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What are philosophy journals for?

Philosophy research - reading a text.

11/10/2024

Philosophy journals face what some are calling a publication emergency. Here Dr Joshua Habgood-Coote explores the roots of the crisis and whether we should opt for reform or revolution. Comparing these approaches, he argues, can help us to better understand what makes journals valuable in the first place and how this should guide decisions about the future of philosophical publication.

Journals in philosophy appear to be in crisis. Wait times are up, journals can’t find reviewers, there aren’t enough pages for the available papers, and publishers are squeezing any profit they can out of journals. We keep hearing warnings of a publication emergency.

Should we care? Besides self-interested reasons (the job market in philosophy is bad, we’d all like another paper), there are some compelling reasons to be concerned for the discipline of philosophy. The networks of communication available to a group of people will shape their ability to produce knowledge. It’s going to take us a lot longer to write a paper together if we can only communicate via letter, than if we have access to an online word processor with in-line comments. If we think that producing more philosophical knowledge is good (and possible), then we ought to care quite a bit about how to best set up our communication structures. Maybe it’s not the most important problem in philosophy, but it is an important problem.

There are two broad approaches to the publication emergency. Revolutionaries advocate abandoning the current system in favour of some better option, whereas reformists think that our best bet is to fix the current system while we’re still floating on it. The revolutionary proposal that’s had the most attention is to replace peer review prior to publication in a journal with unreviewed open-access publication on a free archive, followed by crowd-sourced review (see Heesen and Bright 2021). Most reformists are either focused on the financial model of journals, looking to take journals open-access and set-up new open access journals, or are in the metaphorical back-room trying to make systems for review and editing work better (here we should shout-out and salute Ergo’s back-end system). By invoking Rosa Luxembourg it might seem that I’m tipping the scales in favour of revolution, but there is a huge amount of practical knowledge embedded in the current system which would have to be reinvented if we switched to an archive system, and one might worry that familiar problems with highly-connected online platforms might emerge on a philosophy archive.

One problem shared by both reformists and revolutionaries is a lack of clarity about what the publication system in philosophy is for: what functions we should like it to play. If we take a survey of the blog-literature about this, the following values pop up:

  1. Communication: A publication system is the material basis for academic conversation, and we want it to facilitate productive (that is, knowledge- generating) discussion of important questions.
  2. Attention: A publication system indicates to readers (and perhaps the wider public) which of the many papers about a given topic they ought to read, teach, and cite.
  3. Credit: A publication system is a way to distribute academic credit for good work, to help incentivize effective collective inquiry.
  4. Filtering: A publication system is a quality control device that leverages academic specialists to allow non-specialists to make better decisions about how much credibility to assign to papers, allowing – if all goes well – appropriate trust in publication.
  5. Editing: A publication system aims to improve the quality of typesetting, writing, and argument in academic writing.
  6. Recording: A publication system is a way to archive academic work for posterity.

There is a lot more that we can say about each of these values, and the way they relate to each other. One thing that we can see just by having this set of values in sight is that a lot of the publication crisis literature has been focused to a fault. When you read one of the many proposals to reform the publication system, you’ll see reference to one, perhaps two, of these values used to motivate a reform, but we don’t hear much about how the change to the publication system might affect these other values. To pick an example at random, post-publication review might be a fairer way to allocate credit, but it will make it more complicated to archive academic work and will lead to a deterioration in the quality of typesetting and writing.

Going forward, the debate about the publication emergency could benefit from thinking about the way these different functions relate to each other. We might decide that there is a sensible way to compromise between these systems (perhaps by creating different levels of publication, or by making a system that realises each of the values imperfectly), or we might decide that some of the values are more important than others, meaning that some can be dropped.

Joshua Habgood-Coote is a Lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. He works on epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of technology.