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So I think the journals are basically doing as well as they can, and the problem lies largely with search committees. (And possibly with tenure committees.) https://twitter.com/birchlse/status/1380122834186407938">https://twitter.com/birchlse/...
Here& #39;s a toy model of the discipline. There are 300 journals. There is a ranking of these from best to worst. The ranking is common knowledge. Everyone hires based on what the highest ranked journal you& #39;ve published in is. Writers don& #39;t care about being read, want to get hired.
And assume that writers have absolutely no idea how good or bad their papers are, and each of these journals has a financial/organisational limit to how much it can publish.
What behavior would you expect?
What behavior would you expect?
Mostly people will send every paper that they think is good enough (which is all their papers) to the top journal, then the second journal, and so on.
Someone who needs a publication right away might start with a lower ranked journal, but those will be exceptions.
Someone who needs a publication right away might start with a lower ranked journal, but those will be exceptions.
And the acceptance rates at these top journals will be absolutely minimal.
So that& #39;s not a million miles from what we actually see.
So that& #39;s not a million miles from what we actually see.
What changes could you make to make things better? Or at least different?
First thing to note is that if you sped up processing times, you& #39;d probably make things worse. In the model, slow processing is the only thing that stops acceptance rates at journals 1-10 going down to under 1%.
If you could hold the ranking fixed and abolish the constraints on how much journals publish, you might make things a bit better. But (a) those constraints are hard to break, and (b) abolishing them would probably change the ranking.
(I think a lot of plans for reforming the journal system assume the rankings are exogenous and immutable, and would break on this point if implemented. But that& #39;s a story for another day.)
A slightly better solution would be for enough people to have different rankings. In practice, this is the only thing keeping us from complete dystopia. It really helps that people have distinct rankings of, say, Ethics, BJPS and AJP. That leads to some scattering of submissions.
A much better solution would be for search committees to not use journal prestige.
Imagine a world where it simply did not matter for hiring whether your paper was in Phil Review or one of the 172 Anglophone philosophy journals here: https://doaj.org"> https://doaj.org
Imagine a world where it simply did not matter for hiring whether your paper was in Phil Review or one of the 172 Anglophone philosophy journals here: https://doaj.org"> https://doaj.org
Then people who cared about profile and prestige could send papers to Phil Review or wherever, and people who were just trying to get a foot in the door for hiring could spread around their submissions. And everyone would be happier.
Of course search committees should still use the quality of a paper in hiring. But on this model they would not use publication venue as a proxy for that. (Even better would be to not use whether it was published as a proxy, but baby steps.)
