Editors Stephen Darwall J. David Velleman Editorial Board K. Anthony Appiah | Richard Arneson | Paul Boghossian | Robert Brandom | Michael Bratman | John Broome | Victor Caston | John Cooper | Mark Crimmins | Kit Fine | Daniel Garber | Richard Heck | David Hills | Louis Loeb | Penelope Maddy | Tim Maudlin | Peter Railton | Gideon Rosen | Nancy Sherman | Michael Smith | Robert Stalnaker | Jason Stanley | Jamie Tappenden | Kendall Walton | Stephen Yablo Production and Publication Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library Director: Maria Bonn OCLC: 45826937 ISSN: 1533-628X LCCN: 2001-212257 Description Philosophers' Imprint is a refereed series of original papers in philosophy, edited by Stephen Darwall and J. David Velleman, with the advice of an international Board of Editors; and published on the World Wide Web by the University of Michigan Digital Library. The Imprint was founded in the spirit of the Open Access movement, whose mission is to promote a future in which funds currently spent on journal subscriptions are redirected to the dissemination of scholarship for free, via the Internet. Although the Imprint is edited by analytically trained philosophers, it is not restricted to any particular field or school of philosophy. Its target audience consists primarily of academic philosophers and philosophy students, but it also aims to attract non-academic readers to philosophy by making excellent philosophical scholarship available without license or subscription. The Imprint issues papers at irregular intervals; readers can receive periodic notices of recent publications by subscribing to an electronic mailing list. Papers are published in an attractive, typeset format that can be read on-screen or printed by the reader. Their physical appearance and Universal Resource Locators (URLs) are permanently fixed, to allow for reliable citations. The Imprint provides its own indexes and full-text search engine, in addition to being indexed by Philosophers' Index and public search engines. Submissions to the Imprint are refereed anonymously and selected for publication on the basis of their estimated long-term significance. The Imprint does not publish book reviews or discussion notes, though papers responsive to the current literature may of course meet the Editors' criteria. Submissions must be sent electronically; submissions in hard copy will not be considered, acknowledged, or returned. Although there is no page limit on submissions, the Editors value economy of expression and do not plan to publish book-length works. Mission There is a possible future in which academic libraries no longer spend millions of dollars purchasing, binding, housing, and repairing printed journals, because they have assumed the role of publishers, cooperatively disseminating the results of academic research for free, via the Internet. Each library could bear the cost of publishing some of the world's scholarly output, since it would be spared the cost of buying its own copy of any scholarship published in this way. The results of academic research would then be available without cost to all users of the Internet, including students and teachers in developing countries, as well as members of the general public. These developments would not spell the end of the printed book or the bricks-and-mortar library. On the contrary, academic libraries would finally be able to reverse the steep decline in their rate of acquiring books (which fell 25% from 1986 to 1996), because they would no longer be burdened with the steeply rising cost of journals (which increased 66% in the same period).* The problem is that we don't know how to get to that future from here, and there are so many other, less desirable futures in which we might end up instead. The growing trend toward licensing access to electronic versions of journals is counterproductive, since it reproduces the unnecessary economy of subscriptions and permissions, in which intellectual property produced at universities, often with public funds, is transferred to private publishers who can collect fees for its dissemination. Now that academic institutions have access to the Internet, they have no reason to pay subscription or subvention fees to anyone for disseminating the results of academic research. At the time of the Imprint's founding, significant obstacles stood in the way of a transition to fully electronic publishing. Authors did not view electronic publication as prestigious, readers did not view the electronic literature as authoritative, and neither of these views seemed likely to develop in the absence of the other. Younger scholars were unsure whether electronic publications would count towards tenure and promotion. And the funds that would support electronic publication and archiving were tied up in print subscriptions that could not be discontinued until an electronic alternative was available. Philosophers' Imprint was founded to overcome these obstacles to the free electronic dissemination of scholarship. The Imprint is designed to combine the permanence and authority of print with the instant and universal accessibility of the Internet. The Editors select for publication only those submissions which are judged to be of lasting value, on the basis of a blind refereeing process. Having no commitments to subscribers, the Editors are free to publish as few papers as are found to meet an absolute standard of quality. Each paper is given a fixed, typeset appearance and a stable Universal Resource Locator (URL), to allow for reliable citations. The University of Michigan Digital Library has committed funds to produce the Imprint , to provide it with indexes and a full-text search engine, and to ensure the permanent accessibility of its archives. No license, subscription, or registration is required for access to the Imprint . Because the Imprint has no subscription income, it must operate economically, without paper or postage. Contributors are therefore required to submit their work electronically. All correspondence with authors and referees is conducted by electronic mail. Finally, the Imprint does not manage rights and permissions. Permission for instructional uses are not necessary, since the Imprint is accessible without charge to teachers and students alike; permission for other uses is managed by the authors, who retain copyright in their work. Subscribing to the Mailing List New papers are published by the Imprint at irregular intervals, as they are refereed, selected, and edited. Readers who wish to be notified of new publications by the Imprint may subscribe to an electronic mailing list, by sending an e-mail to philosophers-imprint-general-request@umich.edu with the word 'subscribe' in the subject field. Notices will be sent no more frequently than once a month. (To be removed from the mailing list, send a message to the same address with the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject field.) Submitting a Paper Formatting your paper. Compose your paper in a standard word-processing application. Prepare the paper for blind refereeing by removing personal references, including those which may be automatically inserted in the "Properties" or "Summary" field of the document. Saving your paper. Save your paper in Rich Text Format (RTF), with the extension ".rtf" after the filename. (All standard word-processing applications can save a document in RTF, usually via the "Save as..." command.) LaTeX manuscripts. If your paper contains symbols or equations that cannot be handled by a standard word-processor, you may submit a pdf file produced from LaTeX. If the paper is accepted, you will be responsible for formatting it using the Imprint macros at: http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/philosophersimprint/ Submitting your paper. To submit a paper to Philosophers' Imprint , visit http://www.philosophersimprint.org/submissions/ , fill out the form, and upload your submission. You should receive an acknowledgment from the Editors within a week. Philosophers' Imprint no longer accepts submissions by email. Questions about submissions. If you have questions about submissions, editorial policies, or the status of a submission, please contact imprint-editors@umich.edu.