Submissions

Please read these instructions before submitting. The checklist below must be completed at the point of submission.

Scope

Although Imprint is edited by analytically trained philosophers, it is not restricted to any particular field or school. Its target audience is primarily academic philosophers and students, but all content is freely available without license or subscription.

We do not publish interventions in contemporary debates, or commentaries on contemporary figures — that is, papers whose primary subject is the existing literature rather than a philosophical issue or historical figure. Submissions are selected on the basis of their estimated long-term significance; we are not interested in papers that will be stale before they appear. Our backlog is currently over a year.

We aim to publish across as wide a range of topics as possible. Papers on the same subject as recently published work may be held to a somewhat higher standard. We publish primarily in English, though we now accept submissions in French.

Length

Our publishing costs are approximately $70 per 1,000 words, regardless of whether words appear in the body, footnotes, or references. The length of a paper should be proportionate to its contribution. Papers over 10,000 words are held to a higher standard; papers approaching 15,000 words are very unlikely to be accepted. In general: if a paper is too long for other journals, it is too long for Imprint. Authors of very long papers may wish to contact Michigan Publishing about open-access monograph options.

Footnotes and Bibliography

We prefer footnotes to be used as little as possible; a handful of short footnotes are acceptable, but too many footnotes, or excessively long footnotes, greatly increase our production costs and reduce readability. All notes become endnotes in the HTML version of the paper, so you should assume they won't be read.
The bibliography can be in any standard format, but must be complete and correct. Make sure to include page numbers, full names of editors and translators (where applicable), and DOIs (where available). Papers with bibliographic errors will be rejected.

File format

We accept .docx and .pdf. Please submit a .docx file if you have one — it is much easier for us to work with. Only submit a PDF if you do not have an editable version, or if you intend to do the final typesetting yourself in LaTeX. Do not submit a PDF generated from a word processor.

Payments

All payments go to the University of Michigan. Questions about payments should be directed to electronicpmts@umich.edu. The editors have no access to the payment system, and cannot answer any questions about the payment process.

Review process

Our review system differs from the Janeway default. Status indicators on the author dashboard are likely to be misleading about where your paper actually stands in our process.

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

Anonymous Submission

☐ The paper is prepared for anonymous review: personal citations are removed, author information has been stripped from the file's Properties or Summary fields, and any acknowledgments that would identify the author (e.g., thanking only colleagues in your department) have been removed.

File Format

☐ If an editable version of the paper exists (e.g., .docx), it has been submitted rather than a PDF. A PDF generated from a word processor will not be reviewed.

Metadata

☐ An abstract is included. It has been carefully proofread and is in plain text with no unnecessary formatting. It was typed directly into the submission box, or pasted using "Paste and Match Formatting", not cut and pasted from Word or a PDF.

☐ The author name and article title are correctly capitalised.

☐ The submission fields (field, keywords, etc.) are filled in as precisely as possible. We rely on these to find appropriate reviewers and do not have in-house expertise across all areas of philosophy.

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 4.0
None
CC-BY 4.0
<p>Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, andindicate 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. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.</p>
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
<p>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.</p>

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://ssc.umich.edu/finance/payments/pay-by-credit-card/.

If that link is not working, please contact electronicpmts@umich.edu. The Imprint editorial team has no access to the payment system so cannot diagnose any errors. Do not contact the editors with questions about this; they will just have to forward your comments to that address.

To pay the fee, follow the following steps.

Click "Pay Now"
Say you are paying for "None of the Above"
Say whether you are inside or outside the US
Enter your email and phone number
Say you are paying by "Unique Identifier"
Enter the identifier as "Imprint" and say that the purpose is "Submission fee for Philosophers Imprint"
Click the “Go to Secure Payment Provider to Pay My Bill” button.
Enter the amount you are paying in the “Amount” field, enter tthe credit card details, and hit Submit.

If you are willing to contribute this fee, please do so before uploading your paper, and include a screen capture of the receipt as a separate document in the submission - this allows us to track how much funds we should be receiving from the University each month, and will not be sent to referees.

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