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Submitting to PPA (and other Wiley journals)?

In our November “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

I am an ABD PhD candidate grappling with how to approach morally problematic publishing issues. As many of us know, the board of Philosophy and Public Affairs (PPA), much like the board of the Journal of Political Philosophy, rightly resigned some time ago due to Wiley’s unacceptable publishing demands. However, unlike the latter, PPA has managed to continue its operations with a new editorial board.

It seems that people keep submitting their work to the journal, and high-quality articles are still being published regularly. This brings me to my dilemma: Should I submit to PPA? I am currently just a candidate seeking the best possible venues for my publications, and PPA remains the ideal fit for my research.

If established scholars do not seem to care about the controversy, is it necessary for me to be the one acting on principle? Furthermore, as the journal appears to be functioning well, I suspect that in the near future, let’s say in five years, the past controversy will be neglected or forgotten. As a result, PPA will likely regain its full reputation as if Wiley had never made those impermissible demands.

Prospectively speaking, do I still need to worry about the ethics of submitting there? Or am I overthinking my obligations as a junior scholar in this situation?

My moral disposition tells me to keep boycotting Wiley. But this should then apply to other Wiley journals as well as all other monopolies such as Springer, which would mean we are running out of high-quality options. Long story short, would you submit to PPA from now on?

What do readers think?

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16 responses to “Submitting to PPA (and other Wiley journals)?”

  1. Richard

    I’m glad that the original board resigned and created Free & Equal (and would encourage people to submit to the new open access journal — I recently published there myself). I’m also glad that a new editorial board stepped up to revive the PPA brand (while, I understand, securing a firm commitment from Wiley not to interfere with their editorial discretion). Having two well-regarded journals where we previously only had one seems overall good for the discipline (and Wiley has learned that they can’t push our editorial boards around). So I’d also encourage folks to continue supporting the new PPA—at least once you’ve run out of comparably prestigious open-access venues to prioritize.

    fwiw, I’d certainly never hold it against a junior candidate (or anyone else, for that matter) that they published in PPA: it’s obviously a professional accomplishment!

    Reply
  2. Anon

    I can’t see why there would be anything morally wrong with submitting a paper there. What possibly could make it wrong? True, Wiley overreached. But they aren’t now. (And even if they were, it wouldn’t be a moral issue.)

    Reply
    1. Daniel

      The morally objectionable thing would be undercutting the power of editorial boards. The editorial board of PPA resigned because Wiley was interfering. If Wiley knows it can let editorial boards resign en masse because replacement editorial boards will show up on its doorstep, it can ignore the concerns of editorial boards and do evil things.

      The reply from the PPA editorial board would be that they only showed up on Wiley’s doorstep because Wiley was willing to change its interfering ways and provide assurances that it won’t be evil again. (They failed to get Wiley’s assurance that it would not implement the most evil possible change, which is moving the journal to a two-column format, so in my mind they’ve already failed, but whatever.) So the argument is that actually Wiley is still under pressure to behave properly, because if it doesn’t, it will lose its replacement editorial board too, and then once again it will not have a journal. That’s no help to the original editorial board, which had to resign to exert pressure on Wiley, but it paid dividends for the new editorial team, which can threaten to resign if Wiley starts doing anything untoward, and now Wiley knows it’s a real threat.

      I find the reply convincing (except to the extent that they have allowed Wiley to force the evil two-column layout on the journal, thus ruining it) so I’m not sure I see anything wrong with submitting to PPA. I have yet to submit to it, though, because I know some people disagree and I’m not yet sure that I’m right and they’re wrong. I’m still thinking it over.

      Reply
      1. Anon

        I don’t find that to be convincing at all—nor are my standards for evil low enough to consider what Wiley did evil.

        I don’t like what Wiley did, but I fail to see why it rises to the level of immoral instead of merely annoying and stupid. (If there was a contract that prohibited this behavior, then it was immoral.) And it’s definitely not immoral to submit to PPA.

  3. Anonymous

    I am an ABD PhD candidate. I don’t submit to PPA and I never will, for three reasons:

    1) Lots of famous ethicists and political philosophers who I respect (and their colleagues) think it’s unethical to submit to PPA. Those people are faculty at institutions I might apply to or otherwise hope to engage with, and they will see the publication as a betrayal.

    2) Lots of people don’t think PPA is a nice venue anymore. So the market value of a publication in PPA is highly uncertain, which makes publication in PPA less desirable. I’d rather publish (e.g.) in Phil Studies, Ergo, or Political Philosophy.

    3) Submitting to PPA rather than F&E seems to actively support the former over the latter. At the very least I would advocate submitting to F&E first. But I would also advocate not sending to PPA at all. I think as a profession we should support editors who risk a lot in resigning from a greedy and exploitative journal to make a better one, and submitting to F&E and not PPA is a great way to do that. There are a ton of journals we can submit to in value theory: Ethics, F&E, Political Philosophy, JESP, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Utilitas, Oxford Studies in Metaethics/Normative Ethics/Political Philosophy, Economics & Philosophy, PPE, and so on. Plus all of the generalist journals. It would take years to accumulate rejections from all of these journals, and to my mind they are more deserving of our support than PPA (and many of them are at least as prestigious, with none of the controversy).

