In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

How do journal book symposia and published exchanges happen? I can't find explicit instructions on journal submission sites. Are you just supposed to email the editor directly and ask whether they would be interested in such a thing? Is it customary for this to be the author of the book?

Context: I was invited to comment on a book for an APA session, and now I'm wondering how best to transform my commentary into a publication. Maybe that's just to find a journal that would publish it as a book review but (a) my comments are only on one chapter of the book, and (b) the author has a reply, and there is another person who delivered comments on another chapter of the book. Thanks for advice in advance!

Good questions! I suspect the thing to do here is to ask the participants in the APA session whether they'd be interested in a journal symposium and offering to head things up if they are. Then you could email editors at journals where symposia appear to see if they are interested. Alternatively, if others on the APA panel aren't interested (though why wouldn't they be?), I suppose you could see if it's possible to publish an exchange with the author. I'm not sure how common such exchanges are, though.

Does anyone have any helpful insights?

Posted in

3 responses to “Book symposia and published exchanges?”

  1. Ethics has some useful info on how they deal with symposia, here:
    https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/et/instruct#:~:text=Symposia
    It would be great if more journals were transparent about whether they welcome book symposia, and if so, how the process works.

  2. Brad

    We do publish book symposia in Metascience, which is a Springer/Nature journal that publishes book reviews of books in history, philosophy, and sociology of science. But we do not publish a lot of them. They are a lot of work to coordinate, and we would tend to do them only for books that we anticipate will generate a lot of interest. We generally commission them, but we have published symposia that were proposed to us. We try to meet some conditions for run them – we do not just want a small group of friends reviewer the book of another friend.

  3. Analysis Reviews will publish submitted book symposia. Instructions on how to pitch them here:
    https://academic.oup.com/analysis/pages/reviews_guidelines?login=false#Submission,reviews

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The Philosophers' Cocoon

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading