Philosopher’s Digest is a new online (open access!) resource for philosophers. Here’s the description from the site.
Philosopher’s Digest is a tool designed to help philosophers stay abreast of interesting work in the field by publishing short reviews of articles appearing in top journals. Articles are selected by our reviewers for the significance of the arguments they advance, the importance of the topics they address, or both. Articles can appear from any peer-reviewed philosophy journal.
John Miliken is one of the founders. He emailed me yesterday and asked me to be on the review board. I said yes. If you’re a professional philosopher, I’d like to try and persuade you to volunteer. Here are some good reasons for professional philosophers to devote time to this.
1. The Value of Philosopher’s Digest
I don’t think I have to say much about this, but Philosopher’s Digest strikes me as a very valuable service to the profession. It’s online, open-access and the reviews are capped at 1,000 words. You get a nice summary of what’s current – for free! It’s also very convenient. I read Clayton Littlejohn’s recent review on my phone on the way to class yesterday!
Note that this may benefit not just professional philosophers, but anyone who is casually interested in philosophy. There are non-philosophers that may not have access to the best journals in the field, and they may not have the time or the patience to sift through those journals even if they did. Philosopher’s Digest (in addition to helping professional philosophers) could fill a void in our profession by providing the public with some resources to start thinking more about philosophy.
2. Helps You Stay Current
If you commit to 3-4 reviews, that lights a little fire under you that should help you stay current. I volunteered yesterday, and I already feel the onus to browse the journals more frequently. After I write this, I’m going to peek through some of the recent Journal of Philosophy issues.
3. Publication Credit?
This one will depend, of course, on what your institution would give you publication credit for. If your institution gives you publication credit for book reviews, I see no reason why they shouldn’t give you publication credit for the number of article reviews you’d write each year. So whatever credit you think you might get for a book review, it seems you would be able to make the case to your institution that you get similar credit for this. Note that there is a screening process to write for Philosopher’s Digest. The call for reviewers requires you send a writing sample and your CV.
4. Spring Boards for Other Projects
I suspect that these could serve as spring boards for other projects you’re interested in. Since a lot of good papers start with a nice, clear summary of someone’s views/arguments, writing a review involves writing a part of that longer project.
5. Tracking (UPDATE)
Galen Foresman, one of the other editors, just emailed me with an additional reason. Philosopher’s Digest tracks the traffic, so you will be able to know (roughly) how often your reviews are read by other people. I paste this from the email (with Foresman’s permission).
You know there is another interesting feature of the site. We keep track of the number of views each page gets, so we actually have some idea of how many times your reviews are actually being read, a feature printed journals don’t have. Depending on your tenure and promotion standards, I would think that might make for good evidence when it came time to say your writing had been worthwhile. For example, Clayton’s post has had 50 unique visitors at an average of 2 min 11 seconds per visit.
(UPDATE: To put Clayton’s traffic into perspective. Those figures are for the last 3 days!)
I think your evaluation of Philosopher’s Digest is correct. I just sent in my first review, and plan on plugging it on the Timpest once it appears.