Ergo Eliminates “Major Revisions” Option for Editors and Referees
Philosophy journal Ergo has eliminated the “major revisions” category of editorial response to submissions.
The only options for editors and referees of the journal will be “accept,” “reject” and “minor revisions”.
In an email, one of the managing editors of Ergo, Ben Bradley (Syracuse), writes:
Papers that need a substantial amount of work to be publishable, even very promising papers, will be rejected. One of the guiding principles of Ergo has been to emphasize efficiency over improving submitted papers (hence our policy allowing only one round of revisions—we want authors submitting papers that are already in a polished state). This policy change accords with that principle. But it is also, and most importantly, an attempt to reduce the number of accepted papers to an affordable level. Ergo’s budget allows us to publish only about 50 papers per year, but we now get well over 1,000 submissions annually. Despite generous financial support from the Syracuse philosophy department, we cannot pay our bills in the long term if we accept even 70 of those, absent a new revenue stream.
Have other journals made similar moves, or considered doing so?
Discussion of this change and other related editorial policy matters at academic journals are welcome.
See the comments policy.
Remember: comments are moderated and may take some time to appear.
Hey Ben, I’m curious roughly how much funding would be required to go from 50 to 70 papers a year?
Sorry Simon, I attributed your question to Richard… my estimate is 12-15k, depending on word counts.
Hey Ben,
Sounds like you could cover the funds by reinstating author donations when they submit? Below you said that “I had to periodically spend several hours providing proof to the SU financial folks that each of the hundreds of people who donated $ intended that money to go to Ergo”. If those numbers are right, then several hours of work periodically could cause 20 more philosophy papers to be published a year at the excellent quality level of Ergo (one of my favorite journals). That sounds like a great investment of time for the editor in chief of a journal. That number of hours of work also sounds very small compared to the total number of work hours spent processing a paper at the average journal. I assume that the referees, associate editor, and editor in chief spend a total of at least 20 hours per paper published, probably much more (after all, most papers don’t get published). So this would mean increasing the time per paper published by something like .1-1%.
No, it would not cover the costs to do this. It would cover about 1/3 of the shortfall I project given submission and acceptance rates. Thanks for your kind words about Ergo.
I’d be curious to learn more about the marginal costs of open-access publishing. E.g., how much of the cost comes from cosmetic features like type-setting? How much from more essential processes like robust archiving, DOI assignment, etc.?
If the more cosmetic side of things turns out to be a major cost contributor, it might be worth questioning whether that’s really worth it. Personally, I’d prefer a bare-bones system that (like PhilArchive) simply archives whatever document the author provides, if it better serves our collective academic needs (of identifying and making available valuable new research).
It just seems really tragic if good papers are going to be rejected for essentially financial reasons.
I’m keen to answer this but I’ll do so in a new comment below so that it’s not lost to a nest.
Richard Chappell’s question is important, so I’ll answer it in a fresh comment here:
I co-edit an open-access journal but it’s not Ergo so I could be wrong about their costs. Here are our two biggies:
(1) At FPQ, we employ a graduate student or two, year-round, to anonymize submissions, request referees, liaise with authors and referees via email, and maintain tracking sheets including status of submissions, referee request records, open files, closed files, etc. The student is the largest cost of course, but utterly not replaceable by software. We like our software (OJS platform) and we all depend upon it, but the human student is the one who advises us as to status and submissions, and communicates with everyone.
(2) Our second-greatest cost is our freelance copyeditor, who is excellent, and who does so much more than proofreading, including fact-checking, source-verification, and even some developmental editing. I noticed on social media recently that a few philosophers were praising chatbots as great copyeditors which means that therefore we don’t need humans to do that anymore!, but that is not my experience. Instead my experience is that even some tenured scholars are remarkably inaccurate in their quotations and citations, and we’re lucky a human person catches their inaccuracies. (I suspect that the chatbot fans were really thinking of just proofreading, not actual copyediting.) The freelancer also puts the articles into “final format” (so not exactly typesetting, but close enough, making the files look the way we want them to look for publication), but it’s the first pass through each accepted submission that is the lion’s share of his time.
(3) Ergo may also pay for course releases at editors’ home institutions? My journal can’t so that’s not a cost for us but may be for bigger OA journals.
One might think, if these are Ergo’s costs as well, just pay the two part-timers to do more by working more hours, and then you can publish more items! But the humans only have so many hours to give us. As it is, I kind of have to get in line behind their other jobs. Okay, you may say, then employ two dedicated FULL-timers! That would be amazing. But that’s not possible with the grant money most OA journals have available to work with.
I hope this is helpful information!
