In scholarly-journal publishing, as in marriage, love can have very little to do with one’s decision to stay committed to a partner.
Lately, scholarly societies have been tempted to make alliances with well-heeled suitors. A commercial outfit like Springer or Wiley-Blackwell commands vast global marketing and distribution networks; a specialized nonprofit publisher can offer publishing platforms and services that university presses may find hard to match. And such assets often help seal the deal. The American Anthropological Association, for instance, announced in September that it would leave the University of California Press for Wiley-Blackwell. And this year the American Astronomical Society abandoned the University of Chicago Press for IOP Publishing, part of the nonprofit Institute of Physics.
But another society, the Association for Symbolic Logic, has reversed the trend and decided to ditch a commercial publisher for a university press. It has severed its ties to Springer, which owns and publishes the Journal of Philosophical Logic, a journal edited by the association, and formed an alliance with Cambridge University Press.
Together the association and the press will start the Review of Symbolic Logic as a successor to the Springer-owned journal. Revenue from the new journal will be shared between the parties, while the association retains editorial control.
All of the ASL editors of the Springer journal are switching over to the new journal, which will make its debut in June 2008, taking its place alongside the association’s two other publications, The Journal of Symbolic Logic and The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. (The group typesets those publications itself, and the American Mathematical Society handles printing and mailing.) Dues-paying members of the symbolic-logic group will receive the journal as a benefit of membership.
Those involved with the new Review say it will be broader in scope than its predecessor. The association brings together logicians who work in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, cognitive science, and other fields. It envisions its new journal as a meeting ground for work in several complementary areas, with an emphasis on philosophical logic and its applications, the history of philosophy of logic, and the philosophy and methodology of mathematics.
Penelope Maddy, president of the association and a professor of logic and the philosophy of science at the University of California at Irvine, points to a number of “growth industries” that the Review will spotlight — for instance, how scholars in computational linguistics, game theory and decision theory, and cognitive science apply the tools and methods of philosophical logic. “It’s all about logic,” she says, “but you can come at logic from very different disciplinary perspectives.”
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“Different perspectives” would be a kind way to sum up the association’s relationship with Springer. Thanks to the vicissitudes of corporate mergers, Springer is the latest in a line of commercial publishers to own the Journal of Philosophical Logic, which was founded in 1972. The association has edited it since 1987.
Working with Springer was a headache almost from the start, says G. Aldo Antonelli, coordinating editor of the journal and chairman of the department of logic and the philosophy of science at Irvine. Papers went missing, typesetting went awry. “Authors were up in arms,” he says. The editors would submit clean manuscripts and “get page proofs back that were full of typos and errors.”
The association even tried to buy the journal from Springer, but its offer was rebuffed. So in 2006, when Cambridge signed on to handle book projects for the group, talk quickly turned to a new journal as well.
Charles Erkelens, editorial director for the humanities at Springer, downplays the troubles in the relationship. “There has been an occasional article where things have gone wrong and we’ve fixed them again, but I have no bad relations with ASL in any way,” he says. The journal has done well for Springer, and the company will continue to publish it, with a new editorial board. “It’s fine for philosophical logic to have more outlets for people to publish in,” he says. “I still think the Journal of Philosophical Logic will remain the most important of those.”
David Tranah, editorial director of mathematical sciences at Cambridge University Press, was matchmaker for both the books program and the new journal. Commercial publishers like Springer “have been vigorously courting learned societies,” he says, but often “what they require is more than they can offer.” Cambridge has vowed not to be so demanding. “We do not insist on ownership, we do not insist on retaining copyright,” he says. “We want to explore possibilities for them. It’s a different sort of partnership.”
The union may be a meeting of minds, but both partners stand to gain in financial terms as well. Previously “we were putting in all this work and Springer was making pots of money,” says Charles Steinhorn, the association’s secretary-treasurer, who is a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. If Cambridge’s calculations are correct, he says, “we should be able to support new scholarly activities” with the extra income — a graduate fellowship, perhaps, or research support. Meanwhile Cambridge has an incentive to be active on the journal’s behalf, spreading the word through its networks of editors and marketers.
The association’s officers say they’re over the moon. “We were nowhere near this with Springer,” Ms. Maddy says. “Assuming the Review does as well as we think it will do, this is a great boon to the organization.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 54, Issue 6, Page A14