This is part of a 3-part series. You can find the second and third posts here and here.

This post is dedicated to the generous philosofriends who refereed papers for me.

Last month, I finished editing a special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly on feminist perspectives on moral responsibility, which is (miraculously) scheduled to be published in April. When I issued the call for papers two years ago, I had no idea what an arduous task it would be. To my chagrin, finding willing and suitable referees was nearly impossible. After soliciting referee reports from notable experts and failing to recruit enough volunteers, I reached out to friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances, and finally, adjuncts and grad students who (like me) aren’t paid a cent for professional service – not even a theoretical fee built into their salary. Nonetheless, I stooped to using unpaid labor to publish the special issue, my reasoning being that if I didn’t, the grad students and adjuncts and independent scholars who submitted papers wouldn’t have their groundbreaking work published in the collected volume only because of the ‘referee crisis.’        

Even with the use of unpaid ‘interns,’ it was still extremely difficult to find enough referees for the 20 submissions that I received, to the point that I considered giving up. And it’s not just me. Everyone is complaining about the referee crisis. Even editors of top-tier, generalist journals are having trouble finding referees. But for ‘niche’ journals – and even more so, ‘niche’ special issues of ‘niche’ journals – it’s even harder, because you have to find referees with marginalized disciplinary specializations, and very few people in the profession fit the bill. Think about it: if it’s hard to find a willing referee in analytic epistemology or moral philosophy, imagine how hard it is to find one in Indigenous environmental feminisms, South Asian moral philosophy, or autoethnographic addict philosophy. Welcome to my world! 

Now, you might think that I could ask any old philosopher to referee these papers – we all have expertise in philosophical writing, don’t we? – but this would be epistemically irresponsible, since not every philosopher has the subdisciplinary expertise needed to responsibly referee these submissions, and as a result, a randomly-selected referee could reject a perfectly publishable or even exceptional paper only because they don’t know what they’re talking about. And this happens all the time. I once submitted a proposal on resilience from a Marxist crip feminist perspective to a book editor who seemed enthusiastic about my draft, but proceeded to send it to an economist and a psychologist who promptly rejected it on grounds that it was too “ideological,” “polemical,” and likely to “turn off” readers. That’s a predictable result of sending an anti-hegemonic proposal to experts in hegemonic disciplines. Yet someone with appropriate expertise would have been much harder to find, since philosophers in my areas of specialization are underrepresented in the profession, as well as concentrated in non-tenure-track jobs that don’t pay for professional service.

The publishing racket in general is extremely fragmented and structurally unjust. As Maeve McKeown puts it vis-à-vis political philosophy, “the ‘top’ journals legitimate mainstream research as the pinnacle of the profession, squeezing out non-mainstream moral or political philosophy. Work in other areas is siloed into specialist journals and considered niche, famously feminism” (2022: 102). Yet virtually every specialization outside of the Anglo-American analytic tradition – continental, Eastern, critical race, Indigenous, crip, queer, etc. – is consigned to ‘niche’ journals that are designated as ‘unranked.’ This has myriad negative effects on the profession, including intense competition to publish in overburdened disciplinary journals (remember when Hypatia had a moratorium on publishing due to “too many submissions”?), prestige bias and hiring discrimination against people who publish in ‘niche’ areas, fewer editors and referees in ‘niche’ areas due to hiring/prestige bias, and, ultimately, a loss of “creativity, diversity, and dissent” in academic philosophy, which continues its descent into bourgeois “mediocrity” (McKeown 2022: 99). The few of us doing counter-hegemonic philosophy are burdened with a disproportionate amount of unpaid professional service, and if we refuse, we contribute to our own obsolescence and isolation. 

The crux of the problem, according to McKeown, is the neoliberalization of philosophy, which is continuously co-opted by capitalist elites, people who want to hire corporate shills and shut out disobedient, contrarian, and killjoy philosophers. Academic bureaucrats don’t care about humanistic goals like creativity, accessibility, and justice. They care about attracting corporate donors, increasing enrollment, raising tuition, burnishing reputations, silencing criticism, and suppressing dissent. In short, bureaucratic authorities only care about one thing: the bottom line, the balance of profits over expenses in a fiscal year. To a bureaucrat, knowledge is a ‘sellable commodity’ and critical thinking is a ‘transferable skill.’ 

