On papers that are hard sells for journals

I recently submitted a paper to a journal. It's a triple-anonymous journal so the editors don't know that it's me, and I won't discuss its content here, so anonymous review is not compromised by talking about the paper here. It's been a while--over a year--since I last sent a non-invited paper into the anonymous review void, having worked at my monograph Wonderstruck (which is coming out soon) and various invited and public philosophy pieces.

I feel confident the paper will be a hard sell. It's the kind of paper that I would not have written five or ten years ago, because doing so would be a waste of my time, as it would not help me career-wise. But now, I became intrigued by the idea the paper explores. It would not let go of me and I lay awake thinking about it several nights and tinkering with it in my head. And so, I wrote the paper in a kind of fever dream over the space of about a week in between other things to do. I sent it to some friends for feedback, reworked it, and submitted it. I expect a rejection in three months or so with the something along the lines of "In the interest of speed we cannot comment on individual papers" (what I call a slow desk rejection). 

The reason I wrote the paper for a journal was that it wasn't concise enough to fit into public philosophy. Otherwise, I would've probably done that. Or maybe I would've thrown the idea onto my Substack (blog) to be developed more fully at a later, indefinite point in time.

Lately, I've been using public philosophy venues to publish what would be hard, maybe impossible, sells for journals. A piece relating Castiglione's concept of sprezzatura and Daoist wuwei has just appeared in The Philosopher, in their special issue "Where is public philosophy going?" It was a fun idea. There's a lot of talk about baroque lute music, and much as I love that, I know this is very niche. I have no clue what sort of journal would take it. It's comparative philosophy of sorts, but not of the kind that you see in the relevant journals. Same with my piece in Aeon on Spinoza and the climate crisis, which works well for a public venue but would likely not fly for a journal (I'll get into the nuts and bolts of why below). It's not really Spinoza scholarship and it's not really environmental philosophy. But I am pleased with its reception, because I received a lot of letters following its publication, including from human rights workers, teachers and members of the public. It was translated in Turkish and in German, and it also became the topic of a reading group in a museum in Colorado. An agent reached out to me to talk about a trade book after he read the piece, and we're discussing now to see if I can make a project that would be a good fit. I don't think I could've placed the piece better in a top philosophy journal. 

I am very fortunate that I have the position that gives me the opportunity to put ideas not in a journal but in a magazine where it will be more widely read, even though in terms of CV value public philosophy still lags behind journal publications. I have tenure and I do not work in an academic environment where professors constantly need to compete for grants (as in The Netherlands, Germany) and where every publication needs to have CV value. 

What makes hard sell papers a hard sell? I've been thinking about this since I became editor-in-chief of Res Philosophica, the international peer-reviewed journal that is housed in Saint Louis University's Philosophy department. I've been working in this role for about six months now. The process is triple-anonymous, so I don't know who you are when you send a paper. I mean this quite literally: I have not even once guessed who the author is. Once I was pleasantly surprised to see one of the authors (of a forthcoming piece that I enjoyed a lot) was a Korean scholar I met in Seoul who works on early modern philosophy. In hindsight, I might have guessed it was him given the topic was related (but not identical) to what I saw him present in Seoul. But I didn't, in part because I am not in the least curious about who the authors are, even if the papers are intriguing. Also, the field is much bigger than we tend to think. The availability heuristic is not reliable, and early modern scholars are situated all over the world.

At Res Philosophica, I only get the name of the author once I decide to accept, and once I send my decision to our editorial coordinator, who keeps track of author information and reviewer invites. 

So, I see these papers under the veil of absolute anonymity. This is in the interest of fairness but it does present, as Danto back in 1984 already complained, a serious constraint upon the peer review process. Triple anonymous review presents any given paper as an isolated thing, 

... a unit of pure philosophy, to the presentation of which the author will have sacrificed all identity. This implies a noble vision of ourselves as vehicles for the transmission of an utterly impersonal philosophical truth, and it implies a vision of philosophical reality as constituted of isolable, difficult but not finally intractable problems.

Once a paper lands on my editorial desk (or rather, in the system Asana), they are either sent on to reviewers or desk rejected. The desk reviewers are the editor-in-chief, who does a first pass, and, when the paper survives that initial screening, faculty members at SLU. About 50% of papers are sent on to reviewers (we do not have 2023 statistics but it feels similar to me, perhaps a little higher because I desk reject more of the Res Phil Shorts, a new format I introduced recently). A small percentage of submissions (maybe 10%) have elementary problems, such as numerous typos and lack of a clear, tightly written argument. Other papers have major problems identified during desk review, such as major lacunae in their engagement with the relevant literature. Yet other papers that don't survive desk review, are -- I fear -- hard sells. These are papers with an interesting idea but that are hard to evaluate, hard to even think of who might be suitable reviewers. I try to err on the side of giving weird papers a chance (I love weird papers, if they are scholarly decent and well-written and coherent), but even there, a hard sell can strand, perhaps unfairly. 

