“In a survey of 27 philosophy of science journal editors we conducted in 2023, many, if not most of them, did not know that they were working in a transformative journal.” A what now?

The landscape of academic publishing is changing. In the following guest post, Sophia Crüwell (Cambridge), Chiara Lisciandra (Groningen), and David Teira (UNED) talk about the push towards Open Access, its effects, and ways it can go better and worse.

Philosophers, Should you Pay to Publish your Paper?
by Sophia Crüwell, Chiara Lisciandra, David Teira

If you have recently had a manuscript accepted by a journal published by one of the traditional subscription-focused publishers (e.g., Springer), you may have noticed a not-so-subtle change in the publication options. As part of your publishing agreement, the interface may nudge you to pay an Author Publication Charge (APC) to publish your paper Open Access. The traditional publish-for-free, behind a paywall, tick appears only in a smaller typeset link somewhere at the bottom of the screen. Why is this happening?

In November 2022, under the auspices of three major international societies in the philosophy of science, we started an inquiry to understand how we ended up here. Back then, research institutions and funding agencies on both sides of the Atlantic had decided that their scientific output should be Open Access (OA): free for everyone to read after publication. (Great! Or so it seems.) To make this happen, funding bodies and other institutions signed Transformative Agreements with publishers, paying for thousands of APCs in advance so (a) their affiliated authors could publish OA at no cost for them; and (b) journals would transition to a Gold Open Access regime, in which APCs, instead of subscriptions, would cover the journal costs.

The drawback: once the transition was completed, authors without the necessary funds may not be able to publish in the leading journals in their fields.

For the funding bodies, as Paola Galimberti explains here, transformative agreements were supposedly temporary and cost-neutral: the money previously spent in subscriptions would be invested in APCs, making research accessible to everybody. But the publishing world is changing: in 2018, 4,18 million articles were published; in 2022, the figure rose to 5,14 million. Many of these were in journals put out by new aggressive publishing houses, like MDPI and Frontiers, in which quantity often trumps quality, because their business model relies entirely on APCs: the more papers they publish, the bigger the earnings.

Recent scandals (about flawed refereeing) have shown the limitations of this approach. For traditional subscription-focussed publishers—as Ties Nijssen from Springer told us in our first panel session in Belgrade—transformative agreements were a strategy to preserve the quality and diversity of their journal portfolio. For example, Frontiers has just one big journal per field, whereas traditional subscription publishers often have many journals that specialize publishing research for a specialized community. The challenge for them was not to make the same mistakes as their new peers and risk becoming seen as predatory. There are already signs that it is not going to be easy.

In the summer of 2023, transformative agreements had their first reality check, as Sabina Leonellli laid it out for us (also in Belgrade). Very few journals had transitioned to a Gold Open Access regime: despite the subsidized APCs, most authors were still choosing to publish for free behind a paywall. This is not necessarily unreasonable: a study by Brad Wray shows that, for most papers, citations tend to be similar whether they are OA or not. cOAlition S, an alliance of EU funding bodies, decided they would not be paying subscription fees and APCs. Traditional publishers decided they would carry on with transformative journals, otherwise they would not be able to resist the competition of the more profitable ventures such as Frontiers and MDPI. This is why you, author, are finding a new interface nudging you to pay in journals where you did not expect it.

Why should this concern you?

It is already happening: Cambridge University Press is moving its leading philosophy journals to a Gold OA regime (see Episteme, here). They promise that if you do not have funds to pay APCs, there will be waivers. While this is generous, it is not guaranteed, and other publishers may not be so generous.

Many scholarly societies pay their expenses (for, e.g., conferences) through the journals they own. Publishers shared with them, as royalties, part of the money they earned via subscriptions. Now, with APCs, it remains to be seen how many journals will survive and how much money they generate for redistribution. Jim Weatherall, editor of a Cambridge journal, Philosophy of Science, explained that their current agreement between Cambridge and the PSA runs for another three years.