    Also OP says the material coming out of PPA is high quality. Please note that when editors leave, there is often a huge backlog of articles they already reviewed, and which stay with the journal. Many of the great articles published in PPA after the editorial team’s departure were likely reviewed by that team and not the new one.

    Reply
  4. David Thorstad

    At your career stage, it’s not your job to fix the field. Don’t do anything terrible, but this is not so bad.

    Reply
  5. recently tenured

    My intuitions are firmly with David on this, but I do worry about whether Anonymous is right about people seeing it as a betrayal. Personally, I think a fancy tenured person who would hold this against a grad student/very junior/precariously employed person would be unreasonable, given that they should know just how tough the market is, but perhaps some people in our field are unreasonable.

    Everything we do, when we are candidates/junior, feels incredibly pressing – how can I maximize my chances? How should I weigh the potential costs/benefits? – but it is impossible to know what the actual results will be until after you’ve made them, and often far in the future or perhaps not at all. So, you have to make the decisions you can live with, and be prepared to defend them if questioned (“Yes, I am aware of the controversy about PPA and that was a big factor in my decision. However, …”). In theory, we care more about the reasoning process than the specific claims, so hopefully that would be enough if it did cause you trouble later on.

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    Just to add a further data point, I have also heard that some senior faculty look down on publishing with PPA and would echo what the ABD anonymous above says about 1) there being plenty of other great venues for papers in value theory; 2) the quality of the ‘new’ PPA being still somewhat uncertain

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I’ll second that point. I’ve heard multiple people say don’t publish there because of (2) and because some people might perceive that as a betrayal. They said this not to endorse it but merely to describe an attitude they detected.

      Reply
  7. Anonymous

    I don’t see anything morally wrong with submitting to PPA (though strategically it might be worth considering the signal it sends to those who do, as others have said.) But I’ll add that F&E is very well-run — responsive, fast, and generous with comments. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s considered to be a notch above PPA in the long run in terms of prestige (and maybe already?) If I had a F&E/PPA-type paper, I would submit it to F&E first without much thought, and it’s not obvious I would send it to PPA second, and that’s purely for self-interested, non-moral reasons.

    Reply
  8. prof r1

    Junior scholars should know that many philosophers think that PPA was taken over by political philosophers with an axe to grind about how the journal was run previously.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      Could you expand a bit?

      Reply
    2. Anonymous

      echoing the above, would definitely like to hear a bit more

      Reply
  9. Anonymous

    PPA should host a special issue on whether it is permissible to submit to PPA

    Reply
  10. Anonymous

    This is just about personal judgements, but I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the papers published in the new Philosophy and Public Affairs have deteriorated noticeably after the transition. Some of their published works hardly qualifies as substantively philosophical, let alone being of the highest caliber. This isn’t necessarily about the editorial judgments made by the new board, of course — though that might be part of the story — but also about what sort of work people, in their deliberation about career prospects, readership, perceived prestige, would now prioritize sending out. The top 5 journals in philosophy are top 5 at least partly because people send their best work first to them. I think it’s fair to assume that the same group of scholars who would otherwise publish in the original Philosophy and Public Affairs (if not for the Wiley fall out) would send what they judge to be their best work to Free and Equal, not the new PPA, with a highly uncertain fate.

    I also find it strange that people think the new PPA would somehow carry the prestige of the old PPA. The only aspects that continued in the transition were the journal’s name, and the commercial press — right? Neither had anything to do with the quality of work they publish. (Unless some people missed the news about the change.) If Wiley had killed the PPA instead, and someone else somewhere started a new journal and titled it “Philosophy and Public Affairs” or “Public Affairs and Philosophy,” with a completely nonoverlapping board making policies and judgments, surely no one would think that this new journal would inherit any prestige had by the former eponymous journal, right?

    Reply
  11. Anonymous

    There’s some over-generalizing in the comments about whether it’s a good idea to submit to PPA. The answer really depends on the kind of market you’re specializing for. If you’re trying to land at an elite R1, then it’s likely faculty there will have the negative view of PPA that’s been talked about so far.

    But what if you’re going for a SLAC that’s hiring in Ethics/Political Philosophy because they don’t really have anyone else there to teach those courses? Chances are, the faculty on a committee like this isn’t familiar with all the drama that went down with PPA; if anything, they only know its towering reputation pre-board change. This is all the more the case if the SLAC is religious, or generally skeptical of the broadly Rawlsian commitments that the old PPA specialized in.

    So, in sum, the answer to whether it’s wise to submit to PPA depends on the sort of market you’re going for. If someone says it’s not a good idea to submit to PPA because philosophers look down on it, you should ask whether those philosophers would likely be on committees at jobs you’d apply for.

    And let me add that plenty of philosophers like PPA, and maybe even like it more so now, because it’s now run by a new board they’re more sympathetic to.

    Reply

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