Publishing
Category
What Should Academics Do About Journal Prices?
All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors’ noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-ac..
Reviewing Open-Access Books
- How should open-access books be submitted to journals for review? These books are published in hard copy as print-on-demand paperbacks, but they..
Reforming Refereeing (guest post by Aaron Garrett)
The following is a guest post* by Aaron Garrett, associate professor of philosophy at Boston University. Professor Garrett recently became editor of the History of Philosophy Quarterly and asked if we could open up a discussion about reforming various aspects of article refereeing. I encourage people to contribute to the discussion and share their experiences and co..
Getting Credit for Peer Review
It is a great service to the profession to peer review articles, and service to the profession counts at most institutions towards tenure and promotion. But how much does peer reviewing count?
My sense is that the credit one gets for peer reviewing is disproportionately small compared to how important peer reviewing is for the academic enterprise, but it would be..
Should Philosophy Articles Be Shorter?
“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
This line is attributed to several authors, but probably originated with Pascal. Writing shorter is hard, as anyone who has tried to cut several thousand words from a paper in order to submit it to an APA meeting will attest. Yet, when stripped of most non-essential material and organized as efficiently..
“Sleeping Beauty” Papers in Philosophy (updated)
“Sleeping Beauty” papers “lie dormant for years before experiencing a sudden spike in citations as they are discovered and recognized as important.” A recent article in Nature discussed scientific papers that have slumbered for decades, as well as a way of assigning a “beauty coefficient” to papers.
The coefficient, B, is “a value based on the number of citations..
Moratorium and New Editors at Mind
Thomas Baldwin (York), the current editor of Mind, writes that the journal will cease accepting new submissions for several months, starting in July, so as to ease the transfer of the editorship to Adrian Moore (Oxford) and Lucy O’Brien (UCL):
At the end of September 2015 the editorship of Mind will move from Thomas Baldwin (York) to Adrian Moore (Oxford) and Luc..
Answers from Academic Publishers
Two weeks ago I put up a post soliciting questions for academic publishers. If you submitted a question, thanks. Editors at various presses—Peter Momtchiloff, Peter Ohlin, and Lucy Randall at Oxford University Press, Stephen Latta of Broadview Press, Hilary Gaskin of Cambridge University Press, Philip Laughlin of MIT Press, Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press..
What Counts As Pre-Publication?
Dale Miller (ODU) noticed that Public Affairs Quarterly has the following “Pre-Publication Policy“:
Public Affairs Quarterly will not publish material that has already appeared elsewhere. This is not at odds with authors sharing their papers with selected individuals whose comments they would welcome or who they wish for other reasons to inform about their work. ..
Using Initials to Hide Gender
There is some evidence that women scientists use their first initials, rather than their first names, at a greater frequency than men do in their publications. It would not be surprising if this were also true in philosophy and some other non-science disciplines. Reasons for women using initials might include worries about sexism in non-fully-anonymized peer review,..
Questions for Academic Publishers (updated)
Oxford University Press philosophy editors Peter Momtchiloff, Peter Ohlin, and Lucy Randall have offered to answer Daily Nous readers’ questions about academic publishing. Here’s how it’ll work. You send in the questions to me at da[email protected], or post them in the comment section below, and in a subsequent post during the last week of May, they will post..
No One Is Listening
Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities — 82 per cent of articles published in humanities are not even cited once. No one ever refers to 32 per cent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social and 27 per cent in the natural sciences. If a paper is cited, this does not imply it has..
How to Review Book Manuscripts
An assistant professor writes in with the following query:
I’ve been asked recently to review some books for major presses, which is great and I love doing it (free books!) But I have no idea how to do it and they really give no guidelines. They just say something like, “tell me what you think.” Obviously I have all sorts of thoughts, and I’d really like to know ..
APA / BPA Journal Surveys
Last year, the American Philosophical Association (APA) and the British Philosophical Association (BPA) teamed up to conduct a survey of philosophy journals, and the results are now in. 43 journals were surveyed on submission and acceptance rates, review process, and the percentages of papers submitted and accepted that were written by women and members of minority ..
