Information for Authors

• Most importantly, make sure we’re the right journal for your paper (for example, we are not the British Journal for Political Science!).

• Authors may not submit more than one paper at a time. By ‘author’, we mean the same single author or the same author team. Where author teams differ in composition, a new paper can be submitted.

• Authors may not submit another paper within three months of a final decision. By ‘author’, we mean the same single author or the same author team. Where author teams differ in composition, a new paper can be submitted.

• Please keep in mind that we apply a much higher bar for the acceptance of discussion notes compared to fully fledged articles (since notes are usually small interventions and we want to save our pages for substantial, novel contributions).

• Do not contact any of us directly about your paper. To do so would reveal your identity and we operate a triple anonymous review process. If your query concerns the suitability of your paper for the BJPS, simply submit it. If it is not appropriate, you’ll usually find out within a fortnight.

• If your paper is accepted, it will not appear in print for a long time. We will make your final draft available online within a few weeks, and this will generate a DOI. For most purposes—hiring committees, funding applications, and so on—your paper will count as published.¹Why the delay? There has been a substantial increase in the number of submissions we have received in recent years. At the same time, our acceptance rate has remained fairly stable. Thus, there are many more papers that need to be carefully guided through the production process. There are two ways to deal with this increase: (1) Impose a substantial pause on accepting new papers. This option would particularly harm early-career philosophers of science, who have a limited number of suitable venues for their work and can’t afford to wait as long as later-career folks. (2) Substantially increase the cost of the journal to cover the labour costs involved in publishing more pages per year. This option would particularly harm low-income readers and institutions. Because a delay in production is closer to an inconvenience than a harm, we’ve chosen this path.

• We follow both the British Philosophical Association/Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) Good Practice Scheme, and the Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy.

We only accept papers via our online submission system.

Papers that fail to meet the following criteria will be returned to the author(s):

• We have a non-negotiable 24-page limit for both new submissions and resubmissions. Note: This includes footnotes and appendices, but does not include title, abstract, or reference list.

• Your paper, both the main text and the footnotes, should be written in Times New Roman, 12pt, 1.5 line spacing, and 1 inch margins. (See below for how to achieve this in LaTeX.)

• Papers must be fully anonymized:
  • Refer to your own work as though it as written by someone else.
  • Avoid excessive self-citations.
  • If your paper has been presented at conferences or is in a preprint archive, please change the title and paraphrase the abstract before submitting it to the the journal. If the paper is accepted, the title may be changed back to the original (subject to editorial approval).
  • Remove all acknowledgements and even the mention of all acknowledgements (no ‘Thanks to X for pressing me on this point’ and no blank acknowledgements section, for example).
  • For more on this, read Deputy Editor Elizabeth Hannon’s How to Anonymize Your Paper.

• We accept word or pdf files.

• Do not forget to include the title and abstract on the first page of your paper.

• Citation style should be consistent and intelligible (the editors encourage authors to use an article recently published in BJPS or in any reputable philosophy journal as a model).

LaTeX-specific instructions

• LaTeX users may find the .tex file here useful for ensuring papers meet the formatting requirements for BJPS submissions.

• If this doesn’t work for you, upload your complete files during the submission process. By complete files, we mean .tex, .bib., .jpg, and anything else we’ll need to compile your correctly formatted paper in its entirety, as well as a .pdf so we can ensure everything looks right.

• If we correct the formatting and the resulting paper is longer than 24 pages, we will return it to you.

• Referees and editors must be given access to all relevant data/code.

• If the paper is published, data/code must also be available to readers.

• Data/code should not be uploaded with your paper, but rather uploaded to a suitable third-party venue (see below).

• Data/code must be suitably anonymised (the author’s identity must not be listed anywhere).

• A link to the data/code should then be added to a footnote at the first reference to it.

• Please contact the editorial office directly if:
  • data includes information about specific human subjects;
• • data or code cannot be shared, because they belong to a third party or because they contains sensitive information.

• Suitable venues
  • Avoid personal websites, dropbox (and similar), and institutional repositories.
  • Suitable venues are those that allow you to generate links to the data that keep your identity hidden and that enact version tracking, so it is obvious if and when the data or code have been altered. Three examples:
    • OSF
    • Zenodo
    • Anonymous GitHub

No matter how good our average, there are always outliers. There are a number of reasons why your paper isn’t moving through the process as fast as some others.

We rule over our Associate Editors with an iron fist, and the Chief Editors meet fortnightly, so delays as a result of matters internal to the journal are rare (Christmas breaks, illness, and so on aside) . Where they do occur due to internal matters, this is usually because after reading the two referee reports, we decide a third referee is necessary.

But the vast majority of delays stem from two sources. The first is difficulty securing referees. This can take weeks, or even months: Invite two people, await response. If the invite is declined, invite a new person. If the invite is ignored, wait seven days—giving referees anything less than five working days days receives pushback from those who want time to consider the invite—then invite someone else. Repeat perhaps twenty (and occasionally more) times.

The second major cause of delay results from referees not meeting the deadline for their reports. We ask referees to commit to returning their reports within four weeks, but we can do nothing to enforce this. We do regularly chase referees when they are late—our system does not allow us to forget about your paper and we are always working behind the scenes to get reports back as soon as possible (so emailing us about your paper won’t speed things up).