New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Regimes of Accumulation

In a new paper, Maximilian Fochler conducted a series of structured interviews with scientists to make an STS point: when we think of capitalism as a system that depends on “accumulation,” there are many different kinds of things that one can accumulate, many of them non-financial.  I think Fochler makes an important point, but I also think it should be pushed in a somewhat different, more critical direction.

First, though, the results of the interviews.  Fochler interviewed both academic and non-academic scientists in Austria.  On the academic side, he looked at those in charge of labs, and the post-docs who do most of the actual bench science.  Both are engaged in a race to accumulate.  The leaders have to produce peer-reviewed publications in order to get grants, which they need to then get more peer-reviewed publications (Fochler’s interview subjects were Austrian, but it should be noted that in this country, many of those scientists have to get grants to cover their salary.  No grant, no paycheck).  The post-docs are in perhaps the most dire situation: there are a lot more post-docs than there are positions for them, and so they have to engage in a competitive race to accumulate publications as well, in order to continue in their careers (or as Becker would say, adding a polite veneer, “invest in their human capital”), either by extending their current position or gaining another one.  Adding to the stress, postdoc positions typically last 2-3 years, which is not enough time to accumulate a significant publication record (I will leave it to readers to draw the connections between this situation and that faced by the humanities precariat).

On the corporate side, we find the CEO’s of start-ups trying to generate peer-reviewed publications, positive lab results, and other indicia that their particular research program – and its endpoint product – is worthy of continued venture capital funding, with the goal of (eventually) selling the start-up to a larger pharmaceutical company. Since the scientific process apparently takes about 10 years, and the VC funding cycle is two or three years, this is a continuous worry.  The scientists, on the other hand, much to their surprise (and mine, as I read the paper) work in a collaborative, non-competitive environment.  This is because successes and failures are attributable to the entire company.  Of course, the downside of this is that these scientists don’t accumulate anything they can use to parlay into their next job.

The simple point I would like to add is that, despite all of the accumulation, no one is making any real money.  Not the post-docs, especially, though a move into to a faculty position adds some salary and a little job security, but also adds to the need to publish. The CEO’s and employees of the start-ups aren’t likely to get rich either: 90% of start-ups fail generally; pharmaceuticals don’t do that much better; and one study reported  that “97% of drugs in preclinical tests never make it to market, and nor do 95% of the molecules in phase 1 clinical trials and 88% of molecules in phase 2. Not until phase 3 do their prospects get much better: Of the ones that make it that far, 56% are approved” (summative quote from here).

Elsevier eats SSRN

If you’re an SSRN user, you got the notice in your Inbox yesterday; if you’re not, follow the links at the top of Leiter’s post here. Read the comments, too. It’s hard to know what to make of this acquisition, but for those not familiar, here’s a quick backgrounder: SSRN.com (“Social Science Research Network”) has, for a very long time, been a repository for freely available research online, particularly in law.  Most law faculty post their papers on SSRN, where anybody else may freely download and read them.  SSRN also has other categories: I post my papers there, and there’s an entire set of categories for philosophy.  When you post a paper on SSRN, it makes you swear that you have the right to do so, and underscores that it does not take copyright in anything. I’m a heavy user of the site, as is every legal academic I know (that’s how I got to it: I read lots of law journal articles).  Elsevier has now bought SSRN.

Philosophers tend to use academia.edu, which is unfortunate.  You can’t download anything from the site without registering for it, and when you do, it tries to scrape the web and link your papers to your academia.edu site (or at least, it did when I make this mistake several years ago), and then sends you an email asking you to make sure the papers listed are all yours (the overinclusion in my case was comical, as there is somebody in physics whose initials are G Hull).  You also get a barrage of emails: somebody just searched for you on google and found your academia.edu page!  Click here to know where they were!  Good grief.  In computer terms, the site is basically trying hard to be sticky (causing people to go there and linger), and so it imitates Facebook, giving you lots of opportunities to curate your image, follow people, be followed, explore homepages, and so on, when all you thought you wanted to do was share your work for anybody who wanted to read it (the 5^th comment on the Leiter page linked above goes into more detail). Did I mention that it comes with piles of corporate money?

In defense of journal editors who make mistakes

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

All of you reading this will certainly have witnessed the uproar this week in response to a paper published in Synthese which is problematic, to say the least, for a number of different reasons. (It is worth noticing, as has been often noticed, that this paper has been online for 22 months, but presumably having appeared in the latest printed edition of Synthese, those on the Synthese mailing list will have received a notification, and someone actually took the trouble of checking the paper. From there on, it went ‘viral’ through the usual channels – Facebook, blogs etc.) In particular, it contains a passage with clear homophobic and sexist content. [But see UPDATE below.] But this is not the only issue with the paper, which overall seems to be below the level of scholarship that one would expect in a journal like Synthese.

[Full disclosure: I’ve known the author, JYB, for many years, and have attended a number of the events he regularly organizes. He was supportive of my career at its early stages. I know two of the Synthese editors-in-chief quite well, and the third I have close indirect contacts with (he is a regular collaborator of one of my closest colleagues). I have 5 papers published in Synthese, two of which are forthcoming in two different special issues.]

There is no question to me that this paper should not have been published in its current form. JY Béziau has made important contributions to logic earlier in his career, but in recent years his work has not been of the same caliber as his earlier work (this is also the opinion of a number of people I’ve talked to much before this episode). So purely on the basis of the paper’s merits, the decision to publish it in Synthese (whoever made the decision) seems to have been misguided. Adding to that the homophobic and sexist content, then the decision to publish it is not only misguided but also deeply disturbing. But the issue I want to discuss here is: what does this say about the editorial process in Synthese? Does this episode warrant calls for the resignation of the current editors-in-chief?

Permissions Culture: Copyright and complete subsumption

Publishing in general, and for the visual arts in particular, has moved to what’s called a “permission culture,” which basically means that nobody will publish your work unless you get explicit permission from the rights owner.  This is often an arduous process, since art often includes many copyrighted images or other materials.  A documentary film producer, for example, has to worry if an interview subject has the TV on in the background.  Permissions culture means that the producer has to either remove whatever is on the TV, or secure permission to use it.  It also means that scholars may not be able to publish articles that include images of the work they are discussing, either because the images are unavailable, or unaffordable.

On the surface of things, this seems odd: shouldn’t a lot of this fall under “fair use?’ The copyright statute, after all, cites education as an example.  An important paper in 2007 explained why fair use doesn’t matter in this context.  Basically, fair use is an affirmative defense against an infringement claim: you sue me for infringement, I claim fair use, and that’s the argument that litigation resolves.  Fair use guidelines are deliberately vague and left to a case-by-case judicial determination, and so it’s not always obvious what gets counted as fair use.  Litigation is very, very expensive, and publishers are risk averse.  They don’t want to pay for litigation, and if they lose, they lose not only all that money, but the work they were trying to publish gets enjoined.  So publishers won’t publish without prior permission (fair use thus systematically favors rich claimants and defendants).  In addition to the problems all of this directly creates, it indirectly creates a ratcheting effect, because one place courts look to see if use is fair, is industry practices.  So the more publishers seek permission for everything, the narrower fair use becomes.

Recommendations for citing papers

By Roberta Millstein

Following on Helen De Cruz's excellent Why we should cite unpublished papers and some recent reflections of my own while refereeing, I thought it might be helpful to compile a list of suggestions for when to cite (now that we know that our citations should include both published and unpublished work):

1. If someone has provided a way to understand a certain debate that had not been recognized before and you find it useful to present the debate in that way, you should cite them.
2. If someone has provided conceptual distinctions that you are using in your paper, you should cite them.
3. If someone has done the work to find and explain a case study and you want to refer to that case study too, you should cite them.
4. If X has developed further the ideas of Y, you should cite both X and Y. 

Why we should cite unpublished papers

I'm writing a paper where I'm citing an unpublished paper. It's by a relatively junior author, available on the internet, and it has been already cited, for example, I recently saw a citation to it in a published paper that's already in print for several years (that paper is very well known in the subject matter I'm writing about now - it is unsurprisingly by a far more senior author at a high-ranking institution).

I talked to the author of the unpublished draft a few months ago, and they said that the paper had been under review a couple of times, once in a top journal where it was under review for over a year until eventually the editor decided 'no'. They are now resubmitting this paper for the nth time. 

Upon learning this paper is unpublished, my first reaction was to avoid citing it. And I was frustrated with my own initial reaction - was I trying to use my citations strategically (not implausible, see e.g., here) to cite the papers that are deemed "central" in this discussion? Was I not willing to cite because I have often tried to track down, in vain, unpublished papers that are cited in the works of others and I am trying to avoid this frustration in my potential audience?

