Ergo To Stop Requesting Submission Fee from Authors
The philosophy journal Ergo will no longer be asking authors for a $20 fee or “donation” to consider a manuscript for publication.
The journal had implemented the optional fee in 2020 in order to defray the costs of operating the journal. It had also launched an institutional sponsorship plan to get philosophy departments and libraries to support the journal. The plan has been successful. Ben Bradley (Syracuse), one of the journal’s editors, writes:
We are very pleased to announce that we have secured enough institutional commitments to cover the journal’s expenses. We have received sponsorships from over 30 departments and libraries for $100-$600 each. We’d like to single out Cornell, Gothenburg and Toronto as giving especially significant support. Most crucially, we have recently received a substantial long-term commitment from the Syracuse University philosophy department that will cover the majority of our costs for the next three years, and likely longer. As a result, we will be discontinuing the practice of requesting $20 donations from authors, at least for now, and hopefully forever. (Of course, we still welcome any such donations, but they are no longer necessary for us to continue operating.) We expect to make this change on the journal website in a few weeks. We are very excited about this development, and grateful to the SU department as well as the many others who are making this change possible! We also thank the hundreds of authors who have donated to the journal over the last couple of years; your assistance helped us reach this point.
You can view the list of institutional sponsors here.
can Ben Bradley and others at Ergo do an Elon Musk and buy the Journal of Philosophy, Phil Review, Nous, PPR, etc. please?
Kudos to Ergo which continues to be one of the best, and best run, journals in the discipline.
This is certainly great news!
It would be interesting to see whether the editors see any changes in submissions after this fee is removed. The most obvious of these would be to see whether submissions go up, but it would also be interesting to see whether the demographics of submitters changes. (Do we see more submissions from grad-students and the non-tenured, from those living outside of the few countries that dominate most English language journals, from less prestigious programs in the US and elsewhere?) It could even be possible that the distribution of topics discussed changes (perhaps because those writing on some topics suspect they have little chance of being published in generalist journals, and so are unwilling to submit if there is a donation required). Finally, although most difficult to track, is the journal now flooded with far more half-baked submissions? This sort of information could be important for future discussions of the pros and cons of imposing fees upon submissions.