Advice on Refereeing Papers
Three professors have published a brief guide to refereeing papers. Though based in business schools, Jonathan Berk (Stanford), Campbell Harvey (Duke), and David Hirshleifer (UC Irvine) have produced a document that provides good general advice for referees across the disciplines.
Some excerpts:
The main job of the referee is not:
1) To help write the paper ..
Live Twitter Chat w/ Timothy Williamson
Timothy Williamson’s new book, Tetralogue: I’m Right, You’re Wrong, is a philosophical conversation that takes place on a train between four characters. As Catarina Dutilh Novaes describes in her review of the book in Times Higher Education:
We meet Bob, who represents those who subscribe to “ancestral” modes of thinking, including superstition, belief in witchcr..
Do Not “Do Not Cite or Circulate”
Lee Anne Fennell, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, has written a short and amusing paper entitled “Do Not Cite or Circulate.” It’s directed at legal academics, but applies just as well to philosophers. From the opening paragraph:
Law professors, who are generally quite enamored of their own words and not especially reluctant to toss around the..
Plagiarism Policies
In November of last year, Daily Nous hosted a guest post that exposed the extraordinary plagiarism of Iranian philosopher Mahmoud Khatami (follow-ups here and here). One of the articles alleged to be a work of plagiarism was a 2007 article of his in Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy, entitled “On the illuminationist approach to imaginal power: outline of ..
Guarding the Guardians (or Editors) (3 updates)
The reason your paper is listed as ‘editor assigned’ is that I’m going to review it myself.
In the wake of the recent discussion here about the editorial practices at philosophy journals, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (UBC) recounts a story, set about five years ago, in which he submitted a paper to a journal with a policy of double-anonymous reviewing—Philosophic..
Book Dedication Sale
Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (both of Georgetown), have been working on a book entitled Markets Without Limits. You may recall an earlier post which detailed their plans to sell space in the “acknowledgements” section of their book. Not to be outdone—by their earlier selves—the duo are now selling the dedication page of their book to the highest bidder. You ..
Reasons You Rejected a Paper
The discussion of journal practices is continuing, but, at the suggestion of Tom Dougherty, I am posting this as a place to gather “frequent reasons for rejection” of articles. Here is his comment from the other thread:
If many of the papers getting desk-rejected by journals are rejected for common reasons, then I wonder if it might be in everyone’s interests for..
A Closer Look at Philosophy Journal Practices (two updates)
Considering how important the publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals is to a successful career in philosophy, it is expected that curiosity and questions about the practices at philosophy journals would arise. Additionally, lately it seems as if there has been an increase in concerns about unfairness in access to publication opportunities, including insuf..
Confluence, a New Online Philosophy Journal
Confluence: Online Journal of World Philosophies, is a new bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal of comparative philosophy and thought. From its mission statement:
It seeks to explore common spaces and differences between philosophical traditions in a global context. Without postulating cultures as monolithic, homogenous, or segregated wholes, it aspires to address ke..
Deciding which Papers to Referee
Some philosophers receive an excessive number of requests to referee papers. How should they go about deciding which papers to agree to referee?
Of course the paper should be in one’s area, but even that criteria leaves some people with more requests than they could reasonably be expected to fulfill, and so, with a decision about which requests to accept. One mig..
Famous Papers First Rejected
“The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973) by sociologist Mark Granovetter is an extraordinarily influential paper, one of the most cited in sociology (with nearly 30,000 citations, according to Google Scholar). Yet it was initially rejected. You can read the rejection letter via a link from here. It is an interesting case of peer reviewers dismissing an idea because they w..
Open Access and Journal-less Publishing
Recently I was asked by the editors of a journal whose mission and scholarship I support and respect to review a book by a scholar I very much admire. In the past, I would have accepted the invitation without a second thought and proceeded to read the book and develop a review. Over the past few years, however, as my work has focused on questions of public scholarsh..
How Much Should Publishers Pay Contributors?
A professor who prefers to remain anonymous—perhaps so as to not weaken his bargaining position—asks for help from Daily Nous readers about how much he should request to be paid for allowing a publisher to use one of his articles in a textbook anthology. He writes:
Does anyone have any information about how much, if anything, an author should expect to receiv..