Findings from the survey on an OA philosophy book press

Earlier this month, Andrew Cullison, Jonathan Jacobs, Mark Lance, Kevin Timpe and I launched a survey to gauge interest for an open access philosophy book press. Following the successful launch of open access philosophy journals like Ergo and Philosopher’s Imprint we wanted to see if there was sufficient interest for a book publisher that worked on a non-profit, open-access model.

A total of 416 philosophers took our survey. Of these, 223 respondents left their contact details, saying they’d be interested to help as advisory board members or area editors. Here’s the breakdown in % of how our respondents thought about an AO philosophy book press. 85.4% said they would definitely or probably be willing to serve as a referee (without renumeration), 66.7% would definitely or probably submit as an author, 64.8% would definitely or probably be willing to serve on an Advisory Board, and 59% would definitely or probably be willing to serve as an Area Editor (see below the fold for more detailed results and a selection of comments).

Open Access Philosophy Press Survey

Philosophers: Please take the following survey to help us assess the feasibility and interest for an open access philosophy press, by following this link. It should take no more than 5 minutes to complete. https://surveys.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0pSC4gW1ciPOgWF

This survey aims to gage the interest of professional philosophers in helping to create, operate, and sustain an open access philosophy press.

Philosophers aim to disseminate ideas and knowledge as widely as possible. For-profit publishers introduce a price barrier that, with the wide availability of the internet, is unnecessary.  

The success of high quality, open access philosophy journals, like Philosophers' Imprint and Ergo, has erased concerns about the viability of open access, electronic publishing.

But there is no similar venue for books. We see no reason that a successful open access philosophy press shouldn't follow in the wake of the open access philosophy journals.

While the details would be worked out by an Advisory Board or Board of Directors and would follow best practices, the basic idea of the press is to

• publish high quality books in philosophy
• that are rigorously peer reviewed
• and made freely available online to read, download, copy, distribute, print, and otherwise use in legal, non-commercial ways by all without financial barriers.

We ask you, therefore, to answer these few short questions to help us gauge the interest in and viability of an open access, philosophy press.

-- Andrew Cullison, Helen De Cruz, Jonathan D. Jacobs, Mark Lance, Kevin Timpe

 

 

Meritocracies, Rankings, Curricula: A Personal Take On Academic Philosophy

By: Samir Chopra

Some six years ago, shortly after I had been appointed to its faculty, the philosophy department at the CUNY Graduate Center began revising its long-standing curriculum; part of its expressed motivation for doing so was to bring its curriculum into line with those of "leading" and "top-ranked" programs. As part of this process, it invited feedback from its faculty members. As a former graduate of the Graduate Center's Ph.D program, I thought I was well-placed to offer some hopefully useful feedback on its curriculum, and so, I wrote to the faculty mailing list, doing just that. Some of the issues raised in my email are, I think, still relevant to academic philosophy. Not everybody agreed with its contents; some of my cohort didn't, but in any case, perhaps this might provoke some discussion.

Here, reproduced almost verbatim, is that email:

Reliable referees: a rare commodity

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

In recent weeks, there has been much discussion on journal editorial practices at a number of philosophy blogs. Daily Nous ran an interesting post where different journal editors described (with varying degrees of detail) their editorial practices; many agree that the triple-anonymous system has a number of advantages and, when possible, should be adopted.* (And please, let us just stop calling it ‘triple-blind’ or ‘double-blind’, given that there is a perfectly suitable alternative!) Jonathan Ichikawa, however, pointed out (based on his experience with Phil Studies) that we must not take it for granted that a journal’s stated editorial policies are always de facto implemented. Jonathan (correctly, to my mind) defends the view that it is not desirable for a journal editor to act as a (let alone the sole) referee for a submission.

With this post, I want to bring up for discussion what I think is one of the main issues with the peer-reviewing system (I’ve expressed other reservations before: here, here, and here), namely the extreme difficulties journal editors encounter at finding competent referees willing to take up new assignments. Until two years ago, my experience with the peer-review system was restricted to the role of author (and I, as everybody else, got very frustrated with the months and months it often took journals to handle my submissions) and the role of referee (and I, as so many others, got very frustrated with the constant outpour of referee requests reaching my inbox). Two years ago I became one of the editors of the Review of Symbolic Logic, and thus acquired a third perspective, that of the journal editor. I can confirm that it is one of the most thankless jobs I’ve ever had.

The art of writing brief philosophy papers

I have always wanted to have a paper in Analysis or Thought. A really neat, short, paper, that is self-contained and makes an substantive philosophical point. Unfortunately, I tend to write articles of about 8000-9000 words, and first drafts are typically even longer. I've written some pre-read papers for conferences of 3000 words, but to get all the nuances in, they typically expand to 8000 words or more once they reach the article stage. What does it take to write brief philosophy papers? More generally, what does it take to write concisely?

Flash fiction is a style of fiction of extreme brevity, 500 words or less, typically 100-150 words. One very brief example, attributed (probably falsely) to Ernest Hemingway goes as follows: "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn." Or take flash poetry. The Dutch poet Vondel wrote the shortest poem in Dutch, and probably in any language, "U, nu" (literally, "you now", or "now it's your turn"). It's also palindromic, and won him a poetry prize. How to write flash fiction? David Gaffney advises flash fiction authors to cut down on character development, and to jump right in the story. Place the denouement not at the end, but in the middle, that way you have some space left to ponder the implications of what has happened with your readers, and you avoid that your story reads like a joke, with a punchline at the end.

So how do you write really short philosophical pieces that are substantive pieces in their own right? Which brief philosophical self-contained pieces do you particularly admire?

Anonymous reviewing is not enough to counter implicit bias, so what can we do to mitigate it?

This article in Aesthetics for Birds has some interesting statistics on the percentage of papers authored or co-authored by women and minorities in the top print aesthetics journals: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and British Journal of Aesthetics. About 20% of articles in these journals are written by women in the period from 2010 onwards. When we look at memberships of professional aesthetics organizations, the percentage of female aestheticians is about 32%. So that means women are underrepresented in JAAC and BJA. What can account for this disparity? JAAC keeps a record of gender and geographic location of submissions.

Sherri Irvin finds "It is notable that over the past three years, women authors have submitted to JAAC at a rate substantially higher than the rate at which they are published in JAAC from 2010-2014, and closer to the proportion of women members in the ASA. During 2 of the last 3 years, the acceptance rate for women has been lower than for men. Though the differences seem small (only 2-3 percentage points), another way of putting them is that in 2012-3, men were 21.4% more likely than women to have their manuscripts accepted, while in 2013-4, they were 11.6% more likely." She also writes "US submissions tend to be accepted at a rate slightly over 20%, while submissions from non-English-speaking countries tend to be accepted at far lower rates".

JAAC practices double-anonymous refereeing. I am in the statistics, since I've co-authored an article that was published in JAAC in 2011. My co-author and I were very pleased with thoroughness of our reviewer, who is one of the few experts on the aesthetics of paleolithic art. We could guess who he was, and it turned out (as he later communicated with us) he also had an inkling as to who we were. Aesthetics is a small world. The only time I reviewed for JAAC I didn't know who the author was, so I believe I reached a verdict that was unsullied by considerations of the author's identity. But was it? Thoughts about the identity of an author can play a role in one's decision, even if you don't want to, this is after all how implicit bias works.

Who submits to top general philosophy journals?

In a recent survey, I asked philosophers about their submissions to journals, to get a sense of what journals people submit to and also what factors might influence their decisions on where to submit papers. Specifically, I wanted to know how frequently people submit their work to the top 5 journals in philosophy, which are usually regarded (according to polls) as the best journals in the field: Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Noûs and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Increasingly, publications in these journals are regarded as a marker of excellence. 

However, there are several hurdles to getting published in the top 5. The acceptance rates are forbidding (I don’t have exact numbers, but journals in the top-20 that have published acceptance rates as low as 5%, (e.g., Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Canadian Journal of Philosophy). Presumably, the acceptance rates in the top-5 are lower still, making them more difficult to get into than Science or Nature. Also, review times at some of these journals tends to be longer than the standard 3 months. Those journals that are quicker close submissions for half the year, and unfortunately, they do so concurrently (otherwise, so a senior philosopher pointed out to me, they wouldn’t have the lower submission rates they are aiming for).

251 philosophers completed the survey. Below the fold is a summary of some results.  I asked respondents to say how many papers they submitted to top-5 journals and any refereed journal over the past year (i.e., since September 2013).

Quick survey on journal submissions

I would be very grateful if NewApps readers who are philosophers could fill out the following brief, anonymous survey on journal submissions. The aim is to get a picture of what kinds of journals you submit to, especially to the journals that are regarded as the top general philosophy journals. https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6lM1JE4Q88BruhD

Results will be posted when the data have been processed. 