Meanwhile, few are noticing: in a survey of 27 philosophy of science journal editors we conducted in 2023, many, if not most of them, did not know that they were working in a transformative journal, evolving into a Gold OA regime. Publishers are seemingly not involving the key stakeholders in this conversation.

Your next question would be, we guess, what should you do about it?

If you are involved in a scholarly society, perhaps you could start a discussion about how central journals are to its mission. For instance, in response to the merger of Studies B with two other Elsevier journals, philosophers of physics have created a society that is entirely devoted to fund a new Diamond Open Access journal, Philosophy of Physics (see its editor, David Wallace, explaining it here)

In your department, you may consider supporting repositories compliant with OA principles, like Philpapers or the Phil-Sci Archive. Forget, please, about Researchgate or Academia.edu: they are for profit. Small scholarly communities like philosophy need to consolidate their own OA institutions to have an alternative if the Gold OA regime comes to prevail.

Let us find better incentives for the people bearing the hidden costs of journal publication, namely editors and reviewers. These are volunteers donating their time with no significant compensation from the publishers. Alex Levine calculated that the time he spent over the decade he edited Perspectives on Science costs $50,000 at his salary rate. That extra million papers published between 2018 and 2022 would only increase the editorial burdens, and few volunteers had an incentive to shoulder more of it. Without, e.g., teaching load reductions, extra points for service in promotion evaluation, etc., we cannot expect non-profit OA institutions to survive.

As of now, this is how the situation looks for us. We will keep reporting.

The post Philosophers, Should You Pay to Publish Your Paper? (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.

By request, here is a post for people to share their journal “horror stories.”

[Originally posted March 2, 2021; reposted by request.]

Why? For one thing, it may be a relief to learn that the universe, or at least the journals, are not out to get you in particular. But also, there is the possibility, suggested by one of those making the request, that the stories, in the aggregate, reveal some patterns or issues that we can then figure out how to address.

Before we begin, now would be a good time to invoke my multi-purpose adage, “philosophers are people, too.” That includes the philosophers who are the editors of and referees for academic journals. People make mistakes, people have multiple demands on their time, people get tired, and so on. Further, these people are often volunteers or inadequately compensated, adding to their busy lives the various responsibilities of maintaining a significant portion of our professional ecosystem. So even when we may be sharing stories that reveal their imperfections, I think it is important to register appreciation for all the work they do.

UPDATE (3/2/21): A few complaints in the comments below about Pacific Philosophical Quarterly prompted a reply from Janet Levin (USC), chair of the editorial committee of the journal. In it, she writes:

We recently discovered that, due to a major error in our record-keeping process, over 100 manuscripts submitted to the PPQ over a period of a little over a year were misclassified as having undergone an initial review. There was a confluence of factors that allowed the error to go undetected for so long, some due to COVID-19, some technological, and others due to a diffusion of responsibility in the reviewing process – these factors also contributed to some failures to respond to author inquiries. When we discovered the extent of the problem we made the difficult decision to try to clear the backlog as quickly as possible, and therefore (i) to do an unusually thorough reading of papers during the internal review process to enable us to get results back to authors as quickly as possible, and (ii) not to give comments on papers that we did not send out for external review. We understand the costs of having a paper tied up at a journal for so long, and recognize the burden it places on authors waiting for a response. I take full responsibility for this unfortunate situation and apologize sincerely for our lapse. We are overhauling our processes for submission and evaluation of manuscripts to make sure not only that nothing like this happens again, but also that, going forward, the PPQ can be exemplary in giving authors quick decisions. We will announce more concrete steps in this regard soon, including a new faculty editor who will be taking over after the end of this semester. 

UPDATE (3/5/21): Regarding Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (mentioned in a couple of the comments below), current editor Victor Caston (University of Michigan) reports that this past October he told the journal’s publisher, Oxford University Press, that he would not be seeking to renew his contract with them when it expired. It is now expired, and Professor Caston is maintaining the journal while waiting for OUP to put a new editor or editorial team in place. See also this post at Endoxa from Caleb Cohoe (Metropolitan State University of Denver).

Note: The new comment platform appears to have carried over previous email-name affiliations. That is, it will think your name is whatever you previously used as your name when you last commented with that email address. So even if you enter in a new handle, your comment may be sent to subscribers with your old name, or if you edit your comment, it may publicly attribute that edit to your old name. In general, I encourage commenters to use their real names; so I hope that most of the time, for most people, this will not be an issue. But if you think it is important to use a pseudonym on this post, I suggest that when commenting you enter an email address you haven’t previously used here before. (Email addresses are not revealed to the public.)

Additional note about pseudonyms: as per the comments policy, pseudonyms may not contain the words “anonymous, “anon,” etc.

The post Philosophy Journal Horror Stories (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.

Geopolitics of knowledge is a fact. Only few (conservative) colleagues would contend otherwise. Ingrid Robeyns wrote an entry for this blog dealing with this problem. There, Ingrid dealt mostly with the absence of non-Anglophone colleagues in political philosophy books and journals from the Anglophone centre. I want to stress that this is not a problem of language, for there are other centres from which we, philosophers from the “Global South” working in the “Global South”, are excluded. In political philosophy, the centre is composed of the Anglophone world and three European countries: Italy, France, and Germany. From my own experience, the rest of us do not qualify as political philosophers, for we are, it seems, unable to speak in universal terms. We are, at best, providers of particular cases and data for Europeans and Anglophones to study and produce their own philosophical and universal theories. I think most of you who are reading are already familiar with the concept of epistemic extractivism, of which this phenomenon is a case. (If not, you should; in case you don’t read Spanish, there is this).

Critical political philosophy is one of the fields where the unequal distribution of epistemic authority is more striking. I say “striking” because it would seem, prima facie, that political philosophers with a critical inclination (Marxists, feminists, anti-imperialists, etc.) are people more prone to recognising injustice than people from other disciplines and tendencies. But no one lives outside a system of injustice and no one is a priori completely exempt from reproducing patterns of silencing. Not even ourselves, living and working in the “Global Southern” places of the world. Many political philosophers working and living in Latin America don’t even bother to read and cite their own colleagues. This is, to be sure, a shame, but there is a rationale behind this self-destructive practice. Latin American scholars know that their papers have even lesser chances of being sent to a reviewing process (we are usually desk-rejected) if they cite “too many” pieces in Spanish and by authors working outside of the academic centre.

In many reviews I’ve received in my career, I have been told to cite books by people from the centre just because they are trending or are being cited in the most prestigious Anglophone journals, even if they would contribute nothing to my piece and research. I have frequently been told by reviewers to give more information about the “particular” social-historical context I am writing from because readers don’t know a lot about it. This is an almost verbatim phrase from a review I got recently. I wonder if readers of Anglophone prestigious, Q1 journals stop being professional researchers the instant they start reading about José Carlos Mariátegui or Argentina’s last right-wing dictatorship. Why can’t they just do the research by themselves, why should we have to waste characters and words to educate an overeducated public? This is as tiresome as it is offensive. When I cite the work of non-Anglophone authors from outside of the imperial centres (UK, USA, Italy, Germany, and France, no matter the language they use to write), reviewers almost always demand that I include a reference to some famous native Anglophone (or Italian / German / French, without considering gender or race; the power differential here is simple geographical procedence) author who said similar things but decades after the authors I am quoting. I’ve read all your authors. Why haven’t they read “mine”? And why do they feel they have to suggest something else instead of just learning about “our” authors? This is what I want to reply to the reviewers. Of course, I don’t. I dilligently put the references they demand. I shouldn’t have to, but if I don’t, I don’t get published. There’s the imperial trick again.

English is also always a problem, but not for everyone who is not Anglophone. In 2020 I was in London doing research at LSE. I attended a lecture by a European political theorist. They gave the talk in English. Although they work at a United Statian University, their English was poor. The room was packed. The lecture was mediocre. I was annoyed. “Why do they feel they don’t have to make an effort to pronounce in an intelligible way?”, I thought. When I speak they don’t listen to me like that, with concentrated attention and making an effort to understand me. The reason is in plain view: coloniality of power. If you come from powerful European countries, you don’t need to ask for permission. You don’t need to excel. You don’t need to have something absolutely original to say. You just show up and talk. If you are from, let’s say, Argentina, and you work there (here), you have to adapt to the traditional analytic way of writing and arguing so typical in Anglophone contexts, including citing their literature, if you want to enter the room in the first place. You are not even allowed to use neologisms, although the omnipresent use of English as a lingua franca should have already made this practice at least tolerated. One cannot expect everyone to speak English and English to remain “English” all the same. Inclusion changes the game, if it doesn’t, then it is not isegoria what is going on but cultural homogenisation. (Here is a proposal for inclusive practices regarding Enlgish as a lingua franca). The manifest “Rethinking English as a lingua franca in scientific-academic contexts” offers a detailed critique of the idea and imposition of English as a lingua franca. I endorse it 100 %. (Here in Spanish, open access; here in Portuguese).

In my particular case, I am frequently invited to the academic centre, sometimes to write book chapters, encyclopaedia entries, and papers for special issues, sometimes to give talks and lectures. Not once have I not thought it was not tokenism. Maybe it is my own inferiority complex distorting my perception of reality, but we know from Frantz Fanon which is the origin of this inferiorisation.

I used to be pretty annoyed by this whole situation until I realised that I don’t need to try to enter conversations where I am not going to be heard, understood, or taken seriously. The fact is that we don’t need to be recognised as philosophers by those who willingly ignore our political philosophy. And this is why it is hard for me to participate in forums such as this blog. I just don’t want to receive the same comments I get when I send a paper to an Anglophone, Q1 journal, to put it simply.

But I also want to keep trying, not to feel accepted and to belong, but because I do believe in transnational solidarity and the collective production of emancipatory knowledge. It is a matter of recognition, and a question of whether it is possible for the coloniser to recognise the colonised, to name Fanon once more.

As part of our winter membership drive, we are pulling back the curtain on what we do here at Reasons to be Cheerful. In this story, Contributing Editor Peter Yeung explores the evolution of solutions journalism and what we know about its impacts. This is part two of a three-part series. Click here to read part one and here to read part three. Want to learn more about our membership program? Click here.

When Karen McIntyre began her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012, she had never heard of solutions journalism. But one day a professor asked her to compile a list of “positive news” websites for a media research project.

“What I initially found was not solutions journalism at all,” says McIntyre. “It was good news journalism. Happy news. ‘Fireman saves cat’ kind of news.”

But later, while carrying out that research McIntyre came across the idea of “serious news done in a constructive way” — and her curiosity spiked. For her, it was the polar opposite of the media industry’s status quo: rather than agonizing superficially over the negatives of the day, this was about scrutinizing how and why things went right.

Earlier this year, Yeung traveled to Lima, Peru to report on a surf therapy scheme. Courtesy of Peter Yeung

“It was a breath of fresh air,” says McIntyre, who then channeled her energies into finding out as much about this nascent practice as she could.

But there was little out there. In fact, she could find no academic research about the field at all. So in 2015, McIntyre published her dissertation analyzing the positive psychological effects of “constructive journalism” and “solution information” on the readers of news stories — to her knowledge, the first scientific research of its kind.

“These days there’s so much more research out there,” adds McIntyre, who is now an associate professor of journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University. (A list compiled by her colleague Kyser Lough contains 246 pieces of research to date.)

Ever since its beginnings, the journalism industry has sought to change society for the better and pick apart the merits and pitfalls of policies and projects around the world. Yet a fast-expanding movement is transforming the industry by promoting an approach to journalism centered on assessing responses to society’s problems – from the climate emergency to plastic waste, gender inequality and cultural division.

Advocates argue there’s an urgent need to reform the media amid a crisis of financial sustainability, plummeting trust, societal disharmony and a wider failure of journalism to serve the public interest. A survey by Pew Research in 2021 found 42 percent of US adults have no trust in information from national news organizations (up from 35 percent in 2019). More recently, the Reuters Institute 2023 digital news report, a survey of 93,000 people (who identify as news consumers) across 46 countries by Oxford University, found that 36 percent say they also often or sometimes actively avoid the news.

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The solution? It’s complicated. But, aptly enough, solutions journalism could play a significant role.

“There are no simple solutions to what is a multifaceted story of disconnection and low engagement in a high-choice digital environment, but our data suggest that less sensationalist, less negative and more explanatory approaches might help, especially with those who have low interest in news,” the Reuters Institute report concluded.

In fact, a separate Reuters Institute survey of 303 media executives from 53 countries in January 2023 found that 73 percent of those leaders planned to publish more solutions and constructive journalism in the future in order to combat so-called “news avoidance.”

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Professor McIntyre describes solutions and constructive journalism as two strands of a kind of “socially responsible” reporting. They both aim to remedy “news fatigue and perceived negativity bias,” she says, and together represent a shift away from conventional, “just the facts”-style reporting to a more contextual approach, where “journalists consider the bigger picture and play a more interpretive role.”

Two organizations have been at the heart of this emerging movement: The Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), a US-based nonprofit that was established in 2013, and the Constructive Institute, which was founded in 2017 and is based at Denmark’s Aarhus University. 

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While interpretations vary, solutions journalism reporting tends to follow the four pillars defined by the SJN: the response to a problem; insight learned from that response; evidence showing the response works; and an analysis of the response’s limitations. The wider-ranging constructive journalism includes solutions journalism as one of its components, but also should include multiple perspectives. A constructive journalism story is framed on the positive rather than negative aspects of communities involved and attempts to eschew simplicity in favor of nuance.

“Solutions and constructive journalism are different, but they fit together very well,” says Lisa Urlbauer, head of the journalism training programs at the Bonn Institute, a German nonprofit focused on constructive journalism that launched in March 2022. “They have this idea that we must put people’s needs at the heart of our journalism.”

There’s no doubt that there’s been a huge shift towards solutions-focused reporting. In recent years, the New York Times has launched Headway, an initiative “exploring the world's challenges through the lens of progress” and the Washington Post has created a section dedicated to climate solutions. In April, the New Yorker ran a special edition on climate solutions, and in October, NPR dedicated an entire week of coverage to solving the climate crisis. Publications such as NextCity, Grist and Mongabay have announced shifts towards solutions reporting, the last of which is launching a dedicated solutions desk. Meanwhile, Reasons to be Cheerful, one of the world’s first and few solutions journalism-only outlets, has been in action since 2019.

More concretely, the SJN’s story tracker page, a non-exhaustive list of stories that adhere to its pillars of solutions journalism, contains 15,600 articles that have been vetted internally. In addition, the network says it has trained 47,000 journalists across North America, Europe, Africa and Latin America, partnering with news organizations and journalism schools to help encourage the take-up.

“The industry has taken pretty huge steps generally,” says Allen Arthur, a solutions reporter and author of the SJN’s flagship newsletter Above the Fold.

In Northern Peru, Yeung reported on a deadly outbreak of dengue fever (and responses to it). Courtesy of Peter Yeung

Arthur, who often writes about and works with formerly incarcerated people, was himself hugely influenced by the new approach to reporting. “I had never thought about changing the whole structure of the story itself,” he says. “Instead I realized I could do journalism to help a community reach its goals and navigate obstacles.”

The Bonn Institute, whose initiative is centered on a close partnership with German media outlets including national broadcaster Deutsche Welle, characterizes that shift as a kind of Journalism 2.0 that should be the industry norm. 

“It’s a second wave of digitization,” says Urlbauer. “For us, fostering better debate is a more modern kind of reporting. There are many people in society who do not feel adequately heard by mainstream journalism, and we need to broaden our approach.”

However, while investment into the approach has ramped up massively, the evidence of solutions and constructive journalism’s impact is less clear-cut. 

For one, the goals of the movement are various and subject to debate: to build trust, to create a more inclusive industry, to catalyze the uptake of successful solutions, to counteract stereotypes, to improve readers’ mental health, to reduce polarization and division in society, or perhaps to make the media more financially sustainable. What research there is has tended to be low-level in scope or focused only on certain areas.

“In every experiment that has been done in English that we could find, there was a significant impact on audiences’ emotions,” says McIntyre, who published a review of the literature involving experiments on solutions journalism in August. “They make people more positive or less negative. That was clear.”

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While those findings are useful, they are limited. In fact, 17 of 22 studies McIntyre analyzed focused on the emotional impact of solutions journalism. Only one looked at the impact of solutions journalism on trust. But for many practitioners, the goal of solutions journalism is not to be “feel-good” or “positive” — but rather to create change.

“Solutions journalism is not good news per se,” says Arthur. “It is not this big wonderful, happy ending. It should be something we can learn from.”

Small-scale research commissioned by the SJN in 2020 found that of the 628 people surveyed across the US, 51 percent said they prefer “solution” stories compared to the 32 percent who prefer “problem” stories and the 17 percent with no preference. Eighty-three percent of respondents said they trusted a solutions journalism story they viewed, compared to 55 percent who said the same about the problem-focused story.

However, the limits of the research does not mean a tangible difference isn’t being made. In fact, McIntyre argues there’s little evidence that the approach doesn’t work, whereas more and more outlets are taking it up and there are many examples of solutions reporting creating impact. “I’m not really seeing negatives,” she says. “We have reason to say that solutions journalism is useful and beneficial.”

More recent findings have also responded to some of those concerns. A study of 348 US undergraduate students by the University of Maryland last year found exposure to solutions journalism was “positively associated” with the increased likelihood to support collective action to fight for better policy. Other research has found it has improved coverage of gender violence and immigrants as well as conflict reporting.

The SJN also recently launched an Impact Tracker containing numerous, robust examples of how solutions reporting has led to change – from encouraging authorities to replicate schemes pioneered elsewhere to millions of dollars of donor support for organizations implementing solutions.

Perhaps a more significant hurdle, however, is the fact that almost all of the research is focused in the Global North: 64 percent of research identified by McIntyre was based in North America and Europe. And that is reflective of overall adoption of and support for solutions reporting — with far less development in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

“Constructive journalism has gained a foothold in Africa but it’s not mainstream yet – far from it,” says Joy Muthoni, a Kenyan academic who analyzed the uptake of constructive journalism in Kenya for her PhD. “Journalists in Africa simply haven’t had the time and resources and training to properly adopt it yet.”

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The SJN’s Africa Initiative, which launched in 2020 to provide training and support to 60 African newsrooms including Nigeria Health Watch, has attempted to address that imbalance. And it has successfully led to nuanced reporting on vaccinations, malnutrition, sexual health, and more across Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda.

But Muthoni believes that model is a tricky tightrope to walk.

“I would be as bold to say that the trajectory of constructive journalism in the East African context is solely being driven by Western organizations,” she says. “That can be problematic in many ways. It’s like a new form of colonialism.”

Nonetheless, Muthoni believes that the continent would benefit from a constructive and solutions-oriented approach to journalism – following in the footsteps of the African philosophy of Ubuntu (the idea of shared humanity) as well as the history of development and peace journalism in previous decades. “But this isn’t something that happens overnight,” she says.

The SJN’s Arthur also admits there’s a long way to go when it comes to addressing the broader ingrained reporting methods such as “horse-race” coverage of political elections, focusing on candidates rather than issues that affect voters, and the fact that “terrible news will almost always be the lead items and win all of the awards.”

A decade on from its foundation, however, the SJN has undoubtedly played a role in “systematizing and supercharging” solutions journalism, as Arthur puts it — and in November the nonprofit announced its first-ever awards, representing another key landmark in the effort to make journalism more valuable, kind and impactful.

“We don’t know how solutions journalism is going to grow and evolve in the next decade,” says Arthur. “But I think the quality of stories is getting better and better and the practice is growing in incredible ways.”

The post How Solutions Journalism Is Sparking Change appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.