Update on the Problems at the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly [UPDATED with a comment from Prof. Janet Levin at USC]

[Moving this to the top of the blog with an additional comment from the chair of the PPQ editorial committee.]

This post on last week’s Faculty Lounge discussed the experience of an anonymous UK professor, as initially noted on the Leiter Report, whose submission was held up for over a year by the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Although the professor was at one point assured that the article was out for peer review, it was ultimately desk rejected without even an explanation. The delay was apparently the result of an administrative mixup, which can happen anywhere, but I criticized PPQ for not at least providing the professor with the reasons for rejecting the article, so that it could be improved before the next submission. I sent a link to USC Prof. Janet Levin, the chair of PPQ's editorial committee, who responded in the comments with a more detailed, and quite sincere, explanation of the journal's problems. I am reproducing her statement here for those who may have missed it, and I will have some observations after the jump.

I am writing in my capacity as Chair of the Editorial Committee for the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly to explain what happened with our reviewing process over the past year—and to apologize for the burden this has placed on authors waiting for a response. We recently discovered that due to a major error in our record-keeping process, over 100 manuscripts submitted to the PPQ over a period of a little over a year were misclassified as having undergone an initial review. There was a confluence of factors that allowed the error to go undetected for so long, some due to COVID-19, some technological, and others due to a diffusion of responsibility in the reviewing process. These factors also contributed to some failures to respond to author inquiries. 

When we discovered the extent of the problem we made the difficult decision to try to clear the backlog as quickly as possible, and therefore (i) to do an unusually thorough reading of papers during the internal review process to enable us to get results back to authors as quickly as possible, and (ii) not to give comments on papers that we did not send out for external review.

I take full responsibility for this situation and apologize sincerely for it. I want to make it clear, however, that the rejection of papers was not arbitrary; once we recognized what happened, each paper underwent a serious initial review process, more thorough than submitted papers normally receive. The percentage of acceptances to rejections of these papers was actually somewhat higher than it had been in previous years. We are now overhauling our processes for submission and evaluation of manuscripts to make sure not only that nothing like this happens again, but also that, going forward, the PPQ can be exemplary in giving authors quick decisions. We will announce more concrete steps in this regard soon, including new faculty editors who will be taking over after the end of this semester.

With sincere apologies, and best wishes,
Janet Levin, Chair
Editorial Committee, PPQ

No one could ask for a more meaningful apology than that. Let's hope that no future editors encounter similar lapses, but I have a few suggestions in case this ever happens again:

First, be more transparent about the scope of the problem. The initial explanation given to the UK professor for the lack of feedback was:

The journal policy is to provide comments only on articles that receive external review, and due to the fact that this records error affected several submissions we are unfortunately unable to make an exception in this case despite the long delay in our decision. [Italics added]

As Prof. Levin now admits, there were actually over 100 misplaced manuscripts, which is an entirely different dimension. The UK professor, and therefore Brian Leiter (and then Lubet), should have gotten the full story in the first place. If I had known there were 100 outstanding submissions (rather than "several"), I would not have written that the editors "should have devoted as much time as necessary" to provide comments for each one

Second, go public with the problem, rather than communicating it only to the affected authors. I say this because others presumably continued submitting articles to PPQ, even while the editors, of whom there appear to be seven, were busy doing an "unusually thorough" reading of the previously lost 100 manuscripts, a percentage of which were also sent out for external review. This obviously had to tax PPQ's resources, meaning that new submissions were necessarily backed up, and were also facing stiffer than usual competition from the 100 article receiving intensive review. As far as I know, this was never explained to authors who continued to submit their manuscripts to PPQ, although they might reasonably have decided to go elsewhere under the circumstances.

Finally, it would be ideal for a journal to suspend accepting new submissions while clearing a significant backlog, and certainly when it is over 100 articles. 

Comments

[Janet Levin]

Dear Prof. Lubet,

I think I speak for all of us in saying that I appreciate your response, and take seriously your suggestions. I'm also happy to report that we are virtually caught up with our backlog. We are also working to establish a transparent Authors' Portal for future submissions so that authors and editors can be aware of the status of a submission at every stage of the reviewing process--and thereby prevent anything like this from happening again.

Yours sincerely,
Janet Levin