We should have anonymous book manuscript review

To my knowledge, full book manuscripts are never reviewed anonymously. Given that the double anonymity of peer review is implemented to decrease biases, and presumably, thereby increase the focus on the quality of the writing, this is puzzling. David Chalmers wrote, in a very helpful comment on how to publish a book "Most book refereeing is not blind, unlike journal refereeing. And when what's being reviewed is a proposal rather than a full manuscript, reputation of the author make a huge difference in reviewers' and editors' confidence that the proposal will be fleshed out well to a book." 

While I can see that the reputation or renown of an author can relevantly play a role at the proposal stage in assessing the competence of the prospective author in writing a full manuscript, I don't see why it should play a role when the full manuscript is reviewed. This will inevitably happen when review of full manuscripts is non-anonymous. It would be hard not to be influenced if the author of one's manuscript happened to work at high-ranking institution, is very senior, and already has an excellent track record (I declined to review a book for a major press for this reason), or conversely, if the author is relatively junior, working at a teaching-focused or obscure place. 

Ergo publishes first issue

Last year we announced the launch of Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy. Today is the grand day of the publication of Ergo’s very first issue, with four amazing papers. To commemorate this occasion, the Ergo editors asked four distinguished philosophers each to comment on one of the four papers by means of blog posts. These are:

• Julia Jorati (OSU) on a paper in early modern by Paul Lodge (Oxford), at The Mod Squad.
• Anna Mahtani (LSE) on a paper by Michael Caie (Pittsburgh), at Choice and Inference and M-Phi.
• Ellen Clark (Oxford) on a paper in philosophy of biology by Christopher Hitchcock (Caltech) and Joel Velasco (Texas Tech), at Philosomama.
• Thomas Nadelhoffer (Charleston) on a paper in experimental philosophy by John Turri (Waterloo), at Experimental Philosophy.

We hope you will enjoy the papers as well as the commentaries. Ergo remains of course open for submissions in all areas of philosophy, so do send us your best papers!

The many problems with peer-review (yet again), and some proposed solutions

I’ve written a few posts in the recent past questioning the whole idea of anonymous peer-review as a reliable guide to quality – in philosophy as well as elsewhere. In other disciplines, there have been numerous recent cases of ‘false positives’, i.e. papers which made it through the peer-review process but then were discovered to be fundamentally flawed after they were published (leading to a very large number of retractions).

The issue with false positives is well known, but as I’ve suggested in some of my previous posts, the issue of false negatives is equally serious, or perhaps even more serious, and yet it tends to be under-appreciated. A recent piece by JP de Ruiter, a psycholinguist at the University of Bielefeld, articulates very nicely why it is serious, and why it remains essentially invisible.

The two main goals of a review system are to minimize both the number of bad studies that are accepted for publication and the number of good studies that are rejected for publication. Borrowing terminology of signal detection theory, let’s call these false positives and false negatives respectively.

It is often implicitly assumed that minimizing the number of false positives is the primary goal of APR. However, signal detection theory tells us that reducing the number of false positives inevitably leads to an increase in the rate of false negatives. I want to draw attention here to the fact that the cost of false negatives is both invisible and potentially very high. It is invisible, obviously, because we never get to see the good work that was rejected for the wrong reasons. And the cost is high, because it removes not only good papers from our scientific discourse, but also entire scientists. […] The inherent conservatism in APR means that people with new, original approaches to old problems run the risk of being shut out, humiliated, and consequently chased away from academia. In the short term, this is to the advantage of the established scientists who do not like their work to be challenged. In the long run, this is obviously very damaging for science. This is especially true of the many journals that will only accept papers that receive unanimously positive reviews. These journals are not facilitating scientific progress, because work with even the faintest hint of controversy is almost automatically rejected.

With all this in mind, it is somewhat surprising that APR also fails to keep out many obviously bad papers.

On Professionalization and Greatness

Ruth Millikan's Dewey Lecture has been getting a lot of favorable attention in the blogosphere recently. Rightly so. But I want to challenge one part of it that most philosophers seem to like. I'll quote almost all of the relevant two paragraphs, since when I try to trim I think I do a disservice to her argument.

