Adrian Piper - The Berlin Journal of Philosophy

Piper founded The Berlin Journal of Philosophy in 2011. The Journal is an English-language blind-submission, double-blind, peer-reviewed, open-access journal that aims to publish articles on all topics in the four traditional major areas of philosophical specialization, namely epistemology & metaphysics, logic, value theory, the history of philosophy, and their established subspecialties. It innovates in adhering strictly to simultaneous policies of blind submissions, double-blind review, and anti-plagiarism. The Journal is copyrighted, administered and published by the APRA Foundation Berlin, an independent research organization unaffiliated with any department, institute, school, college, university, or other academic institution.

Piper founded the Journal while seeking to solve the problem of how to reconcile the conflicting requirements of anti-plagiarism and blind submissions in academic publishing. For those authors who aspire to peer-reviewed publications accepted exclusively on the basis of their quality, or at least to avoid treatment affected by knowledge of the author’s identity, a policy of blind submissions is a necessary supplement to double-blind reviewing: By concealing the author’s identity even from administrators, it guards against information slippage, whether intentional or unintentional, between administrators and referees. For those authors whose publications receive rather more use than mention by their colleagues, a strong and consistent anti-plagiarism policy, of the sort recommended by the Office of Research Integrity, the Committee on Publication Ethics, or the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity is equally important. These two procedures appear to be mutually incompatible: A robust blind submissions policy requires that the author’s identity not be disclosed, even to administrators, until after referees have made a positive decision on the paper; and, if a negative one, not at all. A robust anti-plagiarism policy requires that plagiarism sanctions apply independently of whether or not the paper is accepted for publication; and this, in turn, requires the author’s identity to be known at least to administrators in advance of that decision. Whereas blind submission prohibits author disclosure until after the publication decision, anti-plagiarism necessitates author disclosure before the publication decision. It would seem to be impossible to satisfy the requirements of both simultaneously.

In collaboration with the APRA Foundation Berlin webmaster, Piper developed a fully computerized procedure for submitting scholarly papers for publication in academic journals that reconciles these two desiderata. The procedure, a simple web application template, satisfies the requirements of blind submission and double-blind review, and is also compatible with a robust anti-plagiarism policy. On 7 April 2011, she publicly announced this application and offered it to any journal that might wish to consider it. But in the process of researching the mechanics of the procedure, she was “compelled to conjure in imagination the philosophy journal in which such a procedure could most easily be put to use, and concluded that would have to establish it self.” The result was The Berlin Journal of Philosophy, an innovative experiment that offers a different way of implementing the traditional values of academic research publications.

The Journal is also unusual in several other respects. It appears whenever a paper that meets the requisite quality criteria has been selected. It explicitly solicits specialized paper submissions in all areas of academic philosophy – including the history of non-Western as well as Western philosophy. It rejects the conventional conception of refereeing as an unpaid service to the field that all academics are professionally obligated to render when called. Instead, it requires referees to apply voluntarily for the job and make a contractual commitment, on the reasoning that referees will be more amenable to following rules to which they have voluntarily agreed. It also offers referees a nominal honorarium for each refereed paper that satisfies the terms of the Anonymous Referee Contract, thus explicitly acknowledging the value of their service. The Contract commits referees to specified refereeing practices, including administration of a detailed anti-plagiarism policy. This policy defines the concept of plagiarism not motivationally, but rather behaviorally and gradatim. It is the failure to meet the obligation of bibliographic citation to a source of one’s research itself, not the motive for this failure, which is held to account by the Journal’s anti-plagiarism policy. The Journal’s Anonymous Referee Contract also strictly prohibits referees from disclosing their service as referees for the Journal to anyone, and therefore from listing it on their CVs. This provision effectively protects the referee’s freedom to evaluate a submitted paper solely on its merits, without fear of professional repercussions even in those difficult and painful cases where the paper raises plagiarism issues. The price of this freedom is that the referee must relinquish the professional advantages of being identified as a referee for the Journal.

These are not standard refereeing practices in the field of academic philosophy. Whether or not they are compatible with standard practice, or offer a viable alternative to it, remains to be seen. In either case, The Berlin Journal of Philosophy offers one possible model for academic journals whose sole priority is the quality and originality of the papers submitted to them.