Thread by @deontologistics

Since my Null Journal idea seems to have been popular, it’s probably a good idea for me to say something more about how I think distribution/validation should work in philosophy (and potentially elsewhere). Let me start with some context.

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1366780889598943237

I have frighteningly little concrete job experience outside of seminar teaching. But the main exception to this was running a journal for 3 years (plijournal.com). I was an editorial board member, the editor for two issues, and administrator for longer than that.

I oversaw the whole sausage, from CFP, through review, meetings, editing, formatting, printing, distribution, and finances. I redesigned the whole back end and balanced the books in the process, liaising with libraries coming through intermediaries and individual subscribers.

When I took over, every process was an elaborate ritual that had to be done just so to please the gods, losing money regardless, and when I left it there was a self-sustainable business model. It’s one of the few concrete achievements I’m really proud of, in a low key way.

Nothing flashy, but every time I see a new CFP for Pli I smile. It’s worth saying that Pli is one of the few graduate run journals with a good reputation. It really did get bought and *read* as a curated object filled with stuff you couldn’t always find elsewhere.

The other journal along these lines is @urbanomicdotcom’s Collapse, which really is a *curated* work, filled with wonders at the intersection of philosophy, science, art, and everything else. In many ways, Urbanomic is less like OUP than it is an exciting indie record label.

So when I say no one reads journals, I mean that none of the mainstream journals are designed to be read this way. The exception are curated special issues, which are the only objects one might get genuinely excited about. I curated one w/ @james_trafford: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

There are various online open access journals that work more like this, e.g., Parrhesia (parrhesiajournal.org), and a variety of other experiments trying to fix the problem locally, if not globally. I don’t want to downplay anyone’s efforts here.

My overarching point is that this is how validation should work, pretty much, at least in philosophy, the arts, and humanities. Any subject where you’re not trying to facilitate the thankless task of testing experimental hypotheses or checking formal proofs.

Peer review is about clusters of peer recognition that have been formalised well enough to authenticate ideas as being worth your time to read and engage with. Twitter implements this in a maximally distributed way, with everyone curating for everyone else in the river of Lethe.

There needs to be enough dynamism in the ways these clusters form and change that we don’t end up with hereditary monarchies. The Mandate of Heaven must be allowed to pass between intellectual dynasties with the least bureaucratic fuss possible.

Some people look at Mind, Analysis, etc., and see venerable institutions based on a proud history of rebellion. When I look I see the House of Lords. But then again, I don’t read these things, because why the fuck would I? I scour ArXiv, Sci-Hub, Libgen like the pirate I am.

The ways in which I search for academic content and the ways in which I access it are, as they rightly should be, only connected when some is putting the effort in to curate it for me. I’ll pay for that effort, not to fill institutional coffers of the a academic landed gentry.

If you want to know why I’ve gradually slipped further into philosophy of mathematics, logic, and computer science, the simplest answer is that it is *so* much easier to navigate, access, and self-teach through articles in these disciplines. I cannot emphasise this enough.

Academia.edu and Philpapers are very poor substitutes for the superior infrastructure and cultural norms articulating distribution and validation in these disciplines. It’s much easier to filter out the rubbish that’s been published for fear of perishing.

The question is: presuming a Null Journal could be built to make every piece of work easily addressable (generating adequate bibliographic indexes acceptable by the current regime, maybe with version control and metadata too), what cultural norms should supervene on it?

I've so far suggested a model that encourages diversity/dynamism of the sort we see on the innovative fringes of other cultural domains: small publishers, zines, labels, art collectives, and the like. It's worth unpacking this analogy a bit, as there are potential pitfalls here.

There are pathologies of 'scenes' that we'd want to discourage: the use and abuse of 'cool' qua social capital. There's arguably plenty of this in the extant system, but it's worth bearing in mind. Still, making it easier to leave one scene and start another is a good response.

Moreover, the analogy suggests that we're not simply talking about peer networks of cultural creators, but of cultural critics: that the process of searching the vast hoard of material on offer might require dedicated guides. This role is already played by commentary and review.

Yet there are also figures who position themselves as tastemakers, who may even on that basis become power brokers:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1352173114222911492?s=20

Once more, I'd suggest that the only way to deal with these problems is to think about the function of peer recognition clusters in cultivating taste for philosophical content in explicit terms, and to design institutions that discourage the accumulation of undue influence.

It's generally better to treat these issues as matters of free association where scholars vote with their feet, or with their choices of who to listen and respond to in the unfolding society of letters of which they are supposed to be a part: confederation contra aristocracy.

The final problem concerns diversity more directly. One point in favour of the current system is that it theoretically enables blind review, and this has its advantages for fighting certain blunt forms of bias, if not weeding out its more complex cousins.

I think that there might be ways to retain the best of both worlds in collective curation/validation. Blind submission is still a possibility elsewhere in the world of publishing, and there's no reason it can't be encouraged by some post-journal orgs. There are options here.

An idea I toyed with a while back is making the all too often adversarial nature of blind review an explicit feature of the system, and assigning applicants an advocate (who knows them) and a critic who doesn't (but is known by the advocate). This is more work, but has benefits.

But even if this is a good idea, which it might not be, the point is to try a bunch of different models of validation and see what produce better results, experimentally articulating new cultural norms governing knowledge production freed from the constraints of distribution.

The point of the Null Journal thought experiment (which could easily become a real experiment, if enough people were interested) is to enable and encourage this sort of experimentation, because it is badly needed, for a variety of reasons. I'll leave the usual critiques alone.

Let me make one more speculative proposal, since I may as well. If I had my way, I'd start something like the Fair Trade movement but for open access curation, or 'post-journals'. I'd recommend people pledge not to publish any other way, and bleed the old system dead.

The day it's acceptable to say openly on your CV that you make your work freely available and let whoever wants to validate it do so after the fact, is the day the cycle of publish or perish dies. Killing this system is a co-ordination problem, and symbols matter to it.

Should I ever get another interview for a job as a professional philosopher, when I'm asked "Where do you publish?" I would very much like to hold my head high and answer "Nowhere". Catch you in the NoXiv. 🖖