Millikan writes:

Philosophy is not a field in which piles of small findings later help to secure fundamental advances. Little philosophical puzzles do not usually need to be solved but rather dissolved by examining the wider framework within which they occur. This often involves determinedly seeking out and exposing deeply entrenched underlying assumptions, working out what their diverse and far-ranging effects have been, constructing and evaluating alternatives, trying to foresee distant implications. It often involves trying to view quite large areas in new ways, ways that may cut across usual distinctions both within philosophy and outside and that may require a broad knowledge across disciplines. Add that to acquire the flexibility of mind and the feel for the possibility of fundamental change in outlook that may be needed, a serious immersion for a considerable time in the history of philosophy is a near necessity. This kind of work takes a great deal of patience and it takes time. Nor can it be done in small pieces, first this little puzzle then that. Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason at age fifty-seven and the other critiques came later. Closer to our time, Wilfrid Sellars published his first paper at thirty-five, having lived and worked with philosophy all his life up to then. I have never tried to research the matter but I have no reason to think these cases unique.... Further, because a serious understanding of the historical tradition is both essential and quite difficult to acquire by oneself, helping to pass on this tradition with care and respect should always be the first obligation of a professional philosopher. Given all this, it has always struck me as a no-brainer that forcing early and continuous publication in philosophy is, simply, genocidal. Forcing publication at all is not necessarily good.

Diversity, publishing, and the Journal of the APA

By Amy Ferrer, APA Executive Director, and John Heil, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the APA

No doubt you’ve heard, over the last year or so, about the impending launch of the new Journal of the American Philosophical Association. With the editorial board having been announced earlier this month, the journal is now a living, breathing reality.

One especially notable feature of the journal is the commitment of the editorial team to diversity. The mission statement of the journal approved by the APA board of officers affirms that it will not only recognize, but in fact represent, the many facets of philosophy as a discipline. Members of the editorial board were selected not only for their scholarly abilities but also for their commitment to this aspect of thejournal’s mission. In the coming months, we plan to have representatives of the journal attending conferences in a variety of philosophical disciplines, seeking out good papers and encouraging submissions.

The journal will aim for full coverage, actively soliciting the best work from every philosophical constituency. We are well aware that many analytic philosophers are skeptical of work in non-analytic areas, and vice versa. By seeking papers addressed to a broader philosophical audience, we hope to challenge this skepticism by encouraging contributors to write in ways that make the virtues of their ideas salient to philosophers from varied backgrounds.

The journal is not just about publishing exciting work—although that is certainly a priority—it is about publishing exciting work that is accessible to the broader philosophical community, work that potentially blurs boundaries within the discipline and, where appropriate, reaches out to other disciplines. We do not hope, unreasonably, to produce a journal in which every reader finds every paper congenial—this is a philosophy journal, after all. Our hope, rather, is to provide a venue for papers that are interesting and important philosophically and wear their interest and importance on their sleeves.

The editors intend the journal to be not simply another philosophy journal, not simply one more place to send papers in hopes of adding entries on CVs. We are responding to a complaint heard more and more nowadays to the effect that journal papers have become more plentiful without becoming more interesting. We suspect that one cause of the current situation stems from the refereeing process. Referees find themselves looking for reasons to reject papers under review. When authors receive the resulting comments they respond by adding material and inserting qualifications, with the result that an initially interesting idea becomes lost in a long discussion of the literature supplemented by preemptive responses to potential lines of criticism. The results are, too often, papers written by committee.

As our editorial statement indicates, we favor clear, succinct papers that go out on a limb, papers that take a chance, papers exhibiting fresh perspectives on familiar problems. This is of a piece with our goal of encouraging discussion across a wide variety of philosophical areas. Once the journal is running at full speed, our goal will be short response times and useful feedback, both of which promise to help early career philosophers get the best of their ideas into print and build the kind of meaningful publication record needed to secure a permanent position and earn tenure.

You might remain skeptical that any journal could live up to these goals—that any journal could be a truly generalist journal, representing the demographic and scholarly diversity of the field, publishing important work from across the philosophical spectrum accessible to philosophers of different persuasions, while addressing some of the biggest challenges in publishing. It is a tall order, to be sure. But we are confident not only that it can work and will work, but that it promises significant benefits to philosophers generally, APA members and non-members alike. At a time in which philosophy, the humanities, and higher education itself are under threat, it behooves us to come together in a way that preserves our interesting differences.

So we hope you’ll join us in making the Journal of the American Philosophical Association a success. Submissions are open.

 [Please note: Our appearance on this blog does not constitute an endorsement by the APA of the blog or its content.]

Journal of American Philosophical Association Launches

The journal's webpage for submissions is here. The editorial board is just about as distinguished as it could get. Editors don't write a journal, but the prestige of this board ought to make this a good venue to have on one's cv.

