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My own work is not so well partitioned. For example, I've written on the ontology of musical performance. I've also coauthored a paper using lessons from philosophy of science to say something about the nature of art. And my task since the conference has been to finish and revise a new paper on the ontology of musical works.
In the new paper, I suggest treating musical works (as historical or conventional art) as homeostatic property clusters. I also get to do some work in proper philosophy of science, arguing for a rapprochement between the species-as-individuals thesis and the HPC view of species.
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Last month, I discussed the unprofessional and craven reply by the editors of Synthese to the petition protesting their unprofessional and craven behaviour. Their reply, if you'll recall, was in a grainy jpeg at synthpetition.info. Wesley Elsberry had transcribed the response, and I pointed to his blog.
Elsberry's blog is now down. The text below is cut and pasted from the Google cache, and I offer it because Google cached pages are ephemeral. This really ought to exist as plain text (a fit format for verbal content) rather than as a bitmap (the preferred format for porn).
The response
In response to the petition sent to Synthese:
We have considered the demands contained in this petition very seriously. We have implemented a moratorium on new special issues and we have begun planning appropriate changes to the editorial procedures of Synthese.
The petition asks for full disclosure of all legal threats. There have not been any communications received from Christian philosophers that constituted legal threats. There was a single email from a member of the public expressing the view that the entire special issue was ‘scurrilous and libelous’. We did not consider this email to be a legal threat. It is important to note that this email was received after our initial contacts with Professor Beckwith.
As far as meaningful legal action is concerned, we have received messages that we take seriously as legal threats but these have not come from Christian philosophers. Our ability to provide detailed responses in the blogs is constrained by these challenges.
Professor Beckwith requested an opportunity to respond to Professor Forrest's paper. We agreed that this was a fair course of action. As regards the inclusion of our editorial statement and the email correspondence with Professor Forrest, it is true that there was considerable discussion between the editors of all aspects of the special issue. We took these matters very seriously and as is often the case with serious deliberation there were some oscillations prior to our reaching a conclusion. Eventually the editors arrived at a shared position, in consultation with the publisher, based on what we judged to be the offending language in two papers.
With respect to the claim that the guest editors were given assurances that no editorial statement would appear, it is true that the guest editors were privy to internal discussions between the editors-in-chief at earlier stages. We were unable to properly communicate later stages of our decision-making process to the guest editors.
We are ultimately responsible for what appears in the journal and we decided to publish the special issue without amendment to any of its papers. We wish to emphasize that our editorial statement should in no way be interpreted as an endorsement of 'intelligent design'.
At this point, we have a duty to help create procedures to prevent situations of the sort we saw here from recurring. Thus, in consultation with the publisher, we have begun planning a transition to improved editorial procedures and improved oversight which will be in place in 2012. We will work closely with our board or area editors and our advisory board to make this happen.
Johan van Benthem
Vincent Hendricks
John Symons
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I recently suffered a computer failure. Although I restored to a recent backup, there is a small window of e-mails which were lost to the void. If you contacted me in the last two weeks or so and never heard back, please send your message again.
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There's an interesting roundtable discussion in Theoria about journal publishing. The editors of several journals discuss the role that journals play in professional philosophy, including the evaluation of philosophers and funding decisions. They also discuss the possibilities of open access publishing.
Social responsibility of editors
Late in the discussion, someone from the audience asks "Why should the editor of a philosophical journal think so much about how the academic system appoints people to their jobs?" The alternative, one of the panelists suggests, is to just "produce good journals."
Sven Ove Hansson resists this suggestion, saying that "journals are part of, and very much integrated in, the academic system." And he's right. Whether journal editors face up to it or not, what and who gets published has real consequences for what and who gets attention and funding. There are institutional consequences of running a journal one way rather than another; that is to say, running a journal has political consequences. So editting a journal is (among other things) a political act.
More than that, there no such thing as a good journal simpliciter. What it is to be a good journal depends on how the journal will be used. The standards for how things should be written, how much citation is required, and so on all depend on the audience. For a journal with no intended audience at all, there is no difference between a good journal and a bad journal. To consider the most extreme possibility, imagine philosophers who toil to produce a journal which is immediately dropped into a black hole.*
So part of an editor's responsibility is to consider who the audience of the journal is and how they are going to use it. Given the academic system, evaluators and administrators are among the audience and the appointment and promotions system is part of how it is used. So producing good journals requires thinking about the academic systems in which the journals exist.