One reason is it's hard to pick suitable reviewers. For any given paper I decide to send out for review, my top choices almost always decline, and I need to go further and further down the list (fortunately many reviewers suggest alternates). Then, typically we reach a point where I have a pair of reviewers who are certainly knowledgeable, but not always in the best position to evaluate the piece. As you go down the list of suitable reviewers, the risk of both false negatives and false positives increases. The risk becomes especially big for hard sell papers, which look (to my non-specialist eye) promising but which don't really fit in an ongoing debate. It's hard to evaluate their merits, and then reviewers default to recommending rejection. Being unsure, reviewers tend to err on the side of caution and rather reject something that could be interesting than accept something that doesn't work. 

The refereeing crisis compounds the problem for hard sell papers, but they've always been hard to evaluate. Does the argument work? What are potential objections? When we work in a well-embedded, mature debate, it's easier to gauge these things. Even now, I'm not sure if my argument in the paper I recently submitted actually works, which is in part why I sent it to a journal (if it racks up a few rejections, I'll see that it may not work).  Having seen what happens on the editorial side, with potentially promising works not surviving the review process, I wonder if there might be a different way to deal with them. Maybe, because their conclusions are tentative, some form of post-publication peer review is the way to go, as Bright and Heesen argue. In any case, the hard sell problem indicates to me that we could make piecemeal changes at least in the peer review process. 

Comments

[Richard Y Chappell]

"Being unsure, reviewers tend to err on the side of caution and rather reject something that could be interesting than accept something that doesn't work."

I wonder why this is viewed as the "cautious" option? Little harm is done by accepting a paper that turns out to be a flop: folks will presumably just ignore it. By contrast, the profession is significantly impoverished if a really interesting, novel paper is denied the light of day. So I'm inclined to think that false negatives are a much greater problem than false positives.

[Assc prof]

By the end, I don't understand why you think the paper is a hard sell. At various points, the following reasons are hinted at:

1. it's long
2. the argument might not work
3. it's not an entry into a pre-existing debate
4. your identity isn't known to the editors/reviewers

1 is a good reason for its being a hard sell: publishing takes up space and the bar should be higher for longer pieces. 2 is also a good reason. 3 is less clear, but there are more and more journals willing to take on papers that are not entries into existing debates (Ergo, JAPA, Imprint, etc.). I'm not sure I understand 4. I agree that much important philosophy has been personal--I entered philosophy by way of Kierkegaard--but I'm not sure this requires that the reviewers know the identity of the author. Almost anything personal that is essential to the content of the paper seems capable of being understood without knowing the identity of the author.

[Helen De Cruz]

Assc prof: I don't think triple blind is a problem per se. I prefer to handle papers in this way. When I was executive editor for a journal with double blind peer review, I kept on second-guessing myself--we had a lot of papers by grad students, and I didn't want to be biased against them. So I would send out their papers also if I didn't think were very promising, in part because I thought it's important to give them at least an opportunity, or learn from the review process. But then they got review reports that were very negative, so I think a desk rejection was probably better to signal the paper isn't in good shape yet. (Obviously, there were very many good papers by grad students too, and we could successfully usher many through the peer review process). At least with triple blind I don't need to second-guess my own biases, which is in part why I don't even try to guess at the author's identity.
What I was hinting at is that the process of triple-anonymous treats papers as these isolable units of pure philosophical truth, and that's just not a right way to conceive of philosophy. When we know the author's identity, we can better see how a paper at least thematically fits in their overall work (when I read a paper in a journal by an author I know, that's how I read the paper, a very different process from the peer review).

[Helen]

I think, Richard, that people generally worry a lot about rigor and the possibility of publishing a paper that does not meet our standards of rigor. Since philosophy is so diverse in its methods (arguably more diverse than any other discipline) we rely on multiple cues to judge whether a work is worth publishing, and I think that one of these things maybe (elusively) whether it's rigorous. It's harder to judge if a paper isn't firmly embedded in an ongoing debate. I remember Jason Stanley talking long ago about how he published papers in a book that had a hard time getting accepted into journals, I think maybe collected in Knowledge and practical interests.
So maybe our methodological diversity is one other reason why we don't want to take chances, thereby risking on missing our on great papers (I'm sad to say the paper I talk above in the main post is not that--it's just a fun quirky idea that's not going to shape the field in any way, if it sees the light of day. But sometimes fun and quirky also is worth publishing, we'll see!)

[whatever]

I have had a paper desk rejected numerous times over the last year that I would classify as a hard sell, and I knew this from the beginning. Yet when I send it on to acquaintances, or have presented related ideas at conferences, everyone seems to love it. I am fairly certain mine is a case of editors not knowing who to select for referees, or perhaps they think the idea is too “literary” for a philosophical journal—I motivate via an example from literature. I wrote this paper in part after reading Korsgaard’s lament at the state of philosophical writing in some recent address she gave (I forget where). I thought, ok, let’s see editors put their money where their mouth is with all this talk of wanting fresh papers; papers that don’t seem to care about making a small move; papers that are more essayistic than formulaic. So far, I got nothing. Seems I’ll eventually revise this and just craft it more in line with the analytic journal aesthetic. But yeah, feels to me like a lot of this talk for wanting new writing is just public apologetics.