Well this is exciting news. My favourite journal has accepted my favourite paper for publication. And their referees made a ton of good suggestions for how to improve the paper.

I was thinking the other day about what lessons we could learn from electronic journals at this stage of their development. But I couldn’t come up with many interesting generalisations. In part that’s because the two leaders, the two publications we’d most naturally look at in order to learn what makes an electronic journal work, Philosophers’ Imprint and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews play such different roles. (And the granddaddy of electronic philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopaedia, plays a very different role again.)

In the short run I’d say NDPR has been the most successful venture to date, because I’m sure there are a lot of people reading it every week, and some of its entries can circulate widely within days, even hours, of posting. But of course that’s not what Philosophers’ Imprint is trying to generate, so it’s no mark against them that they have not matched this impact. The real test for the Imprint is whether people are still referring to work like Kit Fine’s The Question of Realism in ten or twenty years, long after all the NDPR reviews are forgotten. My guess is that they will be, but the empirical confirmation or refutation of that is just going to have to wait.