Our Mission, Vision, and Values
The state of rapid and intense flux that characterizes today’s academic institutions presents exciting opportunities to change the rules and rebuild scholarly infrastructure. To replace gatekeeping practices that discourage and exclude diverse voices working together to create new, more relevant and engaged ways of knowing, the PPJ allows authors easy access to the means of scholarly production.
The PPJ is driven by the core values of Thick Collegiality; Ethical Imagination; Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion; and Trust & Transparency. The journal’s primary ethical and political responsibilities include openly valuing the particular experiences, interests, needs, and expertise of individuals whose intellectual and activist pursuits find them in various publicly engaged settings. Facilitating access to the means of scholarly production through collaborative review processes, rather than simply focusing on outcomes, helps mobilize philosophical publics that thrive on commitments to mutual respect, care, and trust, which work toward repairing injustice in the world.
Core Values
Thick Collegiality
Members of the PPJ community work toward a thick sense of collegiality, which encourages us to share hard truths in ways that can mutually deepen and advance the impact of each other’s work. Thick collegiality is rooted in relations of mutual respect animated by a shared endeavor to develop and improve our scholarship, our communities, and our world.
Thick collegiality also means that all PPJ activities offer ample opportunities for participation, whether by engaging in Collaborative Community Review as authors, peer reviewers, or review coordinators; editing special issues of the journal, or providing feedback for reviewers, editors, or authors about the review process.
Ethical Imagination
As emerging technologies reshape the world and our relationships to one another, the PPJ depends upon the core value of ethical imagination to discern new possibilities for a more just future.
Nurtured by attentive listening, ethical imagination requires practice empathy and constructive critique. It demands that we respond with the right tension, at the right time, in the right ways to enrich the texture of our relationships with one another and render our relationships more beautiful.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Our commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion are ongoing. By actively reflecting and humbly listening humbly to the needs of the broader public and scholarly communities, we aim to uphold these commitments in all that we do.
Too often scholarly publishing engages in and reinforces exclusion rather than fostering the diversity of authors, readers, and issues in public and academic communities. Revising outdated ideas of who counts as a scholar and what counts as scholarship requires collective re-envisioning of how knowledge is developed, evaluated, and circulated through peer review and post-publication processes. Because scholarly publishing directly influences whose voices are heard, valued, and amplified in society, we actively seek scholarship on topics that focus on or carefully consider race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, disability, and more.
To redistribute control of scholarly production and support work that eschews conventional boundaries between scholarship and activism, PPJ recognizes expertise is found in many places, inside and outside the academy. Additionally, we evaluate all pieces in terms of accessibility.
Trust and Transparency
As a community-driven project founded in the spirit of thick collegiality, the PPJ urges open dialogue about our engagement strategies for public outreach and service. All are invited to pose questions, concerns, and suggestions by tweeting to @PubPhilJ, commenting on our Facebook or Humanities Commons pages, or emailing the editors directly.
By intentionally putting our values into practice, the PPJ seeks to build trust within the community and between the PPJ and the wider public. Insofar as the PPJ is defined by how it facilitates publicly shaped scholarship and its vision of scholarship as a series of collective acts toward advancing a just world, it is the greater public itself to which the PPJ owes accountability.
Ethical Conduct
We reject all forms of discrimination based on the race, color, gender orientation, sexual orientation, abilities, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, religion, culture, age, education, and institutional or organizational affiliations of PPJ colleagues. We ask that every participant in the PPJ community demonstrate respect for the perspectives, experiences, and rights of others by practicing habits of constructive communication and understanding that all are equally encouraged to share their truths openly.
Please notify the editorial team of any incidents that violate these community ethics standards. In cases of major or multiple violations, the editors reserve the right to remove content pertaining to the violations, to discontinue individual involvement in the PPJ activity in which the incident occurred or individual involvement in any and all PPJ activities, and/or to prohibit use of and access to community platforms. Major violations include, but are not limited to,
- discriminating against, attacking, threatening, harassing, or silencing others;
- posting discriminatory content or content that, if distributed, would expose its composer(s) or any others persons named therein to potential harm;
- sharing or taking credit for original ideas or content without receiving consent from or giving appropriate attribution to the creators.
Violations are considered minor when they do not involve any of the actions highlighted above but otherwise conflict with the values of the PPJ community. Minor violations will be handled on a case-by-case basis, beginning, whenever possible, with conversations that support clear, mutual insight into how the action under consideration conflicts with one or more of our community values.
Learn more about copyrights, licensing, liability and indemnity, and our take down policy on our Terms & Conditions page.
The Community Ethics Statement
The purpose of the Community Ethics Statement is to encourage composers to articulate how their submission reflects the PPJ’s fourth style criterion: engagement with scholarly dialogue. We aim to model and promote citation practices that reflect careful consideration of whose voices are being credited. Submissions are excellent examples of this criterion when they demonstrate awareness of, deep engagement with, and proper citation of the arguments, experiences, or findings of individuals working within the communities to which the issues under consideration are of particular relevance and concern. Submissions must demonstrate excellence in meeting this criterion to be considered for publication in the Journal. Criteria for excellence include:
- Citation of a wide variety of authors working on the subject matter under consideration;
- Deep engagement with cited material rather than simple reference; and
- Inclusion of details or links necessary to find the original source in question.
Later-stage drafts prepared for Collaborative Community Review are expected to exemplify this criterion at the time of submission, and Community Ethics Statements should provide specific explanations of how the submissions represent engaged scholarship. Failure to meet this requirement at the time of submission will not result in refusal to review a submission, but statements accompanying earlier-stage drafts should indicate composer reflection on instances where this criterion is satisfactorily or excellently met and areas in need of improvement, as well as commitment to improving engagement with scholarly dialogue as the review process unfolds. Writing this brief statement helps to advance the scholarly and ethical integrity of the work under consideration.
In cases where submissions seeking publication in the Journal meet all PPJ community ethics standards except for that of substantial engagement with pertinent scholarly dialogue, and/or when composers have not tendered a Community Ethics Statement, it is at the discretion of the editorial team whether to invite the author(s) to revise and resubmit.
