Philosophy & Public Affairs – Letter of Resignation

The following is a statement from the executive, associate, and advisory editors and all the members of the editorial board of Philosophy & Public Affairs.

We are unanimously resigning from our editorial roles at Philosophy & Public Affairs, published by Wiley, and launching a new diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH). All of us will play the same editorial roles in the new journal and will retain the aim of publishing the best philosophical work touching on matters of public importance.

We take this step because we believe that scholarly journals—including our own—serve important purposes, and that these purposes are not well-served by commercial publishing. For three decades now, academic journals have suffered from their ownership by for-profit publishers, who have exploited their monopoly position to sharply raise prices, unduly burdening subscribing libraries and shutting out other institutions and individuals from access to research. The recent rise of the author-funded “open access” model has only reinforced academic inequality, since scholars with access to fewer resources are unable to pay the fees that make their work freely accessible; it has also incentivized commercial publishers to try to publish as many articles as possible and so to pressure rigorous journals to weaken or abandon their quality controls.

Faced with this conflict between purpose and business model, we have decided to embrace the purpose and move to an alternative model.

The alternative—which our librarian colleagues have been urging for some time—is for libraries, universities, and other academic institutions to offer direct support for the publication of open-access journals, which are guided by independent scholarly judgment and freely available for authors and readers. We are delighted to have found precisely this model at OLH, an award-winning diamond open-access publisher supported by a consortium of libraries and funding agencies.

If diamond open-access journals are so good, why are they not already dominant? Partly because we all have day jobs and transitions take time. In addition, our careers depend on publishing in journals with name recognition, reputation, and high impact factors. These publications are now typically owned by commercial publishers. Colleagues often cannot afford to take a chance on untested journals. This is why, as editors of one of the leading journals in our field, we feel a strong responsibility to move toward a new, better, arrangement.

Our plan, if Wiley permits it, is to complete the reviews for all revised submissions received prior to this announcement. We apologize to authors who recently submitted manuscripts to Philosophy & Public Affairs, and we recognize the especially high cost to authors who have been revising their manuscripts, but who have not yet resubmitted. We very much regret these costs but saw no realistic way to avoid them. We hope to make the new journal worthy of these costs.

We plan to launch the new journal (whose name will be announced shortly) and begin accepting submissions in September 2024. Please send us your best work in moral and political philosophy and adjacent fields, take note of our migration in your hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

We are excited to embark on this new adventure. We hope you share our excitement and join us in making this new venture a great success.

Signed,

Outgoing Executive Editors

Jonathan Quong, University of Southern California, USA

Patrick Tomlin, University of Warwick, UK

Outgoing Associate Editors

Arash Abizadeh, McGill University, Canada

Nico Cornell, University of Michigan, USA

Garrett Cullity, Australian National University

Marc Fleurbaey, Paris School of Economics, France

Johann Frick, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Joe Horton, University College London, UK

Sophia Moreau, University of Toronto, Canada

Kristi Olson, Bowdoin College, USA

Japa Pallikkathayil, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Gina Schouten, Harvard University, USA

Zofia Stemplowska, University of Oxford, UK

Adam Swift, University College London, UK

Outgoing Advisory Editors

Charles R. Beitz, Princeton University, USA

Joshua Cohen, Apple University, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Alan Patten, Princeton University, USA

Arthur Ripstein, University of Toronto, Canada

Seana Shiffrin, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Outgoing Editorial Board

Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan, USA

Cheshire Calhoun, Arizona State University, USA

David Estlund, Brown University, USA

Archon Fung, Harvard Kennedy School, USA

Barbara Herman, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Pamela Hieronymi, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Frances Myrna Kamm, Rutgers University, USA

Niko Kolodny, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Jeff McMahan, Oxford University, UK

Liam Murphy, New York University, USA

Debra Satz, Stanford University, USA

Samuel Scheffler, New York University, USA

Amartya Sen, Harvard University, USA

Tommie Shelby, Harvard University, USA

Amia Srinivasan, Oxford University, UK

Jeremy Waldron, New York University, USA

Stuart White, Oxford University, UK

Gideon Yaffe, Yale University, USA