For-Profit Journals.

There was a thread at Leiter Reports the other day about the ethics of refereeing for journals that operate on a for-profit business model. The Original Poster (Warren Goldfarb, not Leiter) thinks that it is wrong for the journal to make money from his donated labor, and proposes a referee boycott of all for-profit journals. This would include all Springer journals, and some others.

Several commentators pointed out that even if you accept the premise that these journals are exploiting their referees, this exploitation is small potatoes in comparison to the way they exploit the authors. It is a lot more work to write an article than it is to referee one, and access to the articles is the actual product our institutions purchase for us. And a referee boycott is much more likely to hurt the authors, and will hurt them in a more direct way, than it is to hurt Springer. These points seem 100% right to me.

It was also pointed out in comments that referee exploitation is not the real problem. The real problem is that for-profit journals are often prohibitively expensive to libraries, which can lead to libraries not carrying various journals, which is bad for scholars like us who need access to journals.

But again, no referee boycott is going to be effective, especially if the boycott is limited to referees in our discipline. According to Springer's website, they publish in the neighborhood of 2,000 journals. So I strongly doubt that a philosophy author boycott would do anything, either. It seems to me that if there were a professional association for college librarians, it might be better positioned to effectively protest this situation.

So one possible course of action would be to contact the ACRL and the head librarians at our own institutions and encouraging them to take action.

Another possibility is that journal editors might be in a better position than referees to do something about this. How much influence does the editor of a journal have over who publishes the journal? Could Stewart Cohen, for example, take Philosophical Studies to a not-for-profit publisher? Maybe we should start working on people like him.

--Mr. Zero