The corporate takeover of academia has led to epistemic stagnation. McKeown describes the emerging academic landscape as “nepotistic,” “homogenized,” and “uncreative.” I would add “bland,” “boring,” and “sad.”It’s like the “sad beige parenting trend,” which is itself part of a broader “beige conspiracy,” or insurgence of a rising beige aesthetic. Why is everything becoming beige? “You see, beige—and any neutral colors really—are great colors when you consider resale value” (Morgane 2015). Beige sells. Neoliberal philosophy papers are ‘beige papers,’ safe papers, papers that cater to shareholders, that confirm people’s commonsense intuitions. But as Robin Dembroff notes, ‘commonsense’ is relative to a specific cultural ideal. In philosophy, the ‘commonsense’ of the academic elite happens to “align with the commonsense of the culturally powerful,” including the bureaucrats running academia, whereas “the commonsense of the racialized, poor, queer, transgender, or disabled is considered philosophically irrelevant ‘ideology,’ ‘activism,’ or ‘delusion’” (2020: 403). Marginalized philosophers are under a heavier “epistemological burden” when it comes to proving our philosophical ideas, and this translates into fewer top-tier publications, fewer jobs, and fewer paid referee gigs (ibid). Hence, the academic ‘beige conspiracy’ continues.   

The journal system is a striking example of both elite capture and epistemic stagnation. On the standard business model, academic publishers charge libraries exorbitant fees to purchase bundles of journals, whilst paying editors, authors, and referees nothing at all. (In theory, academics are supposed to receive a ‘professional service’ fee built into their salary, but most of us don’t). This predatory system has allowed publishers to make absurd profits. Elsevier, for example, has an estimated profit margin of 40%, higher than Microsoft, Google, and Coca Cola, which, unlike publishers, actually have to pay their workers (CSU Libraries). But this isn’t Elsevier’s only income stream. People who lack institutional access – that is, most of the global population – are invited to purchase a single article for $30. If authors want to avoid the paywall system, they can choose open-access publishing, though it could cost them as much as $900. In the wake of boycotts, protests, and the rise of Sci Hub, Elsevier is moving toward a more open-access model, which would rip off authors rather than readers by charging the former a publication fee that only the most elite academics can afford – that is, in philosophy, mainly privileged, white, able-bodied men, the leaders of the beige conspiracy. (Sorry, #NotAllWhiteMen). If people can’t afford to publish, then perhaps the referee crisis will subside, but at the cost of diversity, risk-taking, and epistemic justice. 

Another problem is that even if you find a diamond open-access journal (like FPQ) that doesn’t charge authors or readers, it can take years to publish a single paper due to the referee crisis. This makes it very difficult to publish on anything topical, which will be old news by the time it comes out. (Who wants to read a paper on AI written three years ago?)

So, what can be done about the referee crisis? Philosophers have submitted various proposals, ranging from increasing acceptance rates (which Wiley is doing, for profit), to reducing word limits, to soliciting fewer referee reports, to (worst of all) banning grad students from publishing, and more. But none of these proposals addresses the systemic issues, including the neoliberalization of academia and the hyper-exploitation of the academic underclass. Remember, the referee crisis isn’t just about not having enough willing referees. It’s also about not having enough referees in underrepresented areas due to prestige bias and hiring discrimination; taxing minorities with intense professional-service workloads; refusing to translate ‘niche’ publications into jobs and academic capital; and allowing predatory publishers to exploit and/or exclude the most marginalized scholars. 

To overcome the referee crisis, we need revolutionary strategies and collective action. To quote McKeown, “if Marx or Keynes were alive today, they would be shocked to see how far the profession has degenerated” (2022: 100). Philosophers need to invest in coalitional, long-term strategies. In the meantime, I’ll share one of my present coping mechanisms: blogging. Blog posts come out quickly, are less gatekept, tend to be easier to publish, are open-access, don’t have paywalls, aren’t owned by predatory publishers, and are fairly diverse. There are blogs on crip theory, addict philosophy, environmental sustainability, and more. While the blogosphere is far from utopian, at least it doesn’t help line the coffers of for-profit publishers. If you’re not going to get paid, then you might as well not get paid for blogging. At least then you don’t have to wait 2 years for your labor of love to get published.  

Of course, blogging might not get you a job, but neither will publishing in ‘reputable’ journals if you don’t have the right pedigree, connections, social identity, and other class signifiers. In fact, students from unranked departments consistently publish more than students from ranked departments, but still get fewer jobs (De Cruz 2018), which shows that publishing in journals hardly matters. If you accept an adjunct gig after graduating, you’re basically fucked, so why help the journal-industrial complex? But if you get tenure, you have job security, so why publish behind a paywall? Why should anyone finance Elsevier’s CEOs’ yachts? (The same argument applies to Wiley and other exploitative publishing companies). 

If you do choose to keep participating in the journal racket, god help you. Being an editor of a niche issue of a niche journal gave me nightmares, and my experiences with publishing have not been smooth sailing, either. I’m about ready to jump ship. If you see a better way forward, please share your thoughts in the comments. If not, see you on the open waters!

An image of me, a white settler with black hair and a blue lifejacket, in a green kayak, holding a yellow-and-black paddle, with a beagle-weiner dog in my lap, on a lake.