A new, online, journal of philosophy has been founded (nearly). The Berlin Journal of Philosophy is “a blind-submission, double-blind, peer-reviewed, open-access journal”. Details here. ‘Blind submission’ means that even journal adminstrators don’t know who wrote the paper, unless accepted, and if it is rejected, never. We also hear that “the journal will aim to notify authors of a decision within four to eight months”. Many journals take that long, but few would admit that it is anything other than an unfortunate side-effect of recruiting willing referees, or those that say they will do it missing deadlines. Seems strange that if you are looking for willing referees to volunteer their services to the journal, who you then pay, that you give them a four month deadline to write the report. Part of the reason for that is the extremely strict, and detailed, anti-plagiarism policy.

These procedures have clearly had a lot of thought put into them. Whether the content follows is anyone’s guess. The journal is not yet even accepting submissions, and I’m not sure it ever will – it appears to be an elaborate answer to a procedural question the putative editor, Adrian Piper, set herself. You can read the announcement here on philos-list. The question, to put it simply, was how to deal with a case of alleged plagiarism in the case of a blind submission; essentially whether the two aspirations of rigorous anti-plagiarism and blind submission and review could be reconciled.

I previously posted some of my doubts about blind submission here; which is why the ultra blind submission policy – where even administrators do not know author identity – intrigued me. But I didn’t realise quite how deep the rabbit hole was going to go…