I say this with the proviso that I would prefer for editors, referees and the like to be paid, but: given refereeing and editing are volunteer positions, why do the first two tasks you outline have to be paid? Many referees are in precarious jobs and if anything in greater need of financial support than graduate students, and it seems that saying ‘refereed [X JOURNAL] 1x’ is a weaker line item for the service section of one’s CV than editorial assistant. If it’s too large a time commitment for one volunteer, why not four volunteers? If there aren’t enough in the department, what prevents some from being remote? What about seeking undergraduate volunteers as part of a service club akin to a newspaper club, or teaching a course on journal publication where assisting with these tasks is part of the coursework?
Hello, c b. Thanks for the proviso! It really would be lovely if all referees and editors could be paid for their time.
Why we pay hired laborers: You are correct that editors are not paid and are volunteers who do this in addition to our full-time jobs. For that very reason, I cannot see how I or my co-editors could add to our plates with volunteer teaching of volunteer undergraduates with not-yet-demonstrated skills in excellence practices of well-written and mature communications with professionals as well as use of Excel, OJS, Dropbox, and the grant platform of our federal granting agent, let alone the professional-level quality of copyediting that realizes professional publication and protects our journal/authors from problems including contribution to the propagation of errors in publication networks (i.e., a lot of people cite others’ citations instead of tracking down originals to cite more accurately).
I like all of your ideas about how these could be educational and developmental for undergraduates! I do not anticipate being able to do that well in the hours I have remaining after the job. But I would be very interested to know which journals do the sorts of education and training of undergraduates that you describe. I know of undergraduate journals that do this, but I don’t know of professionals’ publications that do same.
Hi Kate, I appreciate personally your work in editing FPQ! I want to clarify that I meant these questions generally rather than as taking issue with FPQ for using what are currently discipline-standard practices (albeit practices we collectively find perhaps less than sustainable). I propose it only in the spirit of thinking, additional labour oughtn’t be picked up principally by those already contributing so much of their time in editing, and yet that there could be a substantially more equitable distribution of labour picking up hours from those who currently feel themselves to have excess capacity. Ideally there is more support forthcoming from those who value philosophy, rather than its academic practitioners alone, but barring that, lots of us with more time available than those who pick up the mammoth task of journal editorial work want to figure out a way to do more.
I think certainly there hasn’t yet been made a satisfactory demonstration of these practices, but having worked with undergraduate interns and seen the high level of editorial & administrative professionalism from solely undergraduate-led publications (in particular thinking here of daily newspapers, with very complex printing schedules, multiple revenue streams, professional typesetting software, difficult factchecking processes) I believe it to be within the realm of feasibility. In any case it would be a good subject for something like trial grant funding from the APA.
Ooh, I like the sounds of grant funding from APA or similar! But since that’s just a membership organization of us, via our individual monetary taps, I wonder if a decently healthy university wouldn’t be a better site for this, because universities especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences are always looking for ways to demonstrate transferrable skills and job-ready experiential learning and such. And large, well-off-ish universities also already have the internship and co-op and experiential learning staff in place as well as the Journalism, Communications, and English departments in place that have some nigh-qualified high achievers already about, working at student papers and student journals. My school does not have all this in such depth, but some schools do and may already be better placed to do it without an APA grant.
This seems like a step in the right direction.
Right now, we’re in an equilibrium where authors think they have an incentive to “spray and pray” for an R&R, while editors and referees are struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of submissions and revisions.
I’d prefer an equilibrium where authors spend more time polishing before they submit, and journals spend less time on R&Rs.
The reason for spray and pray is that a) there are pressures to publish in large volumes. For instance, I’m expected to hit at least 4 publications a year. And b) what counts as a needed revision varies significantly from reviewer to reviewer. I’ve had cases where 2 reviewers were basically happy with the manuscript as is but a third reviewer was not happy no matter how much I addressed their objections. Also c) word limits often force us to choose which potential objections to address, but the question of which objections are more salient can be very subjective.
Four a year?
Has your department heard of the 8th Amendment?
Sorry, you’re expected to publish four papers every year?
I am not sure this is quite the right diagnosis. For some of our colleagues who do not have PhDs from top-tier institutions, do not have a network of high-status friends willing to routinely discuss ideas and read drafts, and who cannot attend more than one conference or workshop every couple of year for financial and/or geographical reasons, ‘spraying and praying’ through journals is often the only way to get any sort of feedback on their work. This is I think what gives to many people a strong incentive to submit drafts they know will get rejected, but on which they need a third-party perspective, rather than the hope of getting a major revision RR (I have been guilty of this myself, fwiw).
Maybe I am wrong, but my understanding is that many journal editors implicitely play along with this, which is also why they do not desk reject as often as they should.
Why can’t they just polish their papers before submitting? They’ll still get feedback, and they won’t be wasting the journal’s time.
By ‘polished’ you just meant ‘without typos’? Because that is a very different thing from ‘unlikely to need a major revision’. I thought we were talking about the latter here.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.
My point is that, as a referee and editor, it’s a huge waste of my time to have to point out basic errors, missing citations, and (yes) typos in the papers I review. If authors are willing to put in a little work before submitting, they save me a lot of time. I don’t want to reject a paper on the basis of fixable problems — but the more time I spend on those problems, the longer each paper takes, and the slower the journal gets.
If you’re a student who doesn’t have many sources of feedback, by all means, send your paper to a journal!
But lots of vulnerable academics need fast turnarounds from journals. Where possible, we should try to conserve editors’ and referees’ time. And we can do that by incentivizing fewer submissions of higher quality.
(Chris: I’m sorry to hear that you’ve gotten arbitrary rejections. That’s a serious problem in our field that I don’t know how to solve — though I still think polishing tends to help papers get accepted faster at the margin.)
While the other mistakes are annoying and time-consuming, it’s not the referee’s job to point out typos. Your job is to review the content of the essay, not to copyedit it.
I also think that when the essay is not up to snuff for basic competency reasons, it’s worth saying it and giving one or two examples rather than laboriously going through the essay marking up each one. Your refereeing an article for a journal, not supervising one of your graduate students.
You’re*
(Jk.)
You’re right that referees shouldn’t waste time belaboring points. Still, I review a lot of technical papers, where typos sometimes force me to reread a proof several times. And if a paper gets an R&R, as an editor, I’m going to correct any errors I find in the bibliography and references.
What’s the alternative? Hiring more people do to that work? Publishing papers with errors?
And just to follow up on Stan – one reason the “spraying and praying” approach is reasonable is that even in cases where I’ve spent 6 years “polishing” a paper, sending it around to many other scholars for comments, etc., I’m still (it seems) just as likely to get an R & R as when I send it off after just a year of work without having sent it around to so many other scholars, and perhaps only presenting it once or twice at conferences. It all depends on the referees. It is more reasonable to send it off and then just make revisions in response to the referees somewhat arbitrary requests (“somewhat arbitrary” because there are usually so many different ways to improve a paper that is reasonably complex). and of course, arbitrary because at least in many subfields of philosophy, there is still substantial disagreement about what exactly constitutes a good paper.
Yep. I could not discern any clear relationship between the amount of time I put into the paper (beyond a certain point, obviously — usually backed by a couple presentations + feedback from friends) and its odds of getting the coveted R&R. I got no signals at all that “just polishing more on my own” would enable me to get publications more effectively or faster.
It’s an interesting question whether journals eliminating major R&Rs will ameliorate the problem of editors and referees struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of submissions and revisions — but my own suspicion is that it would in fact exacerbate that problem. Getting a major R&R followed by an acceptance from the first or second journal I submit to creates much less work in aggregate than submitting to umpteen journals until I eventually get lucky and get a minor R&R or an acceptance.
Of course, you might believe that making it harder to get a path to acceptance will incentivise ‘higher quality’ submissions — higher quality in the sense that most any reviewer will recommend accept or minor R&R. However, I suspect that won’t happen either, because lots of authors believe (warrantedly?) that in many subfields reviewer preferences vary too widely for it to even be possible to produce a paper for which most any reviewer will recommend acceptance or minor R&R. (Indeed, even well-published, highly successful philosophers often express this belief!)
So eliminating major R&Rs strikes me as unlikely to affect on the total number of papers written for journals, but as being likely to increase the number of reviews required for each paper before acceptance or the author giving up.
One anecdote about this: I recently submitted a paper to a good journal where it was rejected after a very negative report from a single referee. I then resubmitted it to another, equally good journal, where *three* referees read it and gave a positive report.
I don’t know—in general—where on the spectrum my papers fall, and here is at least one case where disagreement is broad enough that a negative report is no signal at all for how others might perceive it.
Why would I then think I need to polish my papers more after a negative report?
Yes, this choice seems to just increase the crapshoot nature of the game, from the POV of authors.
This is a belated comment but my conclusion, after 10 years as an editor at The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, was the R&R process often, and maybe even on balance, made papers worse. That’s because they often took a paper with a strong and original central idea and buried that idea under added discussions of idiosyncratic referees’ objections, not obviously relevant literature, etc. — what was best in the paper became less prominent and less easy to see. I also saw this in a paper I read for an APA prize that was then published, with added responses to some literature, in Philosophy and Public Affairs. The additions had again made it worse. It shouldn’t assumed that revising in response to an R&R always improves a paper. It often submerges the author’s distinctive voice and obscures their distinctive contribution..
I absolutely hate that policy—makes Ergo drop from my favorite journal to my least favorite journal. Also, why did they get rid of the submission $ if they anticipate financial problems?
Administering the author donation policy was a significant time sink due to bureacratic requirements. For example, I had to periodically spend several hours providing proof to the SU financial folks that each of the hundreds of people who donated $ intended that money to go to Ergo.Those donations covered only about 1/4 of our expenses anyway. We shifted to soliciting institutional donations so that we could avoid asking authors for that money.
I’ll preface my comment by saying: I have immense gratitude and respect for Ergo as a journal, its editors for the work they do, and this comes from a place of wanting to help solve the problem as posed. But, like the other commenters, I think, as framed, this move is hard to defend on grounds besides immediate necessity.
If peer review is only for putting an imprimatur on papers that are deemed (nearly) ready, it seems to me to serve no role at all. This benefits papers which are less ambitious (which is to say safer, and on topics more familiar to referees), and authors at well-networked institutions, that can better train you on referee-proofing, as well as the implicit expectations of the specific clique of people the editors will know to tap. Whereas, when we think of reforms we want to the journal system, we want exactly the opposite. More room for ambitious papers, on topics so weird some rethinking is likely necessary; and more openness to people with low familiarity with Anglophone elite institution cliques. Every author ‘polishes’, nearly every author presents first; the reason you get ‘major revisions’ is because you have a reviewer coming from a different part of the philosophical world.
And, also like the other commenters, I think, if the problem is really fiscal, it seems very much solvable. I have some professional background in non-profit fundraising & administration, and I want to point out two immediate directions to turn, as well as a few that are somewhat more ambitious.
As far as immediate reforms:
First, Ergo’s asks from supporting institution are too small, and Ergo’s tactics for drawing this support are weaker than they could be. Ergo asks for $200 from PhD granting institutions, and $100 otherwise. These numbers haven’t changed in the time I’ve checked them, at least a few years. Peer journal prices are an order of magnitude higher from these; for most institutions stretching into the thousands. And, these prices have not only kept up with, but beaten inflation, whereas Ergo has not updated its asks over the past years of above-average inflation.
And, on the other hand, to reach a higher % of institutions supporting Ergo, it needs to get slightly more aggressive. One example of a philosophy resource which has done this to great effect is PhilPapers, which slows down access to the site, or adds a pop-up, if you have an IP at an institution which hasn’t yet subscribed. Ergo could try this, or create a form letter to send to your institution if you have an accepted paper, and they don’t yet support Ergo.
On this note, Ergo could attempt to take advantage of funding available for APCs, which comes from a separate grant pool, while maintaining the ‘support’ structure. Perhaps Ergo has a notional APC, which is simply waived by default for both philosophers at institutions which already pay to support Ergo, as well as philosophers not at well-resourced institutions. Norming its APC charge against peers ($2k), and assuming 10% of your 50 are at institutions like these, this yields as much revenue as the entire list of supporting institutions.
Second, Ergo has no individual giving campaign. There are three major hurdles to implementing one: Ergo lacks financial transparency (a given for successful nonprofits), Ergo makes donating arbitrarily difficult, and Ergo doesn’t ask individual donors.
At minimum, Ergo should start by publishing unaudited financial statements. These allow a clear formulation of ongoing costs, and make raising to prevent decisions like this one easier. Many of the questions the below commenters have would be obviated by just the level of transparency mandated by the IRS for ordinary non-profits (and most peer journals to Ergo are run as independent non-profits). I understand that Ergo is not (yet) a non-profit, but presumably it has books of *some* kind.
On the second point, donating to Ergo is at present ridiculously confusing. There are only two ways to discover that you can even give. One is a tiny link on the text ‘individuals may give here’ located in a block of small text on the front page, and the other is an easily missable ‘here’ located in support Ergo, after a whole wall of text about institutional support. This is money on the table. Ergo should have a donation box located on the front page that requires 0 additional clicks, as well as after every article.
And the third point is that Ergo just doesn’t ask, at present. Ergo should be asking everyone on its email list for $50 a year, every year. It should have individual giving campaigns, perhaps individual membership. It should make bigger asks to those who’ve identified themselves as tenured, or above a certain age. That data exists, cutting newsletter lists along those lines is pretty straightforward. Plenty of academic philosophers have financial means; we’re not early career. But you can’t get that money if you don’t ask for it, and even here, in a post about financial problems, Ergo didn’t ask for it.
On the more ambitious front, I’ll present these schematically, and in somewhat less depth. Broadly, the suggestions cluster in ways to reduce costs, and in ways to increase bargaining power (to extract revenue).
Whatever the marginal costs look like, we know that they’re largely proofreading and typesetting, and not hosting. What would it look like to make it easier for philosophers to help proofread and typeset their own papers? If we’re already happy accepting volunteer labour (as ‘service’) in peer review, why not also in proofreading? I and my partner have both worked as proofreaders for hire before, as have I suspect a disproportionate share of philosophers. Are there good ways to connect this prospective pool of volunteers to the specific work that needs to be done? As with money, the first thing you need to do to get it is to ask for it.
And, in the long-term, I’m happy to concede that neither begging institutions, nor individuals, is likely to be all that sustainable, especially as the # of OA journals proliferates. (This is not to say it would not be more than enough for Ergo to close the gap right now). We need an organisation to coordinate making large asks on behalf of philosophy publishing in general, which is capable of withholding publication from wealthy institutions (or demanding a high APC) until they kick in annual support, and which can work towards building sustainable endowment revenue for independent scholarly publishing. In an ideal world, Ergo, PhilImprint and JAPA (as well as perhaps the two fledgling OLH journals) would be part of a larger philosophy scholarly publishing non-profit, perhaps coordinated by the APA, that works towards building a long-term sustainable financial basis. But this will require a lot of vision, and we’re not there yet.
Yes, I worry about long-term sustainability for all of us in OA publishing a lot. We can all ask individuals and institutions in our contracting sector for donations but that won’t be the solution that keeps boats floating. I’m lucky that Canada has a federal Aid to Scholarly Journals grant most of the time (and only mostly — In the year or two that they suspended it for no known reason, co-editors and I knit our research funds together to keep going).
I mean, to push the boat metaphor a bit, we kind of need an ocean. And asking folks to instead turn on their taps on occasion feels like asking the wrong people. But my feelings may be no guide to action.
I absolutely agree that in the big picture, we want resources to come from all those who care about philosophy, and all those who know they benefit from it. The problem is that the group of people who both fall into the first bracket, and have strong enough awareness of the contours of the academic discipline to understand who they ought to support, overlaps too substantially with academic philosophers. This is another problem that can only be addressed at the level of the discipline. And considering neither my spouse nor I have permanent jobs, we’d rankle at being asked, too. Still, the advantage of asking is that it allows as a stop-gap those with stronger resources (e.g. those with generational wealth, who are substantially overrepresented in academia; those with six-figure tenured jobs; etc.) to pick up more of the burden for the benefit of those who at present cannot (the same parallel holding for making more substantial asks of institutions, in hopes that as many institutions face budget cuts we are able to ask more of those with rising endowments).
I think the risk of only accepting less ambitious papers is actually much smaller at Ergo than at journals with other models that might adopt this sort of thing–area editors desk reject at least 2/3 of papers anyway (I am one and I think I have a significantly higher desk rejection rate than that) and, at least speaking for myself, I am not suddenly going to become more likely to send non-ambitious, small-point, etc. kinds of papers out for review–I will continue to send out ambitious/exciting papers and desk reject ones that I find to be unmotivated, making small points in the literature where there’s no effort to make it understood why anyone not steeped in that literature should care about those points, and overly referee-proofed/poorly written/poorly structured papers. That’s what I do now and what I will continue to do. The only difference might be that there are really borderline papers that I sort of know aren’t close to ready for publication but that I might have taken a gamble on before. But frankly: those authors should not yet have submitted those papers to journals, and I’m sure many of my fellow area editors were immediately desk rejecting those very papers, so I doubt there will be much change in how they tend to get treated overall. I will continue to send out ambitious but imperfect papers for review, and intentionally select referees who I think can be helpful in perfecting them. So, just speaking as one area editor: I think the extremely high desk rejection rate/editor discretion at this journal probably cuts against some of the “this will make less ambitious stuff get published” worries in a way I agree it would not at other journals.
Hi there! I agree that the high desk-rejection rate at Ergo, along with its speed, is effective for screening out small-point papers. But I guess my question is, regardless of the enthusiasm of the AE for the ambitious paper, whether this is also enough to ensure that neither referee returns a verdict of ‘major revisions’, since major revisions now equals reject.
Personally I’ve had just that happen (at Ergo, in fact!). In my experience it’s pretty uncommon when I send out a more ambitious/less-fine-point/less-consciously-referee-proofed paper for neither referee to have a big question about the way it’s set up. My hunch is that the only people who are consistently able to make papers seem interesting, while forestalling the specific nits that the people first asked to review are likely to pick, are the best-connected, who have been told ‘you ought to publish on X’, have already shopped it around with the right people, and have a good sense for the particular concerns the reviewers people first think to ask are going to have. My hunch is also that screening out both the biggest & the smallest papers is going to lead to just fewer papers published all around, but that’s in fact just the justification for the policy in general.
