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November 21st, 2009

Northern Institute Journal

As part of the setting up of the Northern Institute of Philosophy at Aberdeen, plans are afoot for a new journal for short papers. Here’s a brief description of what the journal will be like.

The Northern Institute of Philosophy (NIP) intends to establish a journal dedicated to the publication of concise, succinct (of less than 4500 words), original, philosophical papers in the following areas: Logic, Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Epistemology (including formal epistemology and confirmation theory), Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Mind. All published papers will be analytic in style. We intend that readers of this journal will be exposed to the most central and significant issues and debates in contemporary philosophy that fall under its remit. We will publish only papers that exemplify the highest standard of clarity.

The philosophical community has been vocal about the need for such a journal (broadly, a second Analysis-style journal) for many years, and the Northern Institute of Philosophy is in an optimal position to deliver one, since the editorial process will be able draw on the wide-ranging expertise of the very extensive network of philosophers and research institutions variously affiliated with NIP. We are thus exceptionally well placed to quickly establish a journal that can attain and maintain the highest standards of contemporary analytic philosophy.

I’m very enthusiastic about this proposal, since I think there is a need for more high-quality venues for publishing in M&E broadly construed. Indeed, I’ve signed on to be the epistemology editor for the journal, assuming it comes in to being.

As part of convincing the powers that be that such a journal will be a good idea, the Northern Institute is commissioning a small market survey. You can take the survey at:

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The more people who take this, the better the journal’s prospects will be.

Posted by Brian Weatherson in Uncategorized

13 Comments »

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13 Responses to “Northern Institute Journal”

  1. lwalters says:

    As you have spoke up for open access journals in the past, I hope you will lobby the powers that be to make the proposed NIP journal an open access journal.

  2. clayton says:

    I was wondering when we’d hear some news about this and now we’ve heard it. This is really exciting. I’ll badger our librarian to subscribe.

  3. Brian Weatherson says:

    It would be nice if it were open access. I’m not sure how possible that will be, but it’s certainly going to be my preference.

  4. Neil says:

    Everyone recognizes the need for another Analysis style journal. Hopefully it will replicate the positive features of Analysis like speedy decisions. One way in which it will clearly be inferior to Analysis, though, is as currently described it excludes philosophy of action (inexplicably, since everyone whose opinion counts recognizes that phil action is where the action is).

  5. Gabriele Contessa says:

    As great as the idea of open access journals is, our profession seems to be still captive of prejudices against “online journals”. I think that the Philosopher’s Imprint performance in Leiter’s survey some time ago was evidence of that (especially considering that the respondents were likely to be an unrepresentative sample of the profession as a whole).

  6. lwalters says:

    Gabriele, so we should feed this prejudice by making the NIP journal a print journal? Of course not, the NIP should lead the way.

    here is a real opportunity to do something positive. And given that Brian is involved, we should ask him to back up his previous good words.

    And Philosophers’ imprint did pretty well in the survey you mention. Maybe not as well as it deserved but pretty well nonetheless. Not bad for a journal which is less than 9 years old.

  7. Brian Weatherson says:

    As Lee said, Imprint did pretty well on that survey. I’m sure that if you did a correlation between journal age and journal ranking, you’d find a pronounced negative correlation. (The top 3 were all over 100 years old!) Once you control for journal age, it seems the Imprint did extremely well, and there’s no evidence that open accessness cut down its ranking.

    Having said that, I do think there is a legitimate worry about archiving electronic data, just because we have no history of it being done successfully over a centuries-long timespan. I’d like to see journals have paper copies that are (cheaply) sold as well as free online access. Of course, this does require some funding!

  8. fintel says:

    Brian,

    “I do think there is a legitimate worry about archiving electronic data, just because we have no history of it being done successfully over a centuries-long timespan.”

    I think you’re being too pessimistic here. Librarians and publishers have been hard at work to solve this problem and there are trust-worthy mechanisms in place now, such as the Portico service. Open-access journals typically have an additional advantage, because they often allow anybody to distribute the articles so that there should be wide-spread diffusion, which will insulate the content from local disturbances.

  9. Brian Weatherson says:

    I am being a little pessimistic, and it’s good that people are working on the problem. But in general I like proofs that X words at job Y by seeing X do job Y. And there haven’t been electronics around for long enough to check whether we’re good at this job.

    One of the things that worries me is file-compatibility. It’s already a bit of a pain to pull out files in 10 year old formats. Maybe we’ve standardised enough on PDF that that won’t be a problem, but you never know.

    Having said that, journals that put copy protection on the articles themselves make this problem much worse. My credence that we’ll be able in 20 years to easily read articles with 2009-era copy protection built in is well under 0.5.

  10. lwalters says:

    There are obviously issues here, but nothing stops an online journal storing hardcopies with some university and copyright libraries in addition to having online publication and back-ups.

  11. Richard says:

    My old post on the practicalities of open access received some helpful comments that might be relevant to the powers that be. For example, the Director of U.Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office wrote:

    There are many, many academic libraries who are ready and/or willing to provide the infrastructure to publish and online journal of quality scholarship. My own library would thrilled to do more projects like PI. Even and especially in these difficult budgetary times we see investment in alternative means of scholarly distribution as a high priority. I believe that there are many scholars who are willing to provide scholarly labor in exchange for rewards other than monetary ones. Our challenge is to find ways to bring all these willing parties together.

    If you know of journals in search of “adoption,” please do not hesitate to be in touch. I might be able to be of assistance.

  12. Richard says:

    [That final sentence should have been included in the blockquote. Alas, I’m not in a position to be of any assistance here myself!]

  13. baber says:

    De facto I think you have to start as a hardcopy journal and eat the production/postage costs while providing as much open access as feasible. Then slide to a primarily online format, which is in effect what established journals are doing.

    What I find particularly distressing is the extent to which journals have signed on with commercial services for their online presence, where one of these firms charges $3000 [sic!] for open access and certain universities pay that fee—in spite of the fact that authors are allowed to put the paper up for all the world to see at their own websites!

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