The executive, associate, and advisory editors and all of the editorial board members of one of the most influential journals in moral and political philosophy, Philosophy & Public Affairs, have resigned en masse.

According to their statement (below), crucial aims of scholarly journals are “not well-served by commercial publishing.” Philosophy & Public Affairs is published by Wiley, the sixth largest publishing corporation in the world by revenue (over $2 billion annually).

The outgoing editors and editorial board members will be launching a new diamond open-access journal to be published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH), and will be occupying at the new journal the same positions they held at Philosophy & Public Affairs. (Current editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs, Anna Stilz, is not among the statement’s signatories. In answer to an inquiry about that, she replied, “I cannot comment on this at this time.” That said, it is worth noting that Stilz has been publicly critical of Wiley in the past—see, for example, the updates on this post.)

Readers may recall the similar resignation last year of the editorial team at the Journal of Political Philosophy, another Wiley journal, and that team’s creation of Political Philosophy, also a diamond open-access journal published by OLH. At least 11 Wiley journals have seen mass editorial resignations since 2018, according to Retraction Watch.

The as-of-yet-unnamed new journal will be open for submissions beginning in September.

In the statement below, the editors and editorial board members announce their resignation, explain their reasons for it and for their creation of an open-access journal, and discuss issues related to submissions currently under review at Philosophy & Public Affairs.

The following is a statement from the executive, associate, and advisory editors and all the members of the editorial board of Philosophy & Public Affairs.

We are unanimously resigning from our editorial roles at Philosophy & Public Affairs, published by Wiley, and launching a new diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH). All of us will play the same editorial roles in the new journal and will retain the aim of publishing the best philosophical work touching on matters of public importance.

We take this step because we believe that scholarly journals—including our own—serve important purposes, and that these purposes are not well-served by commercial publishing. For three decades now, academic journals have suffered from their ownership by for-profit publishers, who have exploited their monopoly position to sharply raise prices, unduly burdening subscribing libraries and shutting out other institutions and individuals from access to research. The recent rise of the author-funded “open access” model has only reinforced academic inequality, since scholars with access to fewer resources are unable to pay the fees that make their work freely accessible; it has also incentivized commercial publishers to try to publish as many articles as possible and so to pressure rigorous journals to weaken or abandon their quality controls.

Faced with this conflict between purpose and business model, we have decided to embrace the purpose and move to an alternative model.

The alternative—which our librarian colleagues have been urging for some time—is for libraries, universities, and other academic institutions to offer direct support for the publication of open-access journals, which are guided by independent scholarly judgment and freely available for authors and readers. We are delighted to have found precisely this model at OLH, an award-winning diamond open-access publisher supported by a consortium of libraries and funding agencies.

If diamond open-access journals are so good, why are they not already dominant? Partly because we all have day jobs and transitions take time. In addition, our careers depend on publishing in journals with name recognition, reputation, and high impact factors. These publications are now typically owned by commercial publishers. Colleagues often cannot afford to take a chance on untested journals. This is why, as editors of one of the leading journals in our field, we feel a strong responsibility to move toward a new, better, arrangement.

Our plan, if Wiley permits it, is to complete the reviews for all revised submissions received prior to this announcement. We apologize to authors who recently submitted manuscripts to Philosophy & Public Affairs, and we recognize the especially high cost to authors who have been revising their manuscripts, but who have not yet resubmitted. We very much regret these costs but saw no realistic way to avoid them. We hope to make the new journal worthy of these costs.

We plan to launch the new journal (whose name will be announced shortly) and begin accepting submissions in September 2024. Please send us your best work in moral and political philosophy and adjacent fields, take note of our migration in your hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

We are excited to embark on this new adventure. We hope you share our excitement and join us in making this new venture a great success.

Signed,

Outgoing Executive Editors

Jonathan Quong, University of Southern California, USA
Patrick Tomlin, University of Warwick, UK

Outgoing Associate Editors

Arash Abizadeh, McGill University, Canada
Nico Cornell, University of Michigan, USA
Garrett Cullity, Australian National University
Marc Fleurbaey, Paris School of Economics, France
Johann Frick, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Joe Horton, University College London, UK
Sophia Moreau, University of Toronto, Canada
Kristi Olson, Bowdoin College, USA
Japa Pallikkathayil, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Gina Schouten, Harvard University, USA
Zofia Stemplowska, University of Oxford, UK
Adam Swift, University College London, UK

Outgoing Advisory Editors

Charles R. Beitz, Princeton University, USA
Joshua Cohen, Apple University, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Alan Patten, Princeton University, USA
Arthur Ripstein, University of Toronto, Canada
Seana Shiffrin, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Outgoing Editorial Board

Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan, USA
Cheshire Calhoun, Arizona State University, USA
David Estlund, Brown University, USA
Archon Fung, Harvard Kennedy School, USA
Barbara Herman, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Pamela Hieronymi, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Frances Myrna Kamm, Rutgers University, USA
Niko Kolodny, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Jeff McMahan, Oxford University, UK
Liam Murphy, New York University, USA
Debra Satz, Stanford University, USA
Samuel Scheffler, New York University, USA
Amartya Sen, Harvard University, USA
Tommie Shelby, Harvard University, USA
Amia Srinivasan, Oxford University, UK
Jeremy Waldron, New York University, USA
Stuart White, Oxford University, UK
Gideon Yaffe, Yale University, USA

A PDF of the statement is here.

UPDATE 1 (5/22/24): I’m informed by some of the editorial team that the journal’s founding editors—Marshall Cohen, Tim Scanlon, and Tom Nagel—were consulted about this decision and fully support it.

UPDATE 2 (5/23/24): Inside Higher Ed reports on the story.

UPDATE 3 (5/24/24): Tyler Cowen (GMU), at Marginal Revolution, says: “I am rooting for them, but can they succeed?”