Hume Studies Editorial Report

Submitted by Peter Loptson and Peter Millican

August 2007

This is the annual report of the editors of Hume Studies to the journal’s Editorial Board, to the Executive Committee of the Hume Society, and to its subscribers, delivered on 12^th August 2007 at the Society’s annual conference in Boston, Massachussetts.

The Team

We are extremely grateful to Jacqueline Taylor, who has particular responsibility for submissions in the area of moral and political philosophy.  The journal has benefited greatly from her involvement.  Her title has been Associate Editor.  We are proposing that her title be changed to Editor for Moral Philosophy.  We are also very grateful to Peter Kail, the Hume Studies Book Reviews Editor.  James Fieser has very kindly taken on the role of preparing the annual compilation of the Hume literature, which, after a one-year hiatus, appears in the forthcoming November 2006 issue.  Thanks to Jim for this invaluable work.  We are deeply appreciative as well of the work of Cherilyn Keall, Editorial Assistant at Guelph, a key member of the team, who helps us all enormously in our day-to-day work, facilitating co-ordination of the various activities.  We note also with thanks the continuing assistance which Rick McCarty has provided with issues and challenges with our electronic database.

Production

Production for the journal is centred at Guelph, where the Hume Studies office is located.  The generous support of the College of Arts of the University of Guelph has enabled us to hire Ms Cherilyn Keall as Editorial Assistant, who organizes and coordinates datafiles for editorial and other facets of the operations of the journal.  We have also engaged a copy-editor, Ms Corina David, who works with the Guelph office to help bring the articles, book reviews, and other material published in the journal to full readiness for type-setting and printing. 

We continue to use the Philosophy Documentation Center as our typesetter and Malloy Incorporated of Ann Arbor, Michigan as our printer.   

To date we have published two issues of Hume Studies, November 2005 and April 2006.  Currently we have eight submissions that have been either accepted or conditionally accepted for publication.  We will proceed to publication of our November 2006 issue as soon as we have received final drafts from our authors, and hope that our April 2007 issue will be ready for publication soon thereafter. 

Subscriber Data

For the November 2005 issue there were 541 individual subscribers and 247 institutional subscribers.  For the April 2006 issue there were 520 individual subscribers and 229 institutional subscribers.  This comprises a net loss of 21 individual subscribers and 18 institutional subscribers over the course of the past year.  It is unclear what this change of numbers indicates, and what longer-term patterns may prove to be.  We will continue to report subscriber numbers in subsequent Editors' Reports.

Finances

The information in the table below covers the time period from Nov. 10, 2006 to July 12, 2007.  This anomalous time period stems from last year's period covered (Nov. 7, 2005 – Nov. 10, 2006), which was a function of circumstances in the transition from the previous editors and editorial office location.  Next and subsequent years' budgetary reporting period will be from mid-July to mid-July.  As a result of the shorter time period covered in the present report, the annual stipend for the work of the journal does not appear (the stipend for the 2006-2007 budgetary year was received in September 2006, and reported in the final text of the 2006 Editors' Report).  We note that some of the income received for journal expenditures (notably, for a salary for the editorial assistant of the journal, and for journal stationery) is provided by the College of Arts at the University of Guelph.

Note:  Currency equivalency calculations have been made using an exchange rate of 1 CAD = 0.947418 USD. 

 Submissions and Acceptances

We have had 67 submissions since the 2006 Hume Studies Editors' Report was published in August of last year, of which 49 have been fully processed.  Of these, 16.3% have been conditionally accepted.  30.6% have been given a “revise and resubmit” verdict, and 53.1% rejected.  Broken down by rough subject-area, the figures are as follows: 

 This acceptance rate is lower than last year's figure of 21.8%.  We continue to put particular effort into giving constructive feedback to authors in the “revise and resubmit” category, and we hope that this will bear fruit in future years both in quantity and quality.

 Speed of Response

In respect of papers received and processed over the last year, the average time between initial receipt and formal response (in the form of a letter from the editors) has been about  five and a half months.  So a paper received on 1^st February could now expect to have been dealt with.  Our hope continues to be to reduce this average to four months, and we plan to report the relevant figure each year as a means of monitoring progress.  Judging from our experience so far, less than around four months (on average) is probably not feasible, given the time it can take to find referees willing to act; delays in receiving reports; sometimes finding replacement referees; the frequent need for detailed feedback from the editors; and cases where – for a variety of reasons – the paper has to go to a third referee.  A minority of papers can prove particularly troublesome for one or more of these reasons, and the average time for the more straightforward papers will clearly be somewhat lower.

 Respectfully submitted,

Peter Loptson

Peter Millican