Journal gibberish

Scientific journal publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 published papers after French computer scientist Cyril Labbé discovered that they were nothing but computer-generated gobbledygook--scams ending up getting published in peer-reviewed journals. Here is an example of an abstract for a paper entitled "TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce":

In recent years, much research has been devoted to the construction of public-private key pairs; on the other hand, few have synthesized the visualization of the producer-consumer problem. Given the current status of efficient archetypes, leading analysts famously desires the emulation of congestion control, which embodies the key principles of hardware and architecture. In our research, we concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact.

The papers were generated by the MIT program SCIgen for the purposes of showing that nonsense gets past reviewers, journal editors and production editors (presumably) unseen. Hopefully this could not happen in philosophy. Maybe we should put it to a test.

Free Access to Erkenntnis Articles

As Hannes Leitgeb just pointed out on PHILOS-L, all articles in Erkenntnis will be freely available from now until December 31st, 2011. Here is the link.

How to be an Ethical Journal Referee

I just uploaded a popular paper to my website, entitled "How to be an Ethical Journal Referee".

Journal Survey

The Northern Institute of Philosophy plans to run a journal dedicated to the publication of short philosophical papers within the core areas of the analytic tradition. They are currently conducting a short survey to determine whether there is general interest in a journal of this kind. The survey can be found here.

Survey on Publishing

Sally Haslanger has created a survey on publishing. She will be on an APA panel in NY to discuss publishing issues, and would like to have some data to discuss. It should take about 10 minutes. It will be useful to have your CV handy as you fill it out. You can find the survey here.

Relative Truth

I recently put together a special issue of Synthese on relative truth. It has just come out in print. Contributors include: David Capps, Andy Egan, Michael Glanzberg, Steven Hales, Max Kolbel, Peter Lasersohn, Michael Lynch, John MacFarlane, Daniel Massey, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Stephen Neale, Duncan Pritchard, Brian Weatherson and Crispin Wright.

Episteme 4: 3, Perspectives on Testimony

Guest Editor: Jennifer Lackey. Contributors: Peter Lipton, Linda Zagzebski, Melissa Koenig and Paul Harris, Patrick Rysiew, Paul Faulkner, Al Casullo, John Greco, Marc Moffet, Arnon Keren, and Jonathan Adler. Click here for further details.

Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy: Call for Papers

Call for papers: Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy

Topic: Ancient Philosophy.

Deadline for submission: Sep. 30, 2008.

Papers should be sent to:

Prof. Dr. Uwe Meixner, Philosophisches Institut, Universität des Saarlandes, Postfach 15 11 50, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany, E-mail: u.meixner@mx.uni-saarland.de

or

Prof. Dr. Albert Newen, Institut für Philosophie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany, E-mail: albert.newen@rub.de

Questions: Prof. Newen (albert.newen@rub.de).

Refereeing Practices: Single- or Double-Blind?

A recent study conducted by Budden et al indicates that double-blind refereeing helps to increase the representation of women in ecology journals. The researchers compared Behavioral Ecology, which implemented double-blind refereeing in 2001, to Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, which remains single-blind refereed. Following the introduction of double-blind refereeing there was a 33% percent increase in the number of women represented in BE.

So, why is blind refereeing not standardly employed in ecology? As the article points out, the following four reasons are frequently cited:

1) Increased admistrative burden.
2) Referees can determine author identify in other ways.
3) The decreased potential for more feedback to junior people.
4) Harder to "detect publication of the same data across multiple papers"

But none of them survives closer scrutiny.

Ad 1) If the journal asks authors to prepare their papers for blind review, double-blind refereeing does not increase the work load for the editor. And there certainly shouldn't be an increased burden on the reviewer, as we should expect the reviewer to apply the same high standards in both cases.
Ad 2) Guesses tend to be inaccurate. Referees make correct guesses only in 25% - 42% of the cases. A related concern is that referees might google the paper, which would make double-blind refereeing redundant. But, as not every author posts their work in progress, this is not a foolproof method for determining author identity either.
Ad 3) If this is a real concern, the editor (who knows the author's identity) could ask the referee for a written report, rather than a 'yes' or 'no' assessment.
Ad 4) This may be a genuine concern in the sciences. But I doubt that it generalizes to other areas. It certainly is not a concern in philosophy, as far as I can tell.

So what are the lessons (if any) for philosophy? Well, most philosophy journals are already double-blind refereed, but the data can perhaps explain the underrepresentation of women in edited volumes (as inclusion is determined prior to refereeing). It might also give reason to implement tripple-blind refereeing (i.e., neither editor nor referee knows the author's identity).

(Thanks to Claire Horisk for sending the link)

New issue of EPISTEME now available

EPISTEME
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2007
Editor: Alvin I. Goldman

Special Issue: Epistemic Relativism
Guest Editor: Frederick F. Schmitt

List of contents and abstracts available here

What Counts as Philosophy and Other Links

From GonePublic: What counts as philosophy?

From Knowledge and Experience: Bachelor's Degrees in Philosophy, By Sex and Women in Philosophy: Data on Professors.

From American Philosophy: Philosophy Journals

Data on Journals in Philosophy

Jon Kvanvig has been collecting some data on journals in philosophy which include rejection rates and scholarly impact. It's well worth checking out.

S & P Open for Submissions

The new journal, Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P), edited by David Beaver and Kai von Fintel, is now open for submissions!

Feminist Articles in Philosophy Journals

Kathryn Norlock at St. Mary’s College of Maryland has just completed a study enumerating the articles published in philosophy journals on the topic of feminism. Evelyn Brister has the details.

New Issue of Episteme

New issue of EPISTEME now available.

Volume 4, Issue 1, 2007
Editor: Alvin I. Goldman

Special Issue: Epistemic Relativism
Guest Editor: Frederick F. Schmitt

List of contents and abstracts are available here.

On Refereeing Practices

There is an interesting discussion of one of the issues addressed in Sally Haslanger's piece Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone) over at Feminist Philosophers. The issue is that of why so few female philsophers publish in mainstream journals. Following Haslanger, Jender suggests that part of the reason may be that there is an implicit bias against women, and that blind refereeing and editing, therefore, are mandatory. Blind refereeing and editing do seem preferable to non-blind refereeing and editing. But it's not going to overcome all biases. Very many philosophers put their work online. And it's hard to see what would become of the field if no one did that. But I bet very few referees can resist googling the title or first line of a manuscript before making their final recommendation to the editors (or maybe even before reading the manuscript). Even so, blind refeering is a good thing. At least it is then up to the author to decide how blind he or she wants the refereeing to be. As for blind editing, I think there is much to be said for that too. However, I also think editors are likely to be less biased than referees. My feeling is that editors give a lot of weight to the referees' reports. Editors can, of course, give a lot of weight to the referees' reports and still affect the final decision dramatically. Some referees are notoriously hard to satisfy, others exceedingly easy. An editor could decide to send manuscripts by unknown authors or on "exotic" topics such as feminism to referees which are hard to satisfy. If anything like that ever happens, then blind editing of course won't be the miracle cure for biases against women. It could perhaps help the young and unknowns, but it wouldn't help those writing on less mainstream topics.

PHIBOOK - The Yearbook for Philosophical Logic

The web-site for PHIBOOK is now up and running.

PHIBOOK is an annual volume devoted to philosophical logic and its relation to philosophy and science with particular emphasis on multi- agent and modal systems, active agency and social software. The yearbook is intended to inform the community of current and future directions of research and activity in philosophical logic, major events, books and important papers of the past year but also leaves extensive room for discussion in terms of columns, opinion pieces, and critical reports.

Editors:
Alexandru Baltag (Oxford)
Johan van Benthem (Amsterdam / Stanford)
Branden Fitelson (Berkeley)
Vincent F. Hendricks (Roskilde)
Hannes Leitgeb (Bristol)
Fenrong Liu (Beijing / Amsterdam)
Eric Pacuit (Stanford)
Bryan Renne (CUNY)
John Symons (El Paso)

PHIBOOK/2007 will be available in May 2008

SUBMISSIONS/DEADLINES

PHIBOOK invites authors to submit extensive survey (expositional) papers (30-50 pages) on philosophical logic (including inductive logic, modal, alethic logic, temporal logic, epistemic logic, deontic logic, conditional logic ... with special focus on multi-modal logics and active agency) and its relations to notably epistemology, methodology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and its applications and philosophical significance in computer science, information theory, cognitive science, mathematics, linguistics, economics and game theory ...

For more information click here.

S & P Advisory Board

The editors of the new journal-to-be Semantics and Pragmatics have just announced their Advisory Board:

Greg Carlson (former editor of Linguistics & Philosophy)
Gennaro Chierchia
Bart Geurts (editor of Journal of Semantics)
Irene Heim (editor of Natural Language Semantics)
Polly Jacobson (editor of Linguistics & Philosophy)
Hans Kamp
Angelika Kratzer (editor of Natural Language Semantics)
Manfred Krifka (editor of Theoretical Linguistics, former editor of Linguistics & Philosophy)
Barbara Partee
Robert Stalnaker

Impressive line-up!

