Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure your submission is ready for and fits the scope of the journal.

Please read the submission instructions below, but here are the key parts.

Most of our costs are per word, and we have a tiny budget. We will not accept papers that are too long for the point they make.
Our publication backlog is well over a year; we're not going to accept papers that will likely be stale before they come out. We are interested in papers that can still be profitably read for several decades.
We are a generalist journal, which means we're only interested in papers that appeal to a general audience. Imprint papers should have the appeal (and the length) of a good presentation at a departmental colloquium.
We don't have editors who are experts in all parts of philosophy. Please help us find reviewers by filling in the submission fields as precisely as possible.
All payments go to the University of Michigan, and we just receive a payment each month. Please send questions about the payments to electronicpmts@umich.edu.

Before submitting you should read over the bullet points below, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account).

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 every other month. 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. We primarily publish in English, though we are now accepting articles for review in French as well.

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 interventions in contemporary debates, or commentaries on contemporary figures. That is, it does not publish articles that are primarily about the existing literature, as opposed to being about a philosophical issue or historical figure.
The Imprint aims to publish papers across as wide a range of topics as possible. To that end, papers on the same subject as recently published papers may be held to a somewhat higher standard.
Although there is no strict page limit on submissions, the Editors value economy of expression and do not plan to publish book-length works. Our primary costs are copy editing and typesetting, so long articles impose budgetary constraints on us just like on any other journal. Our publishing costs are currently around $50 per 1000 words (and much higher for PDF submissions), and we don't have the budget to print massive papers. (Whether words are in the body of the article, the footnotes, or the references makes no difference to these costs.) The length of the article should be proportionate to the contribution it makes, especially if it is over 10000 words. If it is substantially over 10000 words, especially if it gets to around 15000 words, it is very unlikely that it will be accepted as appropriate for a journal. (Though we do suggest that authors get in touch with Michigan Publishing or some other publisher about publishing these works as open access books.) In general, if an article is too long for other journals, it is too long for Imprint.
Do not cut and paste from a Word document into Janeway's in-browser editor; it will produce formatting errors which may be costly to remove at publication. This is very important and creates huge hassles down the track. Either type the abstract in or, if you absolutely have to cut-and-paste, use the 'paste and match formatting' option. Papers that do not do this may be rejected.
Please read over your abstracts and keywords to check for typos and formatting errors. These are going to be sent to reviewers as-is.
Check that the capitalisation is correct on your author name and on your article title.
The review system Imprint uses is somewhat different to the Janeway default. (See the notes under Acceptance Criteria for details on what we do.) So any information on the author dashboard about the status of a paper is likely to be misleading, since it measures where the paper would be in the review process more common for journals in other disciplines.
We take articles in docx and pdf, but if you submit an article in pdf, you are committing to doing the typesetting yourself in LaTeX. PDF versions of Word files will be rejected.

About

Philosophers' Imprint is a refereed series of original papers founded by Stephen Darwall and J. David Velleman. 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.

Focus and Scope

Imprint aims to publish articles across all areas of philosophy, with a focus on articles with a long-term significance, especially those on topics that have not received sufficient attention in Imprint or other philosophy journals.

Submission Checklist

An abstract must be included in submissions. The abstract should be carefully proofread, and be in plain text, with no unnecessary formatting. Papers without an abstract, with too many typos in the abstract, or with too much formatting in the abstract, will be rejected. Do not cut and paste from a Word document or PDF into the submission box. (You can cut and paste from a text editor.)
Submissions must be prepared for anonymous review. This includes removing personal citations and information added in "Properties" or "Summary". If acknowledgments would allow to narrow down who the author is, e.g., if they are all people in your department, they should be removed as well. Papers that are not thus prepared will be desk rejected.
Papers may be submitted in any easily readable format, but we strongly prefer submissions in editable formats, such as docx. Do not submit a PDF file if you have a version of the paper in an editable format like docx. Submissions of PDFs generated from a word processor may be sent back so we can get the editable version.

If you submit a paper in PDF, we'll eventually need the following:

If the paper is accepted, you'll need to typeset the paper using the Imprint macros.
You will also need to submit a .tex and .bib file that can compile on a LaTeX installation that has just the standard packages installed.
We'll return the PDF to you from copyediting with changes as comments on the PDF, and you'll be responsible for making those changes to the .tex file before it goes into production.

None of this is necessary at initial submission; all that matters then is that the paper is readable, and the reviewers can make sense of the citations. But there will be extra steps at the production stage for papers that we can't edit because they aren't in docx some similar format.

Copyright Notice

Accepted articles are published under a Creative Commons license. Unless specified otherwise, the license is BY-NC-ND, but individual authors may choose to use a different Creative Commons license.

Peer Review

This journal operates a double blind peer review policy.

Licences

The following licences are allowed:

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Publication Fees

Because submission fees are our only source of income, we ask that every submission includes a submission fee.

The suggested fee is

$50 for people with a permanent academic position (i.e., professors, associate and assistant professors, and similar ranks outside US).
$20 for people without a permanent academic position (i.e., students, and faculty on fixed-term contracts).
If you have a larger research fund that can support a larger donation, we would greatly appreciate any extra support.

The fee can be paid at https://auth-interstitial-authorize.it.umich.edu/authApi/payment/ssc.

To pay the fee, follow the following steps.

Click the “Go to Secure Payment Provider to Pay My Bill” button.
Enter the amount you are paying in the “Amount” field, enter the security code, and click Continue.
Enter the word Imprint in the Invoice Number field. If you do not enter “Imprint” in the Invoice Number field, the University of Michigan won't know that the money is for us.
Enter the name of the person submitting to the journal in the Description field.
Enter your payment and billing information and click "Pay Now". You do not have to enter a "Customer ID".

If you are willing to contribute this fee, please do so before uploading your paper, and include a screen capture of the receipt - this allows us to track how much funds we should be receiving from the University each month.

Do not click this twice if the payment appears not to have gone through without checking your credit card details; we are having some troubles with how some credit cards are being processed, and multiple clicking could lead to the card being charged multiple times.

As you may be able to see from the website above, the payment goes to a general University of Michigan account that none of the editors or journal staff have access to. If you have questions about it, please direct them to electronicpmts@umich.edu.

Publication Cycle

This journal publishes all year round, with an aim of papers coming out six times per year.

Sections

Section or article type	Public Submissions	Peer Reviewed	Indexed
Article