Wiley’s decision to remove the longtime editor of a highly regarded philosophy journal from his post has sparked outrage, resignations, and promises of boycott. The dispute underscores how the incentives of the academic-publishing giants can run counter to those of the scholars who produce the knowledge that helps fund them.
Last week, Robert E. Goodin wrote an email informing academics who help run The Journal of Political Philosophy that Wiley, which owns the journal, had removed him as editor, effective at the end of 2023. Goodin, who had received the news in November, wrote that Wiley was not contractually required to offer an explanation, and it did not.
Many associate editors and board members said they would resign, praising Goodin as a brilliant and dedicated editor who over a 33-year tenure made the journal into one of the most respected of its field in the world. Some have sharply criticized the publisher for what they consider a bad and baffling decision, especially because academics involved in the journal’s management were not consulted. “Wiley is making a catastrophic mistake,” Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford, wrote in his resignation from the journal’s editorial board. “It will be virtually impossible to reestablish JPP as the immensely distinguished journal it has become once Bob has left the helm.”
Rebecca Walter, an associate editorial director at Wiley, emailed the academics to offer an explanation. The decision was “not taken lightly,” Walter told them. She cited a “complete breakdown in professional communication with Professor Goodin.”
Many academics are skeptical of Wiley’s reasoning, saying it likely belies more substantive issues between the publisher and the political philosopher.
Goodin declined an on-the-record interview with The Chronicle.
While it’s unclear exactly what friction arose between Goodin and Wiley, publishing more articles per year became a major sticking point for the journal’s three co-editors, after they learned Wiley had terminated its agreement with Goodin late last year.
Christian Barry, one of the co-editors, told The Chronicle that he and the two other co-editors discussed among themselves and with Goodin what they should do. While they strongly disliked how Goodin was treated, they also recognized the work Goodin had poured into the journal and its important role in academe, which felt like it was worth preserving. With Goodin’s blessing, Barry said, they began discussing with Wiley representatives the contours of an agreement to take over editorship of the journal.
The conversation turned to numbers. Ed Colby, a Wiley spokesperson, told The Chronicle in an email that “a moderate increase of two additional articles per year had been proposed” to the co-editors. “Wiley is always looking for sustainable ways to grow our journals in close consultation with our editors, especially as we transition to open access and research becomes more international.”
According to Barry, Wiley’s original request was much higher. The journal had published 24 articles in 2022, per Barry. Wiley first proposed that the journal publish 30 articles in 2024, 32 in 2025, and 34 in 2026 — a more than 40-percent increase from its current level of production over a three-year span, Barry said. “It seemed very important to them that there be an upward trajectory.”
After some back and forth, Wiley agreed to a lower starting point of publishing 26 articles in the upcoming year and eventually publishing 34 articles in Year Five, Barry said. But Wiley also proposed, should the scholars not hit the mark, that the parties would discuss and agree on an action plan, he said. From the co-editors’ perspective, that was a no-go. They must have power to publish less than the target, to preserve the journal’s quality and their editorial discretion.
It should be clear that a publisher must find common ground with the academics who publish their journals if those journals are to be a commercial success.
A high-quality academic journal is supposed to be selective, Barry said. He and his co-editors were not opposed to accepting more articles if, say, they were all of a sudden receiving 20 percent more excellent submissions. But “that’s just not really the way things work.”
To hit those targets would require lots of work and fundamental changes to the journal’s operations, Barry said. The journal would likely need to publish more and different types of content, such as review essays, which takes time and resources, he said. Also, the advice of reviewers who recommended against publishing an article would need to increasingly be ignored, Barry said, in order to hit a number.
And even if the co-editors made those changes, Barry said, they worried “at the end of this period, Wiley would still want more.”
Wiley representatives were “very pleasant and cordial — and made the right kind of noises about the importance of quality and reputation in the abstract,” Nicholas Southwood, another co-editor, said in an email to The Chronicle. “But what they were actually proposing was another matter.” He also said that the company was “repeatedly unable or unwilling to give us the kinds of assurances we were asking for.”
In an email, Geena De Rose, another Wiley spokesperson, said that deciding journal output “is always a collaboration between journal editors and Wiley,” and that the publisher “consistently discusses editorial scope and publishing opportunities with our editors.” De Rose also said that Wiley and Goodin only discussed publishing more articles in the context of clearing a backlog, and that did not play a role in its decision to end its agreement with him.
Ultimately, Barry said, he and the other co-editors “were not confident that we could have adequate autonomy in making our editorial decisions into the future in ways that would not be affected by the strong impetus to increase content.” They decided they would no longer pursue taking over editorship of the journal and plan to step down from their roles at the end of this year, once Goodin is no longer editor.
Goodin’s removal, first reported by Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog and the Daily Nous, has prompted vigorous discussion online about how academic publishers’ — specifically, Wiley’s — incentives to put out more content can, in some scholars’ view, run counter to the role journals serve in the academic ecosystem.
Complicating matters is the shifting financial terrain of scholarly publishing, particularly the push to make scholarship more accessible. Under the traditional model, new research can be accessed by paying a fee or through a campus library’s subscription with a publisher. Open-access publishing imposes a different financial model. Through what’s called “gold” open access, an article’s author, university, or funding agency pays a processing charge in order for the article to be released for free.
Wiley has recently announced a number of major open-access agreements, such as an expansion of an agreement with the University of California to all 10 campuses. Anna Stilz, editor in chief of the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, also a Wiley publication, and a professor of politics and human values at Princeton University, said that likely means the company’s revenue is increasingly coming from those processing fees and that the publisher makes money not from the quality of what they publish but from the quantity.
The incentives in this model are “at odds” with what the profession expects journals to do, she told The Chronicle, including culling a number of high-quality articles that are path-breaking and giving careful feedback to those whose work is not chosen for publication. Those functions are no longer possible if those journals must massively increase the number of articles they publish, Stilz said.
De Rose, the Wiley spokesperson, said in an email that while open access makes more peer-reviewed research widely available, “it does not and must not come at the expense of quality. Wiley made the decision to embrace open access in response to the expressed desire for open access publishing models from the academic community.”
Stilz had her own run-in with Wiley over pressure to increase scholarly production. In June of 2019, according to Stilz, who was an associate editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs at the time, Wiley told the journal that in order to improve its performance to the publisher’s satisfaction, it needed to accept 35 articles within 60 days. Historically the journal has published between 12 to 16 articles per year, per Stilz.
Wiley continued to seek a major increase in the number of articles the journal published, only relenting “when we threatened a lawsuit to enforce the terms of our contract with Wiley, which contains strong guarantees for the integrity and independence of our body of Associate Editors in the choice of an Editor-in-Chief and in the operation of the journal,” Stilz said in an email.
Colby told The Chronicle that the current publishing team at Wiley has worked on Philosophy & Public Affairs since April of 2020. “We can’t speak to previous conversations with the editor but can confirm that we have not discussed an increase in article numbers for the journal in the past three years.”
The Journal of Political Philosophy’s immediate future is up in the air. Hundreds of academics have signed a petition refusing to submit papers to the journal, review them, or join its editorial board once Goodin is no longer editor, unless various bars are met, including that “full editorial independence of the editors over the journal’s publications is restored.”
The broader lesson? “Probably that there is always a potential conflict between the interests of a commercial publisher like Wiley and the commitments of academic researchers,” Philip Pettit, a professor of human values at Princeton University who resigned as an associate editor of the journal, told The Chronicle in an email. (Pettit is not related to this article’s author.) “It should be clear that a publisher must find common ground with the academics who publish their journals if those journals are to be a commercial success.”
In this case, in Pettit’s estimation, “the search for profits has led Wiley to take a step too far.”