It’s up to the editor, not the referees, whether the paper is accepted/given a minor revisions verdict/rejected. The referees are advising the editor. And “major revisions” won’t be a category the referee can recommend anyway. The editor will decide whether the revisions they think are required (based on advice from referees) are minor enough to count as minor revisions. Referee reports are advisory, they do not determine decisions.
This is exactly right. The only outcome if this practice became widespread is that those who can get feedback *outside* of the journal referee process will just keep doing things as before, while those who cannot will be even less likely than they already are to publish in good venues.
Just getting back to this long and super helpful comment, to address things that haven’t already been covered:
Anyway thanks again for the thoughts, and please do get in touch to discuss further!
Have you considered joining with other high quality OA journals to form a joint fundraisning effort? Of course, that may eventually bring back the publishing house model, which was part of what we wanted to avoid anyway.
Sad to hear this, especially as someone who recently had a paper published in Ergo after it went through a round of major revisions. I’ll be curious to see though whether this policy has the intended effect. Will reviewers be more willing to suggest only minor revisions when major revisions is not an option? If that’s the case then it’s entirely possible that this won’t bring down the number of acceptances.
For the record, I don’t think this would necessarily be a bad thing (for the discipline, though maybe for Ergo given their aims). It seems to me that reviewers can be a little too keen to suggest major revisions when minor would likely do. I often hear that most published papers go through at least one round of major revisions at a journal which is a bit odd given that many submitted papers have already likely gone through multiple rounds of revisions after conference presentations, peer commentary, reviews at other journals, etc.
Given that none of these costs are editorial or reviewer payments, I find myself full of questions
I am a co-editor of the same journal that Kate co-edits. I just want to point out that Ergo’s decision is based on its guiding principle to emphasize efficiency over improving submitted papers. That is a reasonable guiding principle but not a principle used by all journals. It is not one of our principles, for example. I like the idea different journals conceiving of their mission/role in the profession differently.
Thanks for the comments everyone. I will try answer as many as I can.
Unlike FPQ (thanks for the info Kate Norlock!), we do not have a graduate student to do all of the grunt work, unfortunately. The managing editors and area editors do all of that stuff for free. I don’t think any of us get course releases or anything like that. As submission numbers go up, that burden gets greater. We’ve dealt with it so far by increasing numbers of editors – over 100 area editors now.
Like FPQ we have a dedicated freelance copyeditor, Mark Steen. He does a great and important job and does some of the extra stuff Kate describes as well. That is one of our two biggest expenses.
The other main expense is typesetting. In our admittedly limited experience, you get what you pay for. We had a relatively inexpensive typesetter for a while, and they did a poor job and did it slowly. We are just getting over the resulting backlog. We’re using a more expensive typesetter now and they are doing a great job quickly. One thing to note here is that we produce both PDF and html versions of all articles.
There are other expenses that have already been mentioned too; those come to a few thousand a year.
To answer Richard’s specific question, it depends on how long the papers are, but I estimate that to publish an extra 20 papers per year would cost us around 12-15k.
People often ask, why not let authors do some of this stuff themselves for free? They could proofread and typeset their own papers, right? We have looked into this and discussed with others who have tried it. The short and blunt answer is most of them wouldn’t do it or would do a bad job. We want to continue to have a professional journal that published papers that are not riddled with typos and other problems.
cb makes a lot of points in their post, and I will need more time to reply in detail. For now I’ll just say: lots of the fundraising steps you describe could be helpful, but none of us are professional fundraisers. I did a fundraising drive a couple of years ago pitched at philosophy departments, with the help of a paid graduate student. We did raise a useful amount of money despite not knowing what we were doing. If we raised that amount every year, we could probably go from 50 papers to 60. But it was a lot of work! And then you have to go back do all the work again a year later. We’ve also applied for some grants, but unsuccessfully. This is where I would refer back to my first paragraph – we are already doing the work of running the journal, and adding full time fundraising on top of that is not sustainable for us. I’ve been trying to put aside just a few days this summer to work on fundraising, but so far have failed. I would be super happy to have a volunteer to handle fundraising who knows what they are doing. Please feel free to reach out to me if you are interested. We are managing ok, but how to pay the bills has been the biggest source of stress for the journal over the last five years. The Syracuse philosophy department threw us a big lifeline, and I’ve been covering what’s left with my own research money.Those are the only funding sources that we can comfortably rely on right now, and we need to constrain our acceptance rate to meet that restriction.
Will try to get back on later and answer more questions. (And sorry if some of the above seems like some kind of plea for sympathy; just trying to be as forthcoming as possible about the challenges that lead to these kinds of decisions being made.)
