You’re completely discounting the value of the time spent running things down and administering.
But that’s not even the major issue involved.
It’s the “there are plenty of people with the clout to do so” part. How exactly did they achieve this clout? And with whom?
The analog to your question has already happened in journalism. In the past, the technological and physical barriers of distribution made it damned near impossible for anyone to practice “journalism” alone. You had to work for a place that could afford the ink and the pulp and the distribution and the ad sales...
You couldn’t just bootstrap that.
Now, theoretically, you could -- but that ignores a huge issue. Who exactly anoints you as a fair and balanced practitioner of “journalism?” The answer in your hypothetical is null.
Chicken and egg? Yes. But you’ll be in for horrendous consequences if you try to bypass that system with this tech. We already have a problem where engaging personalities build large platforms and audiences. But we can’t let the practice of science (and vetting who is a scientist) be administered by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dr. Oz and Bill Nye. Because that’s what you’re going to end up with.
You want to do that with philosophy? Then your leading journals will be curated by Dr. Phil, Oprah, Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins. It doesn’t matter that *you* don’t think these people are philosophers. You’ve now cast your lot with vox populi. They’ll define it for you, in a self-sustaining cycle of fertilizer.
People have done exactly this in other disciplines, like branches of mathematics. Some of the highest status journals in these fields are now free. However, the cost of administration is not zero, so most of the successful free journals rely on infrastructure like arxiv.org or arxiv overlay services like LIPIcs, or professional associations.
I think the main reason people don't do this is because it is labour-intensive to administer a publication. Chasing reviewers is generally said to be a months-long endeavour nowadays. Since the work intensity of most employed academics is quite high, there is not sufficient time left to devote to a project like this. The start-up costs are low, but the ongoing costs in labour terms are high.
Unlike one of the other commenters, I disagree that the main problem would be popular people running these journals as arbiters of knowledge. While popularity gives some advantage in setup, delivery of poor quality publishing would ultimately limit their success. Now, we could see the rise of midrange popular academic publishing, as you've proposed in a recent post, and this is where such popular people might find some success. But the 'hard' academic work probably has too small a natural audience for popularity to be the determining factor. Moreover, since it's this level of knowledge production that academics probably care most about, downstream publications would have relatively smaller influences on the production (and rewards) of knowledge.
I really hope more people start doing this. Some people have done that in Literary Studies (like post45.org and nonsite.org). Actually, what you're describing makes me think of literary magazines. Being online and open used to mean they lacked prestige, but now it's almost flipped and many of the clout-y ones are online and open.
But I think in academic humanities people don't and won't do it because they're professors, whether tenure-track or non-tenure track or tenured or whatever, and that means they've tied their whole lives to all the various "incumbency effects" of academe. Where do you even start with the way academia is set up now, and once you start, how could you turn back? I think that's why most people aren't even trying. At least that's my guess.
Maybe this is an opportunity for someone to create a service like Substack, but for people to launch academic journals.
People are doing what you suggested, e.g. https://nbdt.scholasticahq.com/
And people are generally trying quite hard to disrupt academic publishing, e.g.
https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/54d63486/elife-s-new-model-changing-the-way-you-share-your-research
“It costs zero dollars to run.”
You’re completely discounting the value of the time spent running things down and administering.
But that’s not even the major issue involved.
It’s the “there are plenty of people with the clout to do so” part. How exactly did they achieve this clout? And with whom?
The analog to your question has already happened in journalism. In the past, the technological and physical barriers of distribution made it damned near impossible for anyone to practice “journalism” alone. You had to work for a place that could afford the ink and the pulp and the distribution and the ad sales...
You couldn’t just bootstrap that.
Now, theoretically, you could -- but that ignores a huge issue. Who exactly anoints you as a fair and balanced practitioner of “journalism?” The answer in your hypothetical is null.
Chicken and egg? Yes. But you’ll be in for horrendous consequences if you try to bypass that system with this tech. We already have a problem where engaging personalities build large platforms and audiences. But we can’t let the practice of science (and vetting who is a scientist) be administered by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dr. Oz and Bill Nye. Because that’s what you’re going to end up with.
You want to do that with philosophy? Then your leading journals will be curated by Dr. Phil, Oprah, Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins. It doesn’t matter that *you* don’t think these people are philosophers. You’ve now cast your lot with vox populi. They’ll define it for you, in a self-sustaining cycle of fertilizer.
People have done exactly this in other disciplines, like branches of mathematics. Some of the highest status journals in these fields are now free. However, the cost of administration is not zero, so most of the successful free journals rely on infrastructure like arxiv.org or arxiv overlay services like LIPIcs, or professional associations.
I think the main reason people don't do this is because it is labour-intensive to administer a publication. Chasing reviewers is generally said to be a months-long endeavour nowadays. Since the work intensity of most employed academics is quite high, there is not sufficient time left to devote to a project like this. The start-up costs are low, but the ongoing costs in labour terms are high.
Unlike one of the other commenters, I disagree that the main problem would be popular people running these journals as arbiters of knowledge. While popularity gives some advantage in setup, delivery of poor quality publishing would ultimately limit their success. Now, we could see the rise of midrange popular academic publishing, as you've proposed in a recent post, and this is where such popular people might find some success. But the 'hard' academic work probably has too small a natural audience for popularity to be the determining factor. Moreover, since it's this level of knowledge production that academics probably care most about, downstream publications would have relatively smaller influences on the production (and rewards) of knowledge.
I really hope more people start doing this. Some people have done that in Literary Studies (like post45.org and nonsite.org). Actually, what you're describing makes me think of literary magazines. Being online and open used to mean they lacked prestige, but now it's almost flipped and many of the clout-y ones are online and open.
But I think in academic humanities people don't and won't do it because they're professors, whether tenure-track or non-tenure track or tenured or whatever, and that means they've tied their whole lives to all the various "incumbency effects" of academe. Where do you even start with the way academia is set up now, and once you start, how could you turn back? I think that's why most people aren't even trying. At least that's my guess.