More stuff on Synthese

Leiter has a post up here where he asks 'what to do now' after the response of the Editors in Chief of Synthese was published. As far as I'm concerned, not too much. Enough digital ink has now been spilled over this issue, and I would suspect most people now have more or less a position on the issue and the matter will fall where it falls. From my perspective, no further organised action is required. Leiter having posts such as this one or this one for instance, is just beating a dead horse, and quite frankly smacks of an unhealthy Schadenfreude. And so do his suggested smears against 'European formal philosophers'.

For the record, here is my personal position. Yes, I did sign the petition. I did so because I believe that the Editors in Chief made a serious error of judgment in publishing the disclaimer, and one that ought to be rectified. The response of the Editors is in my view not a sufficient response to the demands of the petition, and the website on which it was published was surely strange (set up specifically for the purpose in such a way that the content is not searchable).

But I will not be signing on to some organised boycott of the journal. I somehow expect that to achieve little. Individuals will submit to Synthese and referee for it as they see fit, and given that journals such as Synthese play a key 'career making' role for starting and established philosophers I somehow expect that the journal will continue to stagger on on its present course for a few decades more. Philosophers are not people who like change, and matters of pedigree, prestige and reputation play a key role in the discipline.

Privately, I had already made a decision to look elsewhere for a number of reasons, among which are the following

• 'Career making' in philosophy is unimportant to me, which diminishes the attraction of high profile journals with all their attendant issues;
• Last time I looked, Synthese had an enourmous backlog of material only published on line, and the print journal was way behind;
• My last experience refereeing for the journal was not a good one, and I had already resolved to decline any such requests from them in the future;
• I believe initiatives such as sympoze will over time prove to be a better repository for the effort I put into academic work.

So in my case, the current hullabaloo only serves to reinforce a decision I had already made.

Two identities

My two CV's pushed through Wordle (click on images for larger graphic).

First the real job

and the academic CV

Two different worlds.

The academic CV has a publication list attached, which is is, I'm sure, why it appears to be all about me rather than about what I can do.

A better wordle is the one with my research interests in it:

On some future directions in the philosophy of chemistry

My academic interests are primarily in the philosophy of chemistry. Since I'm fairly familiar with the literature in this field, and have a few academic hobby-horses running around here too, it's maybe a good idea to sum up some of the currently unsolved problems that I think philosophy of chemistry will run into. Of course, this list is biased and not entirely without any personal interest -- I hope to make some contributions in these areas in the future too.

With that out of the way, here's what I think some of the larger looming problems and directions are

1. The relationship of philosophy of chemistry to the wider philosophy of science. Mohan Matthen has an insightful post on the (lack of) direction of philosophy of science here, which I think is somewhere close to the mark as to the general demise of philosophy of science. I only have one additional comment to make to that post: working in the general philosophy of science increasingly requires in-depth knowledge of one of the sciences, as opposed to more general knowledge. I can see the philosophy of chemistry contributing to some of the wider questions in the philosophy of science on the basis of more realistic theories of chemistry, such as (for example) Eyring's theory of absolute reaction rates, Fukui's theory of frontier orbitals, and Prigogine's ideas on non-linear reactions as mature theories of chemistry that can add new insights to the philosophy of science.
2. The relationship of quantum chemistry to quantum theory. The foundations of quantum theory is a much discussed topic, which I won't go into here. But the basic problem posed in Primas' 'Chemistry, Quantum mechanics and reductionism', which came out in 1981 and again in 1984, is still in my opinion unsolved. Primas argues that quantum mechanics, due to its interpretational problems, is not a good theory to reduce to. Philosophers of chemistry have not really examined how newly proposed interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as in terns of einselection or decoherence have a bearing on this problem. I see the theory of decoherence as a real contender in this area.
3. Chemical ontologies. We have had a lot of discussion about the use of the causal theory of reference in the construction of chemical ontologies, but it seems to me that there is still a large amount of open questions on how to connect chemical theories to ontological theories, such as truthmaking or Quinean quantification. In the wake of this, we might just be able to put paid to the idea of 'ontological reduction' which in my opinion is a particularly unlucky invention that has plagued the philosophy of chemistry for about a decade.
4. Theory formation and theoretical terms in chemistry. There is a paper by Roald Hoffmann in Synthese arguing that chemists do not engage in theory formation in the sense in which it could be argued that physicists do. The question of course is what it is then that chemists' engage in. Hoffmann has his set of answers, but these still have, in my opinion, to be tested against a wider range of examples from chemistry to be useful.
5. Anything having a bearing on inter-theory relations and unity of science with theories of chemistry on one end and biology / physics on the other.
6. Bonding, density, orbitals and observables. This is starting to some degree based on the theories of Richard Bader, but I don't think that the real surprising conclusions of Bader's theory are as of yet fully appreciated - that they allow the calculation of properties on a 'per atom' or even 'per functional group' level. Also this comes back to some of the problems mentioned above below 2.

