Encyclopedia Hanasiana - Nobody likes the slush pile. Let's get rid of it.

Jim Hanas makes a seemingly radical suggestion (lets stop having literary journals with open calls or “slush piles”) that actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Sending a piece in in the hopes of getting it published is nerve wracking, and then the odds are that no one will read it once it gets published anyway, since the only ones who buy the journal are the people waiting for their piece to get published. So, what to do?

So let’s drop the pretense and kill the slush pile. Manuscripts considered by solicitation only. (As most of them are now anyway, let’s be honest.) How will writers and editors find each other then? Simple. Writers will put their work out—on blogs or in writing communities or wherever—and editors will find it.

He makes a strong argument that this could work.

For my part, I think it would make sense to pay for a monthly “list of important papers in your sub-discipline of philosophy.” I try looking at Reddit’s philosophy section sometimes, but basically it’s just not readable. The wisdom of the crowds doesn’t work when you’re looking for wisdom instead of distraction. On the other hand, I’ve never picked up an issue of Philosophy East-West and not been filled with the urge to add another 40 pages to my endlessly growing reading list. So, to me the future would be a well-curated blog behind a paywall that points to people’s articles which are hosted on the personal or university homepages of their authors. The articles themselves would be available to anyone for free, so if you find it on Google Scholar, you don’t have to be part of the existing university structure to get the privilege of reading it for less than $40 (which is seriously how much the average JSTOR article goes for by itself).

I don’t know if this is what’s really going to happen in the future, but it’s a direction I’d like to see things moving in.