Recently discovered: 100+ computer-generated papers. Relation to spamference?

On the Nature website, Richard Van Noorden reports that a French computer scientist, Cyril Labbé, has discovered over 120 computer-generated papers that have been published in conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Over 100 of these papers were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and 16 others appeared in Springer publications.

The papers have been composed using SCIgen, which only requires the user to input author names, and automatically generates random papers that look like Computer Science, but which are actually meaningless. Cyril Labbé has written a program that is able to recognize papers that have been generated by SCIgen. (The program compares the vocabulary of a text to that of a reference corpus; in particular, it measures the inter-textual distance as the proportion of word-tokens shared by two texts. For details of the method, see Labbé's 2012 paper published in Scientometrics.)

The proceedings issues that appeared in Springer publications were (supposed to be) peer-reviewed; for the IEEE proceedings, it is less clear whether they underwent peer review. In any case, the former examples show that the peer review system is not always watertight, not just in the case of open-access journals (which was also discussed here at NewApps).

Most of the conferences took place in China and most of the authors have Chinese affiliations. Of course, it remains to be checked whether the author names correspond to real scholars and if so, whether they were aware of the submission in their name. Nature was able to contact one actual researcher: he does not know why his name appeared in the author list of such a computer-generated paper.

Below the fold, I offer a speculation on the motivation behind the submission of these fake papers.

The Politics of Citation -- guest post by Lisa Herzog

(This post is the result of a facebook debate started by Eric Schliesser)

 Given that what we are doing in philosophy might be footnotes to Plato all the way down, citation practices might not seem worth further discussion (that would be footnotes on footnotes in footnotes on Plato). But Kieran Healy’s data recently revealed the degree to which citation numbers cluster around certain big names. Citation practices seem to depend significantly on informal norms and expectations within the academic community. It is worth bringing these up for debate: more awareness of who is quoted, and why, could not only improve scholarship, but also help to make the hierarchies between the (perceived) centre and the (perceived) periphery of the academic community flatter.

How to deal with a journal rejection?

Recently, I received two journal rejections within 4 days; it must be some kind of record. I could of course despair and take it personally, which is what I used to do at early stages of my career. But now, with sufficient publication success in the past to assure me that I am not a hopeless case when it comes to publications (or so I hope!), I try to look at rejections from a more positive, constructive angle. Readers who were interested in this post of mine of a few weeks ago, on how to go about selecting journals to submit your papers to, may find my current thoughts on how to deal with these two rejections useful.

The first of the two rejections was somewhat frustrating. It came from a very fine, highly selective journal, but it was based on only one referee report, and a referee who seemed to misunderstand the main claim of the paper quite severely. (S/he identified an equivocation that I’m pretty sure is simply not there.) But at the very least, the report suggested that I hadn’t been clear enough concerning the main claims of the paper. The truth is that this paper defends a somewhat controversial thesis; the referee commended the paper as well written and well structured, but seemed simply not to find the main thesis particularly appealing.

Getting papers accepted for publication: how?

One of the skills philosophers-to-be must master is how to negotiate the ins and outs of getting their papers published in journals. Of course, the main thing is learning how to write good papers in the first place, but as we all know, writing a good paper is not a sufficient condition for achieving publication. As the years go by and I move steadily from ‘young, up-and-coming philosopher’ to someone with responsibilities for training other people, I’ve found it increasingly important to guide them in the process of finding the right home for their papers. Obviously, learning to do so is a never-ending process, and we ‘old people’ are still prone to making strategic mistakes; but there is a thing or two that we learn through experience regarding how to select the right journal(s) to submit a paper to. In this post, I’ll elaborate on some of the ‘strategies’ I’ve been passing on to the people I supervise; many of them will sound obvious to more experienced members of the profession, but I hope they can be useful to those still learning to navigate the seas of the publishing process.

One well-known heuristic is to follow the order of a certain ‘hierarchy’ of journals, from top to bottom. So you start aiming as high as you can, and then go one step down the ladder if your paper is rejected. Now, while this is generally speaking a sensible approach, there is much to be said against it. For starters, it may take a very long time until the paper is finally accepted somewhere, and if you are a young professional in the job market, this is definitely something to be avoided. Moreover, some of the so-called top journals are known for taking much too long before getting back to authors, and this is a luxury that many cannot afford.

Has Elsevier jumped the shark?

