Daily Nous has reported that a new editorial team has resurrected the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs (PPA), owned by Wiley. This news comes barely a month after I published a call to action on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY urging philosophers to boycott Wiley and other predatory publishers. Here, I will review some of Wiley’s offenses against PPA’s former editorial board, and their affronts to epistemic responsibility in general. Then, I will respond to the new editor Jason Brennan’s sophistical justification for his decision. Finally, I will argue that journals should publish a higher volume of content, albeit in a diamond open-access format, not for a fee from readers and authors. We need accessibility as well as volume if we want to counteract the pervasive ableism in professional philosophy.  

Philosophers Support Soulless Corporation 

In May of 2024, the editorial board of PPA unanimously resigned in protest of Wiley’s predatory publishing model, which, according to editor-in-chief Anna Stitz, involved pressuring editors to publish more open-access content to increase revenues for executives. Stitz explained,

Their current company-wide strategy for maximizing revenue is to force the journals they own to publish as many articles as possible to generate maximum author fees. Where Editors refuse to do that, they exert all the pressure they can, up to and including dismissal, as in this case… All political philosophers and theorists who care about the journals in our field have an interest in showing Wiley that it can’t get away with this.

This was not Wiley’s first assault on an editorial board’s independence. In April 2023, Wiley fired Robert Goodin, the founding and longtime editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy (JPP), for refusing to comply with their editorial demands. Firing an editor for exercising editorial independence shows utter disdain for the most basic standards of epistemic responsibility. In response to this affront, the editorial team resigned en masse, going on to launch a diamond open-access journal (with no fees for authors or readers) called Free and Equal.

The reasons they gave for their mass resignation included the argument that for-profit publishers like Wiley: 

• exploit their monopoly position to sharply raise prices, unduly burdening subscribing libraries and shutting out other institutions and individuals from access to research. 
• reinforce academic inequality [by charging authors a fee for open-access publishing, which marginalizes] scholars with access to fewer resources [who] are unable to pay the fees that make their work freely accessible.
•  try to publish as many articles as possible [for profit, not for genuine epistemic reasons]. 

As if this weren’t enough, Wiley has tried to sue the Internet Archive, a free e-book lending website, as well as SciHub and LibGen, which provide unrestricted access to copyrighted articles and books for those without library subscriptions or the means to pay for articles.

Why on Earth would philosophers support Wiley – a publisher with a proven track record of coercing editors, charging authors outrageous open-access fees, burdening libraries with exorbitant subscription costs, and suing knowledge-sharing platforms? What does their solidarity with Wiley achieve, other than showing Wiley that it can, as Stitz put it, “get away with this”? What does this betrayal signal if not that philosophers will side with corporations over their own colleagues, will deny that power imbalances inherently affect editorial independence, and will choose piecemeal liberal reforms over revolutionary change at every turn?  

Wiley now knows with certainty that it can bully editors until they resign, then simply find a new editorial team ready and willing to fill their places at no cost. One commentator on Daily Nous compared the new editors to scabs breaking a picket line. This analogy falls short only because the new editors aren’t even getting paid. The cost of their loyalty is nothing!

Philosophers Support Inaccessible Design

Readers of this blog are likely already aware that Wiley’s publishing model is egregiously ableist, but this point bears repeating. Universal access is a matter of disability justice, and Wiley’s publishing model fails to meet the basic principles of universal design, which aim to ensure that “products, environments, and communications” are “usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without adaptation or specialized design.” These principles include: 

1. Equitable Use: The design does not disadvantage or stigmatize any group of users.
2. Flexibility in Use: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.

Wiley’s journals are not designed for equitable use. They cater to people who can afford open-access publishing fees, have access to paywalled libraries, and are affiliated with institutions that have extensive library catalogues – in other words, academic elites, who are overwhelmingly nondisabled due to academic ableism. The academic underclass, who often rely on file-sharing websites like The Internet Archive andLibGen, are having their access to research threatened by lawsuits filed by inaccessible/ableist publishing houses like Wiley. 

Wiley’s journals also fail to accommodate a wide range of preferences and abilities, since they are designed for academic elites with institutional affiliations, i.e., primarily nondisabled people. Wiley’s publishing model does not serve people who lack institutional affiliation, prefer not to pay $30 for a single paywalled journal article, prefer not to pay thousands of dollars to publish a single open-access paper, and prefer not to support a neoliberal publishing system that generates $1.6 billion dollars in annual revenues for Wiley executives, while authors, referees, and editors go unpaid. This neoliberal model of knowledge-distribution increases ‘choice’ and ‘accessibility’ in the same way that private healthcare does: wealthy people have many options, while oppressed people have none. 

