I see several problems with the Journal of Philosophy’s reporting here. I recognize that others have already tried to defend the journal but I think those defenses are very poor (if nonetheless understandable). It’s an embarrassment that a journal would only accept one article in six months even if it will ultimately come to accept a greater number than that over the course of the year. It’s an embarrassment because a well-run system should not take 9-18 months to process a submission. It points to systemic problems.
- Very slow reviewer pipeline
- Reviewers reviewing poorly (for all sorts of reasons)
- Outdated printing model (too few spaces)
So here are some proposals to fix these problems:
To solve the space issue: Accept more papers! Let’s say that the journal shifts from accepting 20 papers a year to accepting 100. Not only would this benefit the profession as a whole, it wouldn’t even hurt the journal’s reputation: Assuming it gets the same number of submissions in the second half of 2025 as it did in the first half, accepting 100 papers means the journal would have a 12.5% acceptance rate! This is hardly the mark of a non-selective journal.
I can already hear you saying: “But the journal doesn’t have room to publish 100 papers a year in its hard copy!!!” And I think that’s fine. Perhaps appearance in the hard copy of the journal is reserved for the 20 “best” papers accepted that year. Appearance in hard copy could function as a secondary marker of prestige but this wouldn’t really hurt the 80 other papers that are accepted and published in the online version of one of the discipline’s premier journals.
If all journals moved to a two-tiered system like this (e.g., a five fold increase in acceptances with only some appearing in hard copy) it would drastically reduce the number of papers floating around in the peer-review system: every paper rejected at JoP is going to submitted somewhere else and the same holds for other journals.
What about reviewers? We’ve discussed this a lot at DN. While some journals might experiment with paying their reviewers, I can imagine that this would get too expensive for most venues given the volume of referring that needs to be done. Maybe reviewers could earn “credits” with a journal that they can spend in different ways. For example, perhaps you can spend those credits to guarantee a faster review time from editors or perhaps credits could be spent in lieu of cash so that accepted articles are published as Open Access? In other words, make the job of reviewing worth something to the reviewer so that they not only agree to review but spend more time ensuring that they’re producing quality reviews.
The worst thing we can do is pretend like this is how things are supposed to be, that the peer-review journal system is running well. It isn’t and it needs to change. I think it’s too late to avoid the iceberg, we’ve already hit it, but let’s not keep the band playing while the ship sinks. We need to change this now.
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