As many of you will have seen by now, it looks like Elsevier -- not content with taking down papers from academia.edu -- is now also issuing takedown notices to individual universities. Nicole Wyatt, chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Calgary, reported on having received such a notice in comments here. The Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, from which I had learned about the academia.edu takedown, also reported on the note received by the University of Calgary and passed on to all their staff. (Btw, did they go after other universities as well? Or is it a case of ‘pilot harassment’, as well described by the SV-POW site? So far I only know of occurrences with Calgary.)

If anyone was still looking for reasons to boycott Elsevier, this is clearly a good one. Of course, it is not too difficult for most philosophers to boycott Elsevier, who does not publish major philosophy journals. But Elsevier is very strong in some adjacent areas, psychology in particular; it publishes for example the flagship journal Cognition, where a number of philosophers have published.

Eileen Joy on uncharitable reading

Very nice meditation on the "necessary of generous reading" by Joy HERE. I'm happy to let Joy have the last word* on the latest imbroglio over Nathan Brown's attempted polemic.** I found Joy's post to manifest what it preaches, but to be helpful to people like me who so often fall short of the explicated norms, and to be intellectually interesting in in its own right (especially given that many of the citations will be new to philosophy professors).

*Along with David Wallace.

**Which as a genre is generally imbecilic independent of Brown's attempt at engaging in it. I should say that my greatest professional regret involves the overly polemical nature of a couple of my earliest publications, and that I have friends with much better CVs than me that have the same feeling with respect to earlier pieces of their own. In a future blog post I'll expand on the imbecility of all polemic without mentioning any of the examples under current consideration.

How not to to engage with other humanists; Nathan Brown and the continental/continental divide

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas in the late 80s there was the huge fad of philosophers making fun of professors in other departments who had appropriated philosophical thinking for their own projects. 

Honestly, it's pretty easy work for people who spend their lives just studying philosophy to beat up on our brothers and sisters in humanities departments when they enter into conversation with a philosopher. The trick is to bracket the dialectical context of the appropriation as well as treat the norms relevant for engaging in those debates as if they are the same as writing good philosophy. With literarature department deconstructionism, this meant completely ignoring the context of New Criticism and the contribution that the appropriation of Derrida and De Man's writings made with respect to this background. 

As a result of the kind of methodological stupidity the revolution very quickly began eating its own,* culminating perhaps in the 1992 petition against awarding Jacques Derrida an honorary Cambridge doctorate.  By this point it was clear that American philosophy had completely squandered a very real chance of retaining a role as queen of the humanities. If during theory's heyday, a critical mass of us had actually taken the time (a couple of years hard work in each case) to actually immerse ourselves in the relevant history and canonical texts of other departments doing "theory," philosophy would today widely be viewed as a helpful discipline, as opposed to this weird thing where we spin our own wheels.**

One of the most depressing things to me as a student of continental philosophy is to see how the worst aspects of the the analytic/continental rift are now being replicated within continental philosophy.

Academic journals as ‘brands’

Yet another interesting piece in the Guardian on academia: Nobel-prize winner (in medicine) Randy Schekman declares he will no longer submit papers to ‘luxury’ journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. His main argument: 

These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept. The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called "impact factor" – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking. 

GMO paper retraction produces yet another Elsevier boycott

In an earlier post, I suggested that the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) should not have retracted a paper that purported to show toxic effects in rats fed GM corn.  Now just over 100 scientists have signed a petition protesting the retraction, stating that the retraction violated the norms of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which FCT is a member.  The scientists note concerns about the impartiality of the process (e.g., the the appointment of ex-Monsanto employee Richard Goodman to the newly created post of associate editor for biotechnology at FCT) and assert, "The retraction is erasing from the public record results that are potentially of very great importance for public health. It is censorship of scientific research, knowledge, and understanding, an abuse of science striking at the very heart of science and democracy, and science for the public good."

The scientists are boycotting the journal's publisher, Elsevier; they will "decline to purchase Elsevier products, to publish, review, or do editorial work for Elsevier."

This is one more black eye for Elsevier that we can add to the removal of papers from Academia.edu, which Catarina recently blogged about, and the pre-existing boycott of Elsevier, discussed on this blog many times (see, e.g., here,  here, here, and here).

Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu

It's very ugly (via many of my Twitter contacts). Go check the whole story, but here's the beginning:

Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions.

Enter Elsevier, stage left. Bioinformatician Guy Leonard is just one of several people to have mentioned on Twitter this morning that Academia.edu took down their papers in response to a notice from Elsevier.