Supporting this ableist publishing model is a political choice – one that the former editors of PPA denounced. The new editorial board has chosen to invest in principles of inaccessible design, and we should not support them if we care about accessibility and disability justice.

Philosophers Support Anti-Democratic Neoliberal Sophist

Brennan defends his decision to lead a new editorial board by saying that, although he “presumes” that his decision “will upset some people,” he is “not trying to antagonize anyone.” This response depoliticizes Brennan’s cooperation with Wiley by treating it a matter of personal disagreement – something to be debated in the philosophical arena – rather than a pollical choice that lends power and credence to a bloodthirsty corporation. If we refuse to cooperate with Wiley, perhaps we can hasten its demise, making room for more democratic, accessible, and epistemically-responsible publishing models. The problem with the new journal isn’t that it hurts academics’ feelings, but that it hurts marginalized academics’ survival in the profession, as well as the public’s access to academic knowledge. That is, Brennan’s choice is an affront to epistemic responsibility and democratic legitimacy.  

Brennan continues,

I know some people believe it would be better if, in the long run, all journals followed the Philosopher’s Imprint [open access] model. Perhaps they’re right. But in the short term, the reality remains that many of the top philosophy journals (such as Noûs and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) are Wiley journals, while the vast majority of our top journals are with Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Brill, Elsevier, Sage, and other private entities. Anyone with a principled stance against publishing with commercial publishers will thereby have to limit themselves to just a few outlets.

This appeal to the status quo can justify any number of injustices. “I know some people believe it would be better if more philosophers pursued their interest in critical disability theory, but in the short term, the reality remains that there are virtually no jobs in that area, so we should advise students to pursue more marketable areas of specialization, and forget about disability studies – there’s no money there.” “I know some people believe it would be better if we abolished the prison-industrial complex, but in the short term, the reality remains that prisons are the backbone of the American economy, so anyone with a principled stance against mass incarceration will be limiting a prime source of income for unincarcerated Americans.” The argument, in short, is that we should always operate within the confines of the neoliberal market, making incremental reforms at the margins, but never addressing the rotten core. Working with predatory publishers is ‘a good policy’ because they own most of the journals – and they always will if there’s an endless supply of free labor!

The new editorial team’s submission to neoliberal market principles would make Karl Marx spin in his grave. However, it also sheds light on why professional philosophy remains stubbornly able-bodied, despite tenured professors’ constant promises to diversity the profession. If tenured professors are more loyal to Wiley – a predatory publisher that exploits unpaid academics to pay its executives huge bonuses every year – than their own colleagues, then how can we expect solidarity from them when it comes to disability justice? Brennan’s defence of his allyship with Wiley explains why we cannot expect revolutionary change in philosophy, either in the short-term or the long-run. Too many philosophers are committed to what Robert Chapman calls “liberal reformism,” “a liberal, rights-based framework, which focuses on incremental reforms within the current system.” Liberal reformism purports to address structural injustices while, in reality, protecting the status quo. 

Brennan adds, “commercial considerations have no bearing on the decisions of the editorial staff. This editorial autonomy is protected by contract.” This liberal notion of the function of a contract overlooks and obscures how imbalances of power affect epistemic standing. Asymmetries of power threaten epistemic integrity inherently, since economic powerhouses can, and often do, use their vast wealth to influence and silence people in extrajudicial ways.   

 Jonathan Quong raises a similar concern in a comment on Crooked Timber:   

I have no idea what sort of contract the newly announced editors have signed with Wiley, but a pressing question is this: who has the power to remove the EIC? If that power rests with Wiley, as opposed to the editorial board, then there’s no genuine editorial independence. And even if the contract does not grant Wiley the unilateral power to remove the EIC, one must think about the relative power imbalance. Wiley is a multi-billion dollar company that can afford a protracted legal battle in the case of a contractual dispute—this won’t be true of almost all academics who might take up the role of EIC.

