the journal (I haven’t published in other Springer journals). Anyway, this is how it should be done.

I would like to praise two journals, and two people in particular working for those journals.

The first is the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, which has excellent reviewing practices and an exceptionally responsive, helpful, and meticulous editor, Stephen Hetherington. I know this from personal experience, and from the experience of several people I know. Given the volume of submissions to AJP, I find it hard to believe that Prof. Hetherington is just one person.

The other journal is the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Again this journal has extremely good reviewing practices, and an excellent set of editors and associate editors. But I would like to single out its managing editor, Elizabeth Hannon, for special praise. All my interactions with her, as an author and as a reviewer, have been extremely smooth and efficient, and I know she is a significant force behind some of the really nice innovations from BJPS in recent years (such as Referee of the Year).

I’ve had good experiences with Canadian Journal of Philosophy, European Journal of Philosophy, Synthese, Journal of the History of Philosophy, among others. Some of these accepted my work some didn’t (multiple times) but in all cases I received substantive comments, and more importantly from my point of view, in a timely fashion.

Re Ergo. I’ve never submitted to it, but thought of it, as they don’t impose word limit on submissions, and in a few occasions I had fairly long papers ready to go. However, they’re not indexed in SCOPUS, and my university (maybe not only mine) puts a lot on emphasis on having publications indexed there, to the extent that something published in a non-SCOPUS journal might not count for prizes/promotion etc.

I had a long but overall very positive experience with Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, thanks primarily to the judiciousness and critical feedback provided by the current editor Victor Caston. The summer after I received tenure in 2017, I submitted a 50-page paper to OSAP that I’d been tinkering with on and off since my dissertation. About 9 months later I received two reports, an R&R and a rejection. Both reports were clearly by senior scholars in my field who had published on my topic. The R&R was helpful and provided a lot of good feedback, requests for clarification, and criticisms. The rejection report was less than a page and contained a number of misreadings and (I felt) unfair reactions to the main ideas in the paper. On his own initiative, Caston overruled the rejection and provided his own 5-page single-spaced editor’s report, encouraging me to revise and resubmit. That report included general and specific comments on my paper, down to page and line numbers, pressing me on just the right points and generously offering suggestions to help shore up the argument. It took me a year to resubmit, mostly due to a persistent diffidence about my views, but I eventually revised the paper and submitted a second version in the summer of 2019. There followed another wait of 8 months for a new report from the R&R reader, this time with a recommendation to publish with revisions. Caston was less positive. He again supplemented the reader report with a lengthy editor’s report of his own: 11 pages of detailed comments on every aspect of the paper, prodding me to make further improvements and close additional loopholes he’d found. So another R&R, but with no further need for outside reader reports things now went very quickly: within a month I submitted a third version of the paper and five days after that it was reviewed and accepted conditionally — again, amazingly, with a further 7 pages of critical comments from the editor.

Was it worth it? I’d certainly not recommend the process for those whose careers depend on a positive outcome. Still, the month or so working on the final version of this paper was one of the most intense and philosophically rewarding scholarly experiences I’ve had. My views developed immeasurably, due entirely to Caston’s scrupulosity. By the end of the process he’d written almost 25 single-spaced pages on three versions of the paper, and despite the pandemic having taken off by this point he generously exchanged lengthy e-mails with me about several key points in the argument. With each version of the paper I was a little more sure I’d put things away, only to be dazed and delighted to discover I could improve things further. It’s a great intellectual gift to be shown how one’s ideas are never final while also being provided with the encouragement to refine them. Thanks Victor!

I had a great experience with Southern Journal of Philosophy; the paper was rejected, but I got the news 2 months to the day that I submitted, and included were comments from 2 reviewers that, while short, were very helpful to me in improving the paper.

I also want to commend the staff and editors at Inquiry. What trouble I did have with my paper there — ultimately accepted, after a looooong time — was due to excessive reviewer tardiness over a couple rounds of revisions, not due to the editors; and the editorial staff were wonderful and very responsive to my inquiries and concerns. I was treated like a human being, and for that I’m grateful.

I noticed someone mentioned that Mind is trying to improve, and that is also consistent with my experience of the editors, however, they can still be at the mercy of reviewers who cling to the bad old ways. Such was my experience, anyway. I hope it’s gotten better.

I have had the best experiences at AJP (several rejections, one acceptance). The referee reports are always done in a timely manner, and they often point out ways to improve the paper.