Peer-Review in Decline

"The well-known people are going to cut back on their publishing in top journals because they don’t need the peer review anymore. They can get attention to their work without it"

Via Adventures in Ethics and Science and Semantics, etc. I just learned about this article from Inside Higher Ed, which discusses the recent decline in publications in peer-reviewed journals by authors from top economics departments. Elizabeth Redden, the article's author, suggests that the reason for the decline is that better publication venues are available to top economists: home-pages, on-line data-bases, blogs, to mention just a few. Bypassing peer-review is a quicker way to recognition than waiting for slow referees and journal backlogs. According to Redden it sometimes takes 3 years for an article to make it into print in a peer-reviewed journal.

I am not sure whether there is a similar decline in publications in peer-reviewed philosophy journals by top philosophers. It certainly seems that high-powered philosophers often choose to publish their work in non-peer-reviewed places. In philosophy, however, publication on home-pages, blogs and on-line data-bases does not seem to have had any effect on how many peer-reviewed articles are published. Non-peer-reviewed volumes, guest-edited journal issues, and conference proceedings are the main competition.

Well-known philosophers are more frequently invited to contribute to non-peer-reviewed volumes than less well-known people, and if one no longer needs to prove oneself in the field, it is probably tempting to bypass refereeing and journal backlogs entirely. As Ellison, the author of "Is Peer-Review in Decline?", says to Redding, "The well-known people are going to cut back on their publishing in top journals because they don’t need the peer review anymore. They can get attention to their work without it". While Ellison is primarily interested in the status-quo in economics, his point extends to philosophy.

One might, however, fear that an absence of top philosophers in refereed journals will set the tone in the profession. If top-people do not publish in peer-reviewed journals, peer-reviewed articles might be perceived as second-rate. On the anecdotal side, a friend of mine who wanted to shift horses mid-career once asked a top philosopher in his new field which journals were most prestigious. Surprisingly the answer he received was "None. Don't publish in journals. If you are good enough, you will be invited to publish your work elsewhere". This, certainly, is an unfortunate attitude. Peer-reviewing is, after all, the most objective way of determining what should appear in print.

Moreover, as Adventures in Ethics and Science points out, building one's reputation is not the only reason for publishing. Hopefully the communication of knowledge is still an honorable aim. And journal publication is one of the very best ways of communicating knowledge. While very few journal articles are read by more than a few people, they are visible and easily accessible. Articles in book volumes and conference proceedings are much harder to find, unless you simply buy the book or the proceedings. When the book goes out of print after a few years it can be almost impossible to find. Webpage publication, of course, can to some extent make up for the public inaccessibility of one's work. Still, lots and lots of non-refereed publications simply are not publicly available. You cannot go to JStor or some other publicly available datebase to download a book contribution.

So if one aims at communicating knowledge and having one's work read in 10+ years, it seems worthwhile to send at least some of it to journals. Of course, the ideal situation would be one where all work was available online on open access but peer-reviewed sites. This way we could avoid journal backlogs, difficulties tracking down non-peer-reviewed articles and the high cost of subscriptions. The only time that would pass between submission and publication would be the time it would take the referees to finish their job and the editors to make a final decision. For now, however, peer-reviewed journal publication still seems a worthwhile enterprise.

Feminist Philosophy at Mainstream Journals

One commenter at the SWIP listserve noted that as an editor of a mainstream journal she didn't receive any submissions on feminism. Surprising? Well, as Feminist Philosophers point out, many feminist philosophers who have no trouble getting non-feminist work published in mainstream journals find it exceedingly hard to get their feminist work published in the same journals. Eventually they give up and send their work elsewhere.

Of course, there is something of a vicious circle here, which needs to be broken. One commenter notes that she thinks feminist philosophers should keep trying. Why? Because it will help to mainstream feminist philosophy:

those of us with secure jobs have something of an obligation to keep trying the mainstream journals (as long as this remains compatible with our sanity!). Getting papers in them will help to mainstream feminist philosophy, which really needs doing.

There is definitely the issue of mainstreaming feminist philosophy. There is also a different issue which wasn't mentioned in the post. Mainstream journals tend to send submitted articles to former journal contributors for refereeing. If few feminist philosophers publish in mainstream journal, one might suspect that even if submitted work on feminism is sent to very experienced and perhaps even sympathetic referees, such work may not always be refereed by the most qualified people working in the area.