In the comments on a previous post about a new journal, Barry Lam (Vassar) floats a brilliant idea:
Philosophy-minded philanthropists, are you listening?
How much would it cost annually to run a journal which publishes everything of high quality it receives, pays reviewers, pays authors, pays its editors, all reasonably but not extravagantly like the book presses, has beautiful type-setting, and does everything it needs to be archiveable and open access? If you take that number and multiply it by 20, that’s the endowment you would need to fund it at 5% annual spending. Would it cost 0,000? 0,000? I know many endowed chairs at fancy U that costs more than that. And this would be a service to the entire field. And far more people would hear about the Paul E Newman Journal of Philosophy over time than any of these endowed chairs. I’d venture plenty of you would publish in the Charles Koch Journal of Political Philosophy if it meant shutting down Elsevier. I wonder why we as a field aren’t fundraising for such things, and then eventually just close down all the for-profit journals.
