Content area
Full Text
TIME AND MONEY: The journal Synthese, founded in 1934, has an international reputation among scholars concerned with logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Unfortunately, not all of that reputation is based on the articles appearing in its pages. With an institutional subscription rate of $1,652 a year for its print edition, Synthese, which is published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, in the Netherlands, is easily one of the most expensive journals in the humanities. And until recently, publishing one's work in the journal taxed even a philosopher's patience: Papers took at least a year to referee, and sometimes another year to get into print.
All of that has changed under John Symons, the journal's editor, appointed in 2002. Mr. Symons, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso, circulates manuscripts electronically, so the review process for an unsolicited manuscript has been reduced to about three months. "But reputation tends to change very slowly," says Mr. Symons.
In hopes of improving relations with the journal's public, the editor had planned to write an editorial to explain the changes. But last month, in the face of continued complaints, he wrote an open letter that appeared on the Web log of Brian Leiter, a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of The Philosophical Gourmet Report, an influential annual survey that ranks philosophy graduate programs. Mr. Symons...