In our newest "how can we help you?" thread a reader asks:
How do you start a new academic journal?
Who (think: career stage) should start a new academic journal?
Should you even bother…?
These are all good questions, though I expect the answers to each of them are likely to be long and contested.
Any readers with experience willing to weigh in?
There are a lot of journals already. Ask yourself: do we really need a new one? Is there a signifficant gap that my journal will fill? You may guess I’m sceptical… IMO, even some of the best generalist journals are increasingly easy to publish in since there is greater pressure than ever on journals to publish more (due to OA, etc.). Specialist journals are even easier to publish in. So my view is that if someone has something important to say in a paper (and even if they don’t) they will likely find potential outlets in many existing journals.
Do not embark on a new journal if you are junior or with tenuous employment. It is the thing for a senior person to do. It requires a huge amount of effort and a lot of social capital. Otherwise you will have a very insignificant journal, that requires lots of work, and is held in low regard in the community at large.
I’m not sure if Circe is trolling, but I’ll just note that (a) I haven’t found it any easier to publish in the best generalist journals lately and (b) I am an editor of an entirely open-access journal and we are under enormous financial pressure to REDUCE the number of papers we are publishing.
I am a bit perplexed by the scepticism towards the endeavour of the above commenters. It is a fact that acceptance rates at most journals are lower than they were a decade ago. And they remain exceedingly low by cross-disciplinary standards: Nature and Science both have acceptance rates 4 to 6x of that of Philosophical Review, higher than those of journals around 10th on Leiter Rankings. In large part this seems attribuable to the increased pressure to publish in order to obtain a job. PhilCocoon commenters have remarked on more than a few occasions that people are now leaving grad school with CVs that would be sufficient for tenure at R1s, and in many cases entering grad school with CVs as impressive as a grad-school-leaver a decade or two ago!
Nor is satisfaction with journals high. None of the top 10 journals in Leiter score above a 3.5/5 in ‘experience with editors’ in the APA-sponsored survey data (this in the era of review inflation). This is understandable given that a pretty good publication timeline in philosophy is 3 or 4 times as long as that of, for, instance, psychology. These are just exemplary; it feels like nearly every month someone posts either here or on Daily Nous about their sense that the journal system, long creaky & overstrained, is near something like failure. This sense of dissatisfaction has driven the many ne
The most salient question strikes me as your ability to provide a journal whose handling of papers is better for the discipline than that which would take the papers were you to not do so, and secondarily is able to model better publication norms so as to help address, if only in part, the structural problems of the journal system. But I don’t think this is intractable: the two new entrants to the system of journals, Philosophers’ Imprint and Ergo, are both well-above-average in satisfaction with editors, review timelines, transparency, and (subjectively) contribution to the discipline. They are also the two quickest-risers on rankings in the past several years. This bodes well for the discipline’s interest in a new journal. And the lingering sense publication in philosophy has structural problems indicates more work is to be done, as well.
These problems, are, in outline, something like: lengthening response times, the decline (as De Cruz has noted here) in the willingness of those contacted to write referee reports which leads to more & more requests sent out, the arbitrariness of acceptance/rejection decisions (strong enough intent to publish leads to rolling the dice fifteen times until one gets an accept decision, so the labour put into refereeing by previous rejecters was more or less for nought). Their causes are, among others, the aforementioned rising pressure to publish leading to more papers sent out alongside greater willingness to keep sending them out in the face of rejection, the increased workload of academics as employment becomes more casualised, and the much-remarked zero (personal) returns to refereeing.
I think a strong enough vision of how a new journal can take on these problems is likely to attract collaborators from across the discipline regardless of one’s career stage. One of the comparative strengths of philosophy is that, unlike most departments, it really does possess meta-disciplinary outlets (like PC, DN, Leiter) which the majority of practitioners check in on. Rarely are journals founded by a single individual, and in certain ways a partnership between those in the early stages of their career & those of the late is mutually beneficial. The securely-employed lend their prestige, and the early-career lend their time.
So this is all to say, if you have a clear sense why you want to start a journal, it is probably worth it (for the discipline) regardless of where you are in your career. It may not be in your personal interest, of course; journal work is demanding of your time & very much unpaid. But if you want to start a journal you know that already, and so I would encourage you to circulate your vision for what you want a new journal to do with your friends & colleagues to canvass support & refine your proposal until you feel comfortable sharing it publicly. In doing so, you will certainly attract all kinds of support from those who possess the journal-running phronesis you currently lack. (And, by the by, I will note that the maturation of excellent & free software frameworks for soliciting, reviewing & publishing papers like Janeway has made the technical and financial barrier to journal-starting lower than ever.)
Of course I’m not trolling. OA journals are likely an exception here (as they are in many respects). Perhaps talk to any editor of an OUP journal for a more typical experience regarding increased pressure to publish. I’m confident they will confirm my claim…
I don’t know whether I think starting would be a good idea. But conditionally, if one wants to start a journal, one can seriously consider making it diamond OA. One can also consider triple anonymous but only one reviewer. A while back ago there was this awesome post on how one reviewer is a) good enough in terms of quality control and b) much more efficient.
https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2024/01/one-paper-one-reviewer-an-easy-amelioration-of-the-referee-crisis-guest-post-by-mahmoud-jalloh.html
But sorry in advance for saying things that are easy to say but incredibly difficult to do.
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