Hi Ben, thanks for your very thoughtful reply. I appreciate that you’re certainly doing as much as you can at the point where you have to cover costs from your own research funds! I am sure others have much to add, but I will shoot you an email in the coming week, and would be happy to contribute time.
Ben, thanks for such an informative comment! Such sympathies on the work. (We don’t have anything like your scale of submission, I think, but when I’ve filled in between student employees’ schedules and graduations, it’s a hard late-night and weekend crunch. Our authors suffer the main cost in longer wait-times for everything when we don’t have paid help. My apologies to authors who suffered me-caused delays!)
Agreed too that asking the authors to do more doesn’t suffice. And we really want a journal that’s good for our authors to publish in, so we want one that’s rightly edited, well laid out, with consistency of practices and published scholarship that helps other researchers to accurately track back citations and sources for their learning too. It would take a lot of individual APCs to equate to the comparative ease of drawing on our federal grant and my research fund. It takes kind of big money to do this at the speed and standard that philosophers expect in a manner that doesn’t exploit everyone more than we already typically do.
And on that note, I risk repeating what I may have said on this blog before: I remember whinging to my university president (also a philosopher) that it’s so bad and hard that peer-reviewed journal publications are *necessary* for tenure and promotion, poor us! And he replied that they are only necessary if we say that are. I tried to argue, “But trustees and ministries and politicians expect that of everyone, pity me” and he was shaking his head before I could finish, and suggested that if every member of a field all said, as one, that the new standard is one chapter in a book a year or one publication of any kind or one original statue in marble or whatever, and here’s how to measure it, we could make a new standard. We just haven’t really tried. At all.
I think about that a lot. I think we might be one big collective action failure.
About this as well as all the other things.
What is the point of the HTML version? If it’s costing you money, just do the PDF version and leave it at that. “Oh what a pain, this article is only readily available in PDF format” is not something I’ve ever heard anyone mutter.
It is much easier to get the computer to read it out loud if the article is in html.
Right, and also easier to read on a phone.
Frankly shocked to hear that you are using your own research money to support this well-loved and hard-working journal.
According to the Ergo Submissions stats page, first round decisions have resulted in 4 (0.4%) straight acceptances, 16 (1.7%) minor revisions and 58 (6%) major revisions in the last 12 months. If submission numbers and standards for straight acceptance and minor revisions remain the same, getting rid of major revisions would result in around 20 papers in a 12 month period which is substantially lower than the 50 budgeted for and seems like an extremely low acceptance rate (2%). So would the standards for what counts as “minor revisions” change? Otherwise it seems like the move would result in far fewer papers than can accommodated financially and a super low acceptance rate. Maybe there’s a backlog currently so this would allow them to catch up?
This is a good question and we did consider this before making the change. It is difficult to predict how people’s decisions will change given a different set of options. There tend to be many cases each year that are borderline between major and minor revisions. I would predict that some of those borderline cases are going to turn into minor revisions verdicts. We will be keeping a close eye on it.
Of course the standards for minor revisions will change, in practice if nothing else.
I welcome this. I only wish that Ergo had started this discussion with a better reason than a financial one. We should abolish revise & resubmit judgments altogether, or change editorial procedures to make them very rare.
For a few years now, I’ve forbidden myself to recommend revise and resubmit. Instead, I ask myself the question: if the paper is interesting but has issues, do I trust the author to fix them? If yes, conditional acceptance. If not, rejection.
The “R&R” is, to my mind, a rather dreadful institution. Many referees and editors apparently believe that an initial R&R is the standard first step to a publication. But it shouldn’t be.
As a referee, it is annoying to referee a paper again for which I recommended revisions (I sometimes get a paper back for which I recommended minor revisions). In a review, I typically raise a number of points for improvement, but I don’t really expect that in the end *I* am convinced or that the paper is objection-proof (as if there were such a thing). The point of revisions, as I see it, is to give an author the opportunity to respond to something they’ve missed. I don’t need to see the whole paper again after I made my suggestions, nor do I want executive control over *how* they respond. This isn’t homework. I don’t give homework to peers, and I don’t like grading it.
As an editor, I am burning out my good referees by asking them to re-referee a paper; and if one declines, I feel bad about confronting authors with new comments. (I can’t unilaterally give a minor revisions verdict on major revisions recommendations due to policies I do not have control over.)