Open access - free as in gratis or free as in libre

In my post yesterday, I referred to the distinction between free and libre in academic open access publishing, and the four freedoms of the open source software movement.

Today I  came across an open access model for publishing that is much closer to the libre model than the invitation I turned down.

http://www.sympoze.com/ is a website that aims to set up open access publishing in philosophy, with crowdsourced refereeing. I am sympathetic to the idea, but also see a few hurdles along the way. In no particular order, these are

1. Reputational issues tied to funding. With research funding in much of Europe and New Zealand now firmly tied to the number of pages you can get into a top ranked journal, it is very hard for non-established journals to get off the ground. Quite simply, if you work at a university, publishing in an upstart journal is a risk. In your evaluation, only the publications of the last five years count, so if you have a good paper that would be publishable in, say, top journal A, it is a risk to submit to upstart journal B unless you're sure that upstart journal B will make it to the top rank within 5 years. That is unlikely to happen, so most academic will duly submit to top journal A and leave upstart journal B along the wayside, thus further diminishing its chances to get to top rank.
2. Protection against kooks and cranks. In a number of Synthese polls we have seen the activists coming in pretty quick after the poll opened to try and swing the vote in a certain way. Publication of politically contentious issues by refereeing through a crowd sourcing model is going to be, eeerm, interesting.

Open Access, spam and Academic scams (just say no)

Today I got an email from an 'open access' publisher called InTech asking me for a chapter for an upcoming book on quantum chemistry. While asking me to write something about quantum chemistry is not completely out of the question, it didn't take long to spot the scam:

1. There seemed to be no direction for what the book was about. If I've got anything to do with quantum chemistry these days I'm a philosopher of quantum chemistry, not a working quantum chemist (anymore)
2. The editor of the volume was someone I'd never heard of, and I know many quantum chemists by name.
   
3. The editor of the volume, from his affiliation, doesn't seem to work in quantum chemistry at all
   
4. The volume is not referenced in the major scientific citation indexes
   
5. I need to pay €590 to get published. Huh? I already write for free.
   

So here is the text of the mail, with some comments in between, and XXXXX's to protect the guilty:

Dear Dr. Hettema,
As a specialist in your field of research, we are pleased to invite you to contribute to our forthcoming Open Access book, "Quantum Chemistry", ISBN XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX-0

Didn't that just tickle you. More please!

The book will be published by InTech, Open Access publisher of books and journals in the fields of science, technology and medicine.

Oooh, I like open access. Cue Homer Simpson spotting a doughnut… But it is unclear to me that what you are proposing will meet my definition of open access, which is based on the 'four freedoms' of the open software movement, and firmly on the 'libre' end of the spectrum. What I'm seeing here is more along the lines of 'gratis sponsored by author'.

InTech is a pioneer in the publication of Open Access books, with a collection currently comprising over 400 books written by more than 25,000 renowned authors. The complete collection is available for free full-text download on our reading platform, www.intechopen.com.

Wow, so this is my chance to be one of the 25,000 renowned, provided of course that I pass your stringent quality criteria…what are these?

This will be a reviewed book that will cover the latest research in the field, and will serve as a free, open access resource for scientists and researchers around the world. The book will be edited by Dr. XXXXXX, an experienced scientist in the field and written by a team of international experts.

Tickle, tickle. I've never heard of Dr X, and if he really is an experienced scientists in the field as you claim, that's odd (not impossible, just a tad improbable). I've been around in quantum chemistry for long enough to have a pretty good sense of who's who.

When you publish with InTech, you make your paper freely available online. Additionally, you:
- Increase your visibility, impact and citation rates;

Eeerm, do I really? You mention google as one of your major citation indexes….

- Keep the copyright to your work;
- Receive a hard copy of the complete book;

For the simple fee of €590 to get my paper in I'm sure that's a bargain.

- Help speed up research;
- Make your work freely available to everyone, benefiting the whole of society.
You have been invited to contribute based on your paper "Explanation and theory formation in quantum chemistry", your publishing history and the quality of your research. However, we are not asking you to republish your work, but we would like you to publish a new paper on one of the topics this book will cover.

Tickle, tickle….

I am the Publishing Process Manager for this book […]

Nice title. I work in business and haven't come across this one before and I've seen a few. I can stop it here. So now for some more fact finding.

The 'easy one click' links they provide in the email track you so they keep track of who visited their page to see the 'invitation'. At least they didn't hide the tracking in the URL., it's there in plain sight:

http://www.intechweb.org/welcome/3b179faa717d8e2afea0e75835c0d4b1/<you@your.institution>

I classify these sort of things as a scam preying on vulnerable junior scientists. Getting a chapter published in this travesty of an open access journal will not enhance your career one iota, you'll be out of pocket by €590 (which is a big deal for an 'indie' like me; the taxman will pay his share, but it's still a lot of money).

I think there are better models to get your stuff out than this one, for instance the one I'm quietly piloting at the moment: self arranged peer review with publication via Createspace.