Ultimately, Wiley’s economic status threatens the editorial independence and democratic legitimacy of the new editorial board. This may not bother Brennan, however, since he is against democracy and in favour of enormous imbalances of wealth and power. In Against Democracy, Brennan argues that “no one has a fundamental right to any share of political power, and exercising political power does most of us little good,” and in Why It’s OK to Want to Be Rich, he argues that “in general, the more money you make, the more you already do for others.” Taken together, these books undermine any confidence one could possibly have in Brennan’s ability to act in the interest of the philosophical community or the public, and they confirm that he is in the back pocket of corporate elites. (Brennan has, in addition, received over a million dollars from the right-wing Templeton Foundation, and has defended the acceptance of dirty Koch money by academics like Brandon Warmke, despite philosophers’ objections that billionaire philanthropy threatens the epistemic, moral, and democratic legitimacy of the profession). Brennan’s books are, in my humble opinion, nothing short of philosophical sophistry in support of corporate bootlicking. He has used the veneer of philosophical legitimacy to sell the public an updated version of Reagan’s debunked theory of trickle-down economics, and to defend (ableist) voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression. This alone shows that he does not have the moral integrity to edit a journal of any kind, let alone one dedicated to political, legal, and social philosophy. 

I for one will not be publishing in the new PPA, or any other Wiley assets, now or in the future. 

Philosophers Choose Impact Factor over Disability Justice 

Something the resigning editors of PPA and JPP did not address in their resignation statement is the ableism inherent in mainstream editorial practice at virtually all high impact-factor journals. Top-ranked journals use the pretext of ‘high standards’ to exclude non-normative philosophy, including crip theory, queer theory, and Marxist philosophy. Editors should be publishing more content, because increasing volume creates more opportunities to publish a diversity of voices, a broader range of topics, more interdisciplinary contributions, greater experimentation and innovation, and global representation. The aim of publishing more content, however, should not depend on allowing for-profit publishers to churn out open-access papers for higher profit margins.  

Increasing publication volume is especially crucial given the dearth of resources on disability justice. In fact, there is virtually no limit to the amount of epistemically-valuable first-hand crip perspectives that we can publish. Even if every journal were to publish 100 papers on crip theory this year, it would not be enough to counterbalance the centuries of eugenic propaganda still in wide circulation. Intersectionality, furthermore, necessitates a massive increase in published content in order to cover the diversity of epistemically-valuable standpoints on disability. (For example, disabled-White-queer-migrant standpoints like mine differ substantially from disabled-Black-lesbian standpoints, and these are just two of the countless positionalities needed to understand the nature of disability and the mechanics of ableism). We are lightyears away from the minimal level of intersectional analysis required for a basic understanding of disability, including its social construction, history, and cultural variations. It is preposterous, then, to suggest that journals could be publishing too muchcontent, while there’s still so much to say about disability and ableism, not just in the United States, where most publications originate, but around the world. This content alone could fill dozens of journals. However, this is precisely the type of content that gets ‘weeded out’ by high impact-factor publications with ‘rigorous’ editorial standards and low publication rates.  

In general, the value that philosophy places on impact factor ensures that journals will publish biased content, for reasons that I addressed in my previous call to action. As I said there, 

To publish in high-impact journals, researchers often favour novelty over replication, cherry-pick data to support more publishable conclusions, focus on publishable/popular topics, and use popular research methods. In philosophy, this means publishing on Anglo-American philosophy using analytic methods. As a result, Continental, Eastern, Marxist, intersectional, feminist, decolonial, queer, and crip philosophy, amongst other non-LEMMING subjects, are all marginalized. As Maeve McKeown puts it, when academics are rewarded for publishing in high-impact journals, “this is detrimental to our field, marginalizing people, topics, and methodologies these journals do not support (which usually align with already structurally marginalized peoples and modes of knowledge).” Academic philosophy’s reliance on impact factor for hiring and promotions reduces epistemic freedom and demographic diversity in the profession, generating what I have elsewhere called Sad Beige Philosophy: safe, familiar research using the standard methods. 

Consequently, high impact-factor journals publish the least epistemically-valuable content. 

This does not mean that we should support Wiley’s neoliberal quest for profits. The profit-driven model is ableist because it restricts access to knowledge, especially for oppressed groups. High impact-factor journals with low acceptance rates tend to be ableist because they exclude marginalized perspectives that are less marketable, while favouring tried-and-true, marketable standpoints and methods (which I have elsewhere labelled Sad Beige Philosophy). In other words, profit-driven publishing and rank-driven publishing are both ableist. What we need are accessible venues that publish a wealth of intersectional content, thereby increasing knowledge, diversity, and democratic legitimacy in the profession and beyond. 

Where can we find such venues? There are many options, ranging from philosophy blogs like this one, to low-impact-factor, diamond open-access journals like Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, to independent book publishers like Pluto Press, which is committed to making radical scholarship widely accessible. And we can, of course, continue creating new accessible venues as well. What we should not do is continue supporting ableist, for-profit publishing houses, or editors who favour corporate elites over their oppressed colleagues.  

 Solidarity.