As an author, R&R is pointless, a necessary tedium on the way to publication. Two of my “highest ranked” publications went through multiple rounds of revision. In either case, the first round identified some problems that I was glad to have the opportunity to respond to, but all further rounds just made the paper longer, more tedious, more distracting, with referees imposing their own idea on how such a paper ought to be written. An initial conditional acceptance would have resulted in a better, cleaner, more straightforward paper overall. Or, at any rate, a paper that conforms better to how I see my own work. Perhaps it would have even made for an enjoyable read (the published versions, sadly, do not).
Thus, I think there are plenty of good reasons to abolish the R&R. It is a burden on authors, editors, referees, and (apparently, given Ergo’s rationale), journals. There is little evidence that it leads to better publications and some evidence that it either has no effect or a negative effect on the final paper.
We have to stop treating papers for peer review like graduate student term papers (although perhaps many of them are) that we shepherd to a publishable format through many rounds of comments and revisions. If we want to stick with it, I’d suggest that we have very narrow rules for R&R.
(I broke my own rule recently when for the first time in years I recommended revise and resubmit. It was a good, interesting paper with a single very significant error that I was not sure could be fixed. My uncertainty about it being fixable meant that my self-imposed policy ruled out conditional acceptance, thus would have led to a rejection judgment. But I was genuinely intrigued about how this might be fixed, if at all! So, a resubmission it was.)
I have never published with Ergo. But I once received an extremely helpful desk rejection from them. The comments left by the Ergo editor led me to changes that got the paper accepted outright at the next journal. I think I got these comments in under 6 weeks. I have nothing but praise for Ergo’s model.
Other journals should follow suit.
I really like this suggestion for how referees should approach their task:
I’m less sold on the, “If not, rejection,” part. If the paper is clearly incompetent, then sure. But otherwise:
Referees should be more humble, and that means both (i) letting the author have the final say on which mere “suggestions” are or aren’t worth addressing, and (ii) giving the author a chance to address what strikes the referee as a seemingly-decisive problem or objection.
When I’ve done (ii), as a referee, I’ve often been pleasantly surprised by the results. And I certainly find it frustrating to be on the author’s end of things when overconfident referees reject papers for what I can see are silly, confused, easily-addressable reasons.
After all, it should be unsurprising that the author of a paper has typically thought more about their specific topic than their reviewers have. (Even if the reviewers have significant expertise in the general area, it’s probably somewhat rare for them to know more than the author about the very precise topic of the paper and its specific arguments.)
So I’d ideally like to see more R&Rs turned into conditional acceptances, and more rejections turned into R&Rs. (If publication rates need to be held steady, more papers should be desk rejected for sheer lack of ambition.)
I’ll be honest. I got my degree from a low-ranking program, and I am not working on any trending topic. All my publications so far went through R&R. I guess I am just not that good. So, I genuinely worry that if more journals will do this, I won’t have any publications for the rest of my career.
From a more general perspective, I worry that this might create some kind of polarization: a lot of publications will be done by a smaller group of people, and more people will have a harder time publishing anything. I hope I am wrong.
Don’t wory. For most reviewers R and R is sort of a default for a paper that the review expects will be accepted (I base this on my observations of the process as a guest editor). If the option was removed, some of your papers probably would have just been accepted outright or given minor revisions instead.
The upshot of Ergo’s policy change will NOT be that only papers which would have been accepted or given minor revisions under the previous circumstances will get those verdicts under the new circumstances. Rather, removing the option for major revisions will make reviewers
more likely to give minor revisions or accept than they previously were.
Good riddance. R&Rs are such a waste of everyone’s time. And just cruel to early-career scholars.
I had a so-called “top journal” give me an R&R in early 2023 after two positive reviews and some feedback. I submit the revisions, and one of the same reviewers takes 9 further months to decide they actually hate the paper for new reasons they never mentioned and they recommend rejection. 16 months and mutilating my paper to please these reviewers, all for nothing. Real helpful for the job market.
I like this comment from c.b. as getting at the real issue this change brings up: ‘If peer review is only for putting an imprimatur on papers that are deemed (nearly) ready, it seems to me to serve no role at all.’
Would like to hear replies from editors/fans of this change on this point. You might think one should only send papers to journals that are ‘ready’ or ‘polished’; but who doesn’t in good faith aim to do that, and yet they are met with major revisions or rejection? Moreover, it does seem like if all papers are sent in ‘ready-to-go’ form, then, yeah: why am I even trying to get it published as opposed to posting it on my website? Probably because even if I think it is polished, you, editor and referee are ready to tell me it is not.
The pressure to recommend rejection, minor revisions or conditional acceptance will indirectly diminish the pressure on referees to provide absurdly long reports. I for one feel less compelled to offer lengthy justifications when recommending either of those. On balance I think this would be a good indirect effect of the change. Bloated referee reports slow down the process and do not necessarily improve papers. Efficiency remains a criminally underrated virtue of the review process.