A reader recently pointed out that the philosophy journal Dialectica in 2020 became an open access journal, after 15 years of being published by Blackwell-Wiley, but that the journal’s latest issue was dated 2020. What’s going on at this journal?

A lot, it turns out.

I asked the journal’s editor, Philipp Blum (Lucerne), for an explanation, which he provides below. As you’ll see, the conversion of a journal to open access can be difficult. Dr. Blum describes some of the various challenges involved, and the work that he and his fellow editors have been doing over the past few years.

The light at the end of the tunnel is this: over the next two months, Dialetica will be publishing 12 issues, catching the journal up to the end of 2023, with plans to publish the first 2024 issue by the end of April.

Here is Dr. Blum’s account:

The Editorial Board of Dialectica, the Swiss philosophy journal founded in 1947 by Bernays, Gonseth and Bachelard, decided in 2019 to go real (so-called “Platinum” or “Diamond”) Open Access, increasingly dissatisfied with the combination of poorer service and higher costs provided by our former publisher Blackwell (bought by Wiley in 2007) and convinced that universities should not have to pay for the fruits of the work of their employees. Helped by a grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation for the year 2020, we founded the Dialectica Open Access Initiative to develop a workflow, based on Markdown and MacFarlane’s pandoc, turning final manuscripts into aesthetically pleasing pdfs and smartphone readable htmls. 

Unfortunately, this took us a really long time. In retrospect, it would have been better to cancel our publication contract with Wiley at the end, rather than at the beginning of the flipping process. Using only freely available software, we had to develop a number of tools, for example environments for principles and statements common in philosophy papers, which we make freely available on our GitHub “DialOA” page. In the context of this second project, funded by swissuniversities, we also started working on an OA toolkit, to lay out the choice-points and difficulties we faced, in the hope of helping other philosophy journals to go OA – which, for us, means getting rid of commercial publishers altogether. We also started making publicly available the huge bibliography we use for the copy-editing of Dialectica articles, which may, perhaps, one day complement PhilPapers and CrossRef. 

During this time, we maintained our ordinary procedures: good papers kept being sent in, the Editorial Committee met every week to discuss them, using the “fishpond”, our system for triple-blind refereeing. With the indispensable help of my co-editor, Fabrice Correia of the University of Geneva, we accepted original papers of the highest quality for all the Dialectica issues up to 76(4), the autumn issue of 2023, all of which are now being copy-edited and will soon be made freely available to everyone.

To those with papers to submit, he adds:

Now is the perfect time to submit your paper to Dialectica: we are able to speedily review them and there are still open slots in 77(1), to be published in April.

And to the philosophical community, he says:

Any advice, especially on copy-editing and collaborative proof-correction, as well as new members for the Editorial Committee are most welcome! Please write to [email protected]. 

Dialectica bills itself as a “general analytic philosophy journal”. It is the official organ of the European Society of Analytic Philosophy. You can learn more about it here.