The Philosophers’ Imprint hit counter, which measures how many papers have been downloaded, was reset on Sunday. In the little over 48 hours since then, 169 papers have been downloaded. Given there’s 12 papers up there, that looks like 14 downloads per paper (on average) which works out to 6 downloads per paper per day. (It’s a little over 2 days, which is why I put 6 rather than 7 here.) Now I think that that’s a lot more readers that you’re going to get per day by publishing in any journal other than perhaps Mind, Analysis or Philosophical Review.

I could be wrong, but 6 a day really does seem like quite a lot to me. It’s a lot more than I’ve ever got for any single online research paper, even for the papers that I’ve made quite a bit of effort to promote. Of course there’s a sample size problem here, but if this rate keeps up it is impressive.

There’s really no reason to think that Philosophers’ Imprint is an obscure publication, since it probably delivers you more readers than most top journals. (But are all those readers philosophers? I don’t know – maybe some of them accidentally landed there because they were searching for porn and ended up at a philosophy site by accident. Or mistake. But it’s unlikely.) And it follows as a quick corollary that some internet journals are not obscure, which is nice to note for future reference.

Having said that, I wanted to quibble a little with something Keith DeRose said in the comments below. He said that we should, ceteris paribus, send articles to journals that will allow for easy, or at least affordable, public access. The Imprint of course is the best case scenario in this regard. And I agree, if ceteris are paribus.

But when one is not tenured, as one is not, one has a few other considerations on one’s mind. Like, how prestigous is this journal, and will being there move me towards tenure? How quickly will my paper be refereed, and printed if accepted? How useful will the comments I get back from the editors and referees? And, though we don’t like to think about this one too publicly, how likely is it the paper will be accepted? Little things like public affordable access are harder to factor in pre-tenure.

By the way, if you must use a dead tree journal, as we all must from time to time, I’ve found Philosophical Quarterly to be simply wonderful in all of these respects. Very quick responses, not an intolerable delay from acceptance to publication (much less than most dead tree journals), very helpful referees and editors, and (though I mustn’t put too much weight on this) they have published three of my papers! I used to quite dislike dealing with journals, now I find it’s mostly quite pleasant. That’s no doubt in part because I’m more professional in my dealings with them than I was a few years ago. But for all the reasons listed above, I still prefer working with PQ over any other journal I’ve had contact with. (Not that PPR or the AJP or several others I’ve worked with are at all bad; quite the opposite. I certainly don’t mean to somehow criticise other good journals by noting how good I’ve found PQ.) And, drifting back onto point, their subscriptions are not that expensive. (Not that I have one.) No, I didn’t get paid to write that little blurb, but yes I am pleased that one of my papers is now listed on their highlights page.

Undigressing now, I don’t mean to downplay the importance of Keith’s principle, and I very much admire him for acting on it, but I just want to stick up a little for those of us who have to take what we can get at least for early stages of our careers.