Analysis has long been my favourite philosophy journal. Short snappy articles, quick turnaround time on replies, mostly interesting areas covered and, although this isn’t a reason that will appeal to everyone, no history. It was very sad when it became malfunctional for a few years in the late 90s, and a very happy day indeed when it returned to publication.

But there are two things that could be improved about Analysis. First, there could be more of it. That would be fun, and it would possibly mean debates could be even longer. Second, there is a real risk in writing for Analysis in that if an article is rejected, and good articles are frequently rejected for spurious reasons, there might not be another place to publish it. It’s also something of a problem that there’s a bit of a backlog between when papers are accepted and when they are published.

There’s a way to solve all these problems at once. What we need is an American equivalent to Analysis. I think it would be great to have a journal published over here that came out monthly, with each edition aiming to be around the size of a current edition of Analysis – approximately 80 to 100 pages. I’d envisage this being a primarily electronic publication, but with a dead-tree version printed for posterity. The Xerox commercials have assured me that digital printing is now really really cheap, though I’m not sure I completely believe this. (I did however send off for a quote for the cost of printing such a journal, just for amusement’s sake.)

Of course starting a new journal isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially electronically. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has been a marvellous success already, but Philosophers Imprint has struggled to get sufficient quantity of high-quality papers. (The quality of the papers they have printed has been high, I think, but four papers a year is hardly enough to really make a splash. Maybe I should start submitting things there though, if I really want to be a cyber-philosopher…)

The real problem, I think, is getting enough of a reputation behind a new journal that people feel comfortable sending it quality material. NDPR solved the problem by having people with superb reputations behind the project, and only publishing book reviews, which most people don’t think are being written for posterity in any case. Philosophers Imprint has tried to solve the problem by also having people with superb reputations behind the project and be very selective about what you print. Even if my proposed journal had big names behind it the whole point would be that it was publishing a lot, and hopefully a lot of original research. And it’s hard to convince people to turn over their hard-earned ideas to an upstart little e-journal. Still, I think, it should be possible to keep a relatively high quality. The standards for acceptances in good journals nowadays are getting ridiculously high – one could aim to publish 12 to 15 short papers a month and still not be publishing scraps. Or so I think.

Anyway, I’d be interested to know how whether people think there would be a market for such a journal – both in terms of a supply of papers and a demand for them. Even if there is, the technical difficulties with getting a journal off the ground (lack of money, lack of time, lack of motivation, etc.) will probably stop it happening, but it would be interesting to know whether people agree that we’d be better off with more Analysis.