Paper feedback groups?

Following Helen's recent post on finding "first readers" for paper drafts, a reader writes in:

[S]ome authors ... lack a community of readers who can provide feedback. Why not something similar to the dissertation groups but for papers and junior academics? This is not helpful for everyone, but I guess those from small departments, etc., may find it helpful.

This is a great query. When I was in graduate school at Arizona and my first VAP job (at UBC), finding readers for paper drafts was really easy. Both departments had large numbers of faculty and grad students, and finding a reader was often as easy as just walking down the hall, stopping by someone's office, and asking! However, once I moved into a much smaller department, finding people with relevant expertise to read paper drafts became far more difficult. I think it would be fantastic if there were some kind of good online resource for finding readers, perhaps some kind of dedicated message-board at PhilPeople (perhaps sorted by AOS) where philosophers could post "reader wanted" queries, perhaps along with some broad information on the paper's topic and other details (such as willingness to trade papers, etc.). But, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't anything like this.

Now, PhilPeople does have a "Get Feedback" function (much like academia.edu) where one can start feedback sessions where people can read and comment on paper drafts. However, while I have seen some of these occur, they don't seem to be very common and I can sort of understand why. First, as we have recently discussed, authors currently have some real incentive not to post unpublished paper drafts for feedback on PhilPapers. For example, although I myself favor a hybrid publishing model that combines journal publication with crowdsourced prepublication peer-review, I often don't post draft papers myself precisely because I'm worried that, under our current publishing model, editors or reviewers may take it to compromise anonymized peer review (see e.g., Ethics's Submission Eligibility requirements). Second, setting these issues aside, I suspect that many authors might feel comfortable posting a paper for feedback publicly only after they feel confident that it's in fairly good shape--which is precisely why they might want private feedback first. Third, feedback sessions seem a heck of a lot less personal than getting private feedback (viz. trading papers). 

So, I think it would be great to have some sort of dedicated forum where authors could go online to seek and arrange paper swaps and the like. But, unless I'm just missing something obvious, there doesn't currently seem to be a good place for this. What do you all think? Would you like something like this? Alternatively, is there such a thing like this already that I've missed?

Comments

[Daniel Weltman]

I too would find something like this very useful for similar sorts of reasons as you: in grad school I had no problem getting feedback since I was in a big department with fellow graduate students and professors happy to read stuff. Now I'm at a small liberal arts college where I'm the only one who works on political philosophy (and I'm in India, too, which makes it even harder to get in touch with people). I've built up a relatively large (all things considered) group of Facebook friends in philosophy but in my experience asking for feedback there doesn't always work. I suspect cold emailing people in my field would work - lots of people are happy to swap papers and even people who aren't might still read my stuff - but that feels sort of weird and a more structured way of setting these things up would probably be more efficient.

[anon early career]

I think there are some groups of this kind already, although in specific areas. E.g., we organized something this year for people working on some segment of the history of philosophy; it was specifically for early career people (postdocs, mostly), and we read and commented on one another's papers. We met about once a month on Zoom.
In general, it worked great, although it only does if people do really commit to it (and everyone is always busy, so there were people who only showed up for their own session).

[Jacob J Andrews]

I was just dreaming up something like this last night! As a K12 philosophy teacher I don't have many chances to connect with other philosophers.

There are existing paper reading groups, of course, which are great. But usually you learn about them through word of mouth—which doesn't work for us grade school teachers, overworked adjuncts, etc. who aren't locked into a university research world and don't have time or means to travel to conferences and the like. It'd be wonderful to have a forum, Facebook group, or some other widely advertised public internet location where people can find readers for their papers.

[Andy]

I had no idea about the PhilPapers feedback feature. It seems like a really useful tool. Has anyone used it? How do you find papers seeking feedback?