Where should one publish? The question is less easy than it seems, given that an ideal journal should be, in my opinion:
- peer-reviewed (no one wants to write on a local and uninfluential venue)
- Open Access (I want people to be allowed to read what I think I have to contribute)
- pluralistic (I greatly admire those scholars of Indian philosophy who managed to write on one of the “Top-5” philosophical journals, but sometimes it seems to me that philosophers who are used to just internal discussions are just not enough interested to read about external challenges to their views)
- not charging authors (I have recently paid [an outrageous amount of money] for an article of mine to be published OA on a Springer journals…
it is nice to know that it is not the only alternative). - allowing LateX files (I know, I am not among the majority in this regard, but I really hate converting my files and the only thing I hate more than that is having to work directly with Word)
Now, Franz Huber has recently written to me to announce the launch the first issue of Ergo. This is a philosophical journal seemingly (hopefully: apparently) fulfilling all the criteria above and with an additional impressive list of section editors, which seems to suggest real openness and freshness of approach (by the way, it is nice to see that it is not an all-men club).
Furthermore, in order to celebrate the first issue the general editors (Franz Huber and Jonathan Weisberg had a great idea of organising a virtual round table by having the papers of the first issue discussed by philosophers on various blogs:
- Julia Jorati (OSU) discusses here the paper in early modern by Paul Lodge (Oxford)
- Anna Mahtani (LSE) discusses here the paper in probabilism by Michael Caie (Pittsburgh)
- Ellen Clark (Oxford) discusses here the paper in philosophy of biology by
Christopher Hitchcock (Caltech) and Joel Velasco (Texas Tech) - Thomas Nadelhoffer (Charleston) discusses here the paper in experimental philosophy by John Turri (Waterloo)
Personally, I hope that the experiment will be so succesfully that they will chose to repeat it for the next issues.
Now, for a topic more directly concerning our blog: Would Ergo also publish articles about Indian Philosophy? Yes* (which is great news, and not just for scholars of Indian philosophy, but especially for the others, who will benefit of this openness).
*”We really mean it when we say that we welcome submissions on all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions, including non-Western philosophy. Our current board of editors is largely reflecting the submissions we have received so far. We aim at not assigning more than one paper per month on average to an editor, and we have hired additional editors for those areas where we have received more submissions than expected” (Franz Huber, personal communication)