In the first place, journals are aimed at scholars interested in advancing the discussion about such-and-so. So, to more charitably read the original question, one can worry that editors are concerned too much about the academic system. The political reality means that editors should think a lot about it, though.
Open access
The fact that journal articles are part of an ongoing discussion underscores the value of open access publishing. Simply put, a more accesible article is more likely to be available and be read in places where it can make a difference. To their credit, most of the editors in the roundtable voice support for open access. Theoria itself is an OA journal.
One strange dissent is from Vincent Hendricks. Discussing the case in his own country, he says:
[The Danes] are introducing an interesting angle on open access. The idea is to have all Danish research articles included in a database, which is basically an open access database belonging to the state. Since the money for the research is paid by the state, everybody should have access to the database. Of course, there is a potential clash here between the state on one hand and, say, the journals on the other. There's no way Springer is going to publish papers that have already been published on a state-controlled website. If researchers have to put up their publications on a state-owned database, then nobody is going to publish their papers anyway. I doubt that those who decided this have any idea what they are getting their hands into.
I call this 'strange' because it describes open access in some bizarro universe. There are already funding agencies that require open access publishing (e.g. the Wellcome Trust circa 2004) and it's not a novel Danish innovation. Contra Hendricks' insistence, a requirement to put papers in a central database is compatible with later publishing in a journal. In physics, almost every new paper is placed in a public archive (the arXiv) even when it later appears in a traditional journal. Somehow physics journals survive at publishers including Springer.
The most charitable interpretation is that Hendricks just doesn't know any of this. He coedits Synthese, a philosophy journal, so perhaps developments in physics and biomedicine just haven't shown up on his radar. Yet, for reasons I suggested above, part of his responsibility as editor is to think about the broader context.**
The less charitable interpretation is that he does know about the developments in physics and biomedicine but conveniently overlooks them. Commercial publishers do this when they argue that open access would destroy academic publishing. Paranoia about open access is probably the narrative encouraged by Springer itself.*** Even though Springer could survive in an open access world, there is more money to be made if they can go on exploiting free labour and a captive market.
* I am here setting aside any value that writing the journal might have for the writers and editors themselves. Although they may derive some benefit from the process, it's incidental to academic publishing.
** Hendricks would disagree with the argument above, I think. He says in response to the question from the floor: "We have to produce good journals. That's all I really have to say about that."
*** There is some reason to suspect that the editors of Synthese are corporate toadies. I don't want this to be another post about the Synthese debacle, though... oops.
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*sigh* The editors responded to the Synthese petition. It happened almost two weeks ago, while I was in Toronto talking about anglerfish.
The editors' reply was posted to the domain syntpetition.info. The domain was created just for this purpose, and it hosts only a low-res jpg scan of a letter in which the editors pooh pooh the entire affair. Wesley Elsberry has transcribed the response in actual text.
When I first read the reply, I wondered whether it actually was from the editors at all. Given subsequent non-denial, it seems that it is. However, I find the format of the response to be... well... unprofessional. 470ish sign a petition in protest, but the editors do the digital equivalent of mumbling their response before sprinting out the back door. They went out of their way to make the response indirect and inaccessible.
The way that the response was delivered compounds their original offenses. If they weren't out of line before, they are now. Even if the hundreds of signatories were entirely off base, the response ought to have been direct rather than maddeningly roundabout.
On top of all that, the content of the response is... well... unresponsive. They say that the disclaimer is or at least might have been a response to messages they received which they "take seriously as legal threats." This is just the worry - that they knuckled under to legal threats from creationists.
The letter goes on to say that the threats were not from "Christian philosophers." This careful wording allows that the threats were from other creationists; i.e., Christian non-philosophers. The dodginess almost even suggests that it was so.
It is possible, of course, that the evaluation of the legal situation was made by Springer's corporate lawyers rather than by the editors themselves. If so, they acting the part of coroporate toadies - worse, bad corporate toadies. If you aren't going to talk about it, a clear public statement of no comment would be both more honest and legally more secure. A grainy scan of an evasive letter posted at an obscure novel domain is a disasterous half-measure.
Also: There's been coverage of the Synthese debacle in the NY Times and the Guardian. Although the URL shifted, John Wilkins is still keeping up an aggregate of related links.
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