Brian Leiter tells the frustrating story of an anonymous UK philosophy professor's mistreatment by a peer-reviewed philosophy journal. In brief, the professor submitted an article to the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly in January 2020 and was told that the review process would take ten weeks. The ten weeks passed without any response. After multiple inquiries, the professor was told that the article was out for review and awaiting the second reviewer's report. Five months later, the professor was finally told that the paper had never been, and would not be, sent out for review. As the professor put it, "In sum, 13 months’ wait for a desk rejection with no feedback."
But that is not why I am posting about this fiasco. Mistakes happen everywhere and the Leiter Report fully covered this one for the appropriate audience. My concern is the PPQ's explanation to the author. Leiter calls it "appropriately apologetic," but I disagree. Here it is, with the objectionable part in my italics:
Due to a recently discovered mistake in our records from the past year, the email you received concerning your submission having passed initial review was sent in error and your submission had not been previously submitted for an initial review. We regret to inform you that after having sent your submission through an initial review our editors have decided not to publish your manuscript. The journal policy is to provide comments only on articles that receive external review, and due to the fact that this records error affected several submissions we are unfortunately unable to make an exception in this case despite the long delay in our decision.
We know this situation is unacceptable and we sincerely apologize for the unfair burden our error has imposed on you. We are making significant changes in the operations of the journal to ensure this does not happen in the future.
I think this response is unacceptable. After sitting on the professor's submission for 13 months, potentially doing great professional damage, PPQ owed more than an apology. The journal editors had a moral duty to make some amends by at least explaining the reasons for the rejection, so that the professor could strengthen the article before submitting it elsewhere. The fact that their error "affected several submissions" is no excuse for failing to make any effort at all to remedy some of the damage. The reference to making "an exception" verges on insulting, as though the UK professor was asking for special treatment.
How much effort would it have taken for the "editors" (PPQ's plural) who did the initial review to explain their decision? According to its website, PPQ has seven editors. The editorial board comprises the entire "Faculty of the School of Philosophy, USC." The University of Southern California has 31 tenure line philosophy professors as well as emeriti, lecturers, and adjuncts. Some of these editors should have devoted as much time as necessary to minimally compensate the UK professor (and evidently several others) for PPQ's blunder, even recruiting outside colleagues if necessary to find appropriate experts to comment on the paper's evident shortcomings. Their failure to provide, or at least offer, even minimal feedback should be an embarrassment to everyone involved.
When you wrong someone, you ought to do what you can to make it right.
[Note: This post has been slightly edited for clarity.]
I would go further. Under the circumstances, I think that PPQ is estopped, morally and perhaps even legally (!), from desk-rejecting the manuscripts for which it did this. It should send them all for external review.
Thanks, James. I thought of that, but it seems unfair to ask external reviewers to spend time on a manuscript that is destined for rejection. It is not possible for PPQ to make the UK professor whole, which is why I believe the editors should spend their own time helping make the article better so that it may be published elsewhere.
That's a good point. I suppose my cynicism may be such that it is not actually clear to me that all of the articles in this category are truly "destined" for rejection. If they are, then your solution is probably better. I think we agree that PPQ "owes" the affected authors the equivalent of a full external review, so the questions are what that entails and how to provide it.
Yes, the "equivalent of a full external review" would at least provide some compensation for the lengthy delay and mistreatment.
I agree with the gist of Professor Lubet's comments. I would just note that USC has about 20 tenure-stream faculty in philosophy, many of those listed are courtesy appointments from other departments who are generally not much involved with PPQ. Still, they have enough intellectual resources to offer substantive feedback to the authors who were wronged.
I am writing in my capacity as Chair of the Editorial Committee for the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly to explain what happened with our reviewing process over the past year—and to apologize for the burden this has placed on authors waiting for a response. We recently discovered that due to a major error in our record-keeping process, over 100 manuscripts submitted to the PPQ over a period of a little over a year were misclassified as having undergone an initial review. There was a confluence of factors that allowed the error to go undetected for so long, some due to COVID-19, some technological, and others due to a diffusion of responsibility in the reviewing process. These factors also contributed to some failures to respond to author inquiries.
When we discovered the extent of the problem we made the difficult decision to try to clear the backlog as quickly as possible, and therefore (i) to do an unusually thorough reading of papers during the internal review process to enable us to get results back to authors as quickly as possible, and (ii) not to give comments on papers that we did not send out for external review.
I take full responsibility for this situation and apologize sincerely for it. I want to make it clear, however, that the rejection of papers was not arbitrary; once we recognized what happened, each paper underwent a serious initial review process, more thorough than submitted papers normally receive. The percentage of acceptances to rejections of these papers was actually somewhat higher than it had been in previous years. We are now overhauling our processes for submission and evaluation of manuscripts to make sure not only that nothing like this happens again, but also that, going forward, the PPQ can be exemplary in giving authors quick decisions. We will announce more concrete steps in this regard soon, including new faculty editors who will be taking over after the end of this semester.
With sincere apologies, and best wishes,
Janet Levin, Chair
Editorial Committee, PPQ
A reasonable solution. At least the time won't have been totally wasted.
I wonder if this shouldn’t be cause for concern about a single department having such dominance over a “peer review” journal.