philosophysmoker-Mstarz

Awesomeness ensues.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Document-an-Open-Letter/138937/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

~zombie

In comments here, Chris Alen Sula of the Phylo Jobs project links to this announcement, which reads:

google map, social media, and new features at phylo jobs

Over the next few days, we’ll be updating you on the latest developments to our job advertisement services, including:

• live Google map of open positions (phylo.info/jobs/map)
  
• additional delivery options (RSS, text-only, mobile, Twitter, Facebook)
  
• screencasts on using Phylo Jobs services
  
• launch of our registered e-newspaper, Job Openings in Philosophy, to aid institutions with federal compliance
  
• streamlined Jobs Wiki design for unofficial status updates (which still includes customized RSS feeds) (phylo.info/jobs/wiki)
  

As of October 1, 2011, we also require that each job poster certifies that his/her institution complies with American Philosophical Association’s Non-Discrimination Statement.

I cannot say enough how awesome this is. As of this writing, the Phylo Jobs site has 80 job listings, almost all of which were unsolicited by the editors. This has been really successful so far. Many thanks to Chris Alen Sula and David Morrow for putting this together. Truly wonderful.

--Mr. Zero

Via Feminist Philosophers and Leiter, the petition is here. Sign it.

And as Leiter says,

NOTE THAT THE petition does not provide a place for institutional affiliations. Do include your city and country, however, to make clear that the news of this disgraceful behavior is being noted internationally. And if you are a U.S. academic, choose "Prof." as title, again to make clear that it is an international academic community that disapproves of this latest example of mindless behavior by out-of-control academic bureaucrats.

--Mr. Zero

From Leiter:

In light of the on-going labor dispute at the hotel hosting the Pacific APA, the University of San Francisco is offering alternative conference and lodging facilities for interested participants. See the website for details about how to move sessions to the USF facilities.

Details here.

--Mr. Zero

One of the perks of being a college teacher is that publishers send out lots of books in the hope that us college teachers will adopt them for our classes. I dont' have to tell you that you get a lot of free books this way. The problem is that it is unusual for these books to be any good. Luckily, there is a small army of people who are willing to buy these books from us, and all we have to do is keep them in a stack until they come around. (I guess that, strictly speaking, we're supposed to return them to the publisher if we don't want them. Failure to do this unnecessarily increases the price of textbooks the students buy. Nevertheless, I have never considered doing this. Does anybody do this?)

The school I teach at has a policy against this sort of thing. It regards these book buyers as trespassers. In the event of a book buyer, the policy says I'm supposed to tell the person to leave campus. And then I'm supposed to call the police. So this morning, when this book buyer came to my office and offered me forty free dollars in exchange for books I didn't want or ask for, I had a choice. I could take the forty bucks, or I could call the cops.

Is this a common policy?

--Mr. Zero

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