Journal of the APA to flip to Open Access July 9

Heather Battaly (Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American Philosophical Association) writes in:

The Editorial Team of JAPA is delighted to announce that all articles accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association from July 9 onwards will be Open Access, published with a Creative Commons license and freely available to read online.

We have an Open Access option for every author: the costs of open access publication will be covered through agreements between the publisher and the author’s institution, payment of APCs (Article Processing Charges) from grants or other funds, or else waived entirely, ensuring every author can publish and enjoy the benefits of Open Access.

The Journal of the American Philosophical Association aims to publish philosophical work of the highest quality in any area of philosophy. The editors are committed to:

• Publishing papers that go out on a limb, papers that start trends rather than merely adding epicycles to going trends
• Publishing papers on topics that draw from and appeal to diverse philosophical constituencies and traditions
• Publishing readable papers that can be appreciated by philosophers not already steeped in the subject matter

Average Time-to-Decision: 43 days

Acceptance rate (prior 12 months): 8.1%

Additional information about the Journal of the APA is available on the Journal’s website. To submit to the Journal, visit the submission website.

For more information about Open Access at JAPA, see this FAQ and the Journal’s Open Access Options page https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-american-philosophical-association/information/journal-policies/open-access-options

Please submit your papers to JAPA!

Heather Battaly
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American Philosophical Association

Comments

[pissed]

I do not think the move to Open Access is something to celebrate. I have been a member of the APA for at least 2 decades. I now work in country that does not allow one to use research funds to pay for Open Access ... so I will not be able to submit to the journal. Even where I worked in the USA, I cannot image my state university paying for this ... (after all, they would say, there are many journals that one can publish in with NO fee). We are walking off another cliff ...

[cautiously optimistic]

It does say "or else waived entirely". I'm not sure they mean "don't worry, just submit and we promise it will be covered if your institution/grants won't" but it sounds like that. (I share some of your hesitation but I'm not sure you should be pissed without more info about what they really mean here!)

[Michel]

Pissed: the announcement does say the fees may be waived entirely.

[academic migrant]

I like this. JAPA in my opinion often publishes extremely interesting and insightful papers. This feels extremely good. The editorial team also gave me the feeling that they want to find reasons to publish rather than find reasons to reject.

[cb]

I am also cautious about the flip, although I appreciate the good intentions. At the moment Cambridge's APC, the APC the blog post says will apply as well to JAPA, is $3,450. The promise that, if no other funding is available to you, that it will be waived, is quite vague, and specific to JAPA--no other Cambridge journal makes this promise, nor is it quite clear that they have any outstanding provision for it.

A case in point: the last journal to flip to OA via an existing publisher (rather than through by going self-hosted on Janeway like Ergo/PImprint), Thought, suggested in their announcement of the change that those who lacked funding would have the APC of $1,500 covered. Today their editorial guidelines, and OA agreement guidelines, make no mention of this. There's no box for 'I'm an adjunct at a college with no research funding', merely for your credit card number. It might be that in a sort of off-the-record fashion a waiver is still possible, but to me the prospects look poor when they no longer make any mention of it in public materials.

In the grand scheme of things, publisher-led OA flips need to be seen simply as redistributing the costs of running a journal from library budgets to nebulous 'research funds', if not authors. This is understandable in Europe, or in the California system, because all large research institutions have such funds. But America, unlike Europe, lacks national research councils to cut deals with publishers, and also unlike Europe has many small institutions which do not allocate funds for APCs and are endangered financially already. These small institutions nevertheless retain library budgets, if library budgets which are gradually being cut. But, there is no reason to believe that resources saved in cutting will be made available for APCs; there is in fact much evidence to the contrary.

Publisher-led OA flips also have the deleterious effect, as we have seen in the cases of Wiley journals, of incentivising journals not on the basis of the indispensability of the content therein but on the sheer quantity of articles published, and thereby quantity of APCs. In the long run it seems likely that the pressures Wiley has exerted upon journal editors to publish more will become more or less the norm.

None of this is true of scholar-led OA flips, for the record. I have nothing but admiration for the APC-free OA journals like Ergo, Philosophers' Imprint, and the new JPP & PPA. It is true that these journals are run much leaner, and rely on volunteer labour, but they at least do not suppress publications by those at less well-off institutions. But, this is not the direction JAPA has gone (although I would suggest, given the not insignificant resources of the APA, it is likely something they should investigate).

[Daniel Weltman]

@cb: FWIW I just published in Thought. I have almost no money (I live in India) and they reduced their fee from $1,500 to $1,000 after I asked them about it (they did not offer). That's a nice reduction but it still ate up basically my entire research budget for the year. And my institution is unusually generous with research budgets - most philosophers here could never handle that much. (I hadn't even realized Thought had adopted this model and I would not have submitted to them if I knew this, I think.)

JAPA's new model is fine for me in particular because my university has one of those agreements with Cambridge. But that's a matter of luck for me.

[Heather Battaly]

Thank you for the interest and comments. The Editorial Team, the APA, and Cambridge University Press have ensured that EVERY author of an accepted paper at JAPA will be able to publish Open Access. For Authors whose institutions do not have agreements with the publisher, and/or who aren't using grant/institutional funds, the cost of publishing OA will be waived.