“As editors of one of our field’s leading journals, we feel a strong responsibility to help build collective momentum towards a better arrangement: a publishing model that no longer wastes massive amounts of public resources feeding profits to private corporations, secures editorial independence against the pressures of profit-making and makes research available to everyone, free of charge.”

That’s Arash Abizadeh (McGill), writing in The Guardian about the mass editorial exodus from Philosophy and Public Affairs earlier this year.

He makes clear the problems with the current dominant form of academic publishing:

Academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals. Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need.

The “obvious alternative,” he says is that

universities, libraries, and academic funding agencies can cut out the intermediary and directly fund journals themselves, at a far lower cost. This would remove commercial pressures from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond” open access, which means the publishers charge neither authors, editors, nor readers (this is how our new journal will operate). Librarians have been urging this for years.

The change, he says, is important not just for academics, but for society: “a revolution in the publishing landscape could also help stem the tide of disinformation and propaganda in the public sphere.”

But there’s an obstacle:

Academics still face a massive collective action problem: we want a new arrangement but each of us, individually, is strongly incentivised to stick with the status quo. Career advancement depends heavily on publishing in journals with established name recognition and prestige, and these journals are often owned by commercial publishers.

What happened with Philosophy and Public Affairs and The Journal of Political Philosophy (here) is—perhaps–the beginning of a change to the status quo, but as Abizadeh suggests, other journals need to undergo similar changes to “build collective momentum”. Which journals should be next?