I’ve been having a useful chat with David Velleman about the design features of Philosophers’ Imprint. I had been a little critical of this design in the past, in retrospect excessively so. There’s a few things that the Imprint could do differently, especially if their prime aim was to make things easy for someone running a papers blog, but it certainly does the job for the intended audience. (And David has been very generous at listening to suggestions for design changes, so if you have any suggestions send ’em in.)
But that wasn’t the main reason for this post. I’d been meaning to write something about how it’s important that the transition from print journals to online journals be managed properly, because there’s a few ways it could go badly wrong and we wouldn’t get the benefits online access promises. But I never really found the right words to say what I meant. Really what I wanted to say was something like this, the mission statement for Philosophers’ Imprint.
There
is a possible future in which academic libraries no longer spend millions of
dollars purchasing, binding, housing, and repairing printed journals, because
they have assumed the role of publishers, cooperatively disseminating the results
of academic research for free, via the Internet. Each library could bear the
cost of publishing some of the world’s scholarly output, since it would be spared
the cost of buying its own copy of any scholarship published in this way. The
results of academic research would then be available without cost to all users
of the Internet, including students and teachers in developing countries, as
well as members of the general public.These developments would not spell the end of the printed book
or the bricks-and-mortar library. On the contrary, academic libraries would
finally be able to reverse the steep decline in their rate of acquiring books
(which fell 25% from 1986 to 1996), because they would no longer be burdened
with the steeply rising cost of journals (which increased 66% in the same period).The
problem is that we don’t know how to get to that future from here, and there
are so many other, less desirable futures in which we might end up instead.
The current trend toward licensing access to electronic versions of journals
is counterproductive, since it reproduces the unnecessary economy of subscriptions
and permissions, in which intellectual property produced at universities is
transferred to those who can collect fees for its dissemination. Now that academic
institutions have access to the Internet, they have no reason to pay subscription
or subvention fees to anyone for disseminating the results of academic research.Unfortunately, significant obstacles stand in the way of a transition
to fully electronic publishing. Authors do not view electronic publication as
prestigious, readers do not view the electronic literature as authoritative,
and neither of these views seems likely to develop in the absence of the other.
Younger scholars are unsure whether electronic publications will count towards
tenure and promotion. And the funds that would support electronic publication
and archiving are tied up in print subscriptions that can’t be discontinued
until an electronic alternative is available.Philosophers’ Imprint aims to overcome these obstacles
in order to promote the free electronic dissemination of scholarship. The Imprint
is designed to combine the permanence and authority of print with the instant
and universal accessibility of the Internet. The Editors select for publication
only those submissions which are judged to be of lasting value, on the basis
of a blind refereeing process. Having no commitments to subscribers, the Editors
are free to publish as few papers as are found to meet an absolute standard
of quality. Each paper is given a fixed, typeset appearance and a stable Universal
Resource Locator (URL), to allow for reliable citations. The University of Michigan
Digital Library has committed funds to produce the Imprint, to provide
it with indexes and a full-text search engine, and to ensure the permanent accessibility
of its archives.No license, subscription, or registration is required for access
to the Imprint Because the Imprint has no subscription income,
it must operate economically, without paper or postage. Contributors are therefore
required to submit their work electronically. Refereeing will take place on
a secure website, and all correspondence with authors will be by electronic
mail. Finally, the Imprint will not manage rights and permissions. Permission
for instructional uses won’t be necessary, since the Imprint will be
accessible without charge to teachers and students alike; permission for other
uses will be managed by the authors, who will retain copyright in their work.
Exactly. And there’s something you (and I) can do to help the mission. Send good papers to the Imprint. It’s clearly a prestigous journal already, as can be seen from the authors who have published there, and from the caliber and the credibility of its editors. So hopefully it can soon become a prestigous and high-volume journal. (In case you need more of a hint, the address for sending papers to them is here, and they only take papers in RTF format.)