A few days ago, from the end of February into the beginning of March, I fired off 12 articles to 9 core journals in one go, including a few book reviews and some papers written during my undergraduate years. At first I submitted a few newer, more important papers, but I didn’t bother to revise the format properly. Later I gradually sent out some older papers; those I did properly reformat, though I didn’t make many textual revisions. In that sense, my sincerity in submitting was still not quite sufficient, after all, at heart I remain rather reluctant about the whole business of submitting articles. But if I want to mix into the academic world, I have to submit; and if I have to submit, then I ought to do it in earnest. So no matter how dissatisfied I may be with the copyright regime of print media, I will still at least observe the most basic rules, and will by no means submit the same manuscript to multiple places at once.
At the very least, though, I can “submit multiple manuscripts to multiple places.” If I only had one paper to submit, and were to dutifully pin my hopes on a single journal, send it out, and then wait in bitter suspense for two or three months with no reply at all, just thinking about that kind of life already makes me feel miserable.
The journals I chose to submit to all accepted Email submissions at minimum, and a few used online submission systems. Those journals that still only accept postal submissions I simply do not submit to at all. On the one hand, of course, because I am lazy; on the other hand, also to make my attitude clear: journals that still stubbornly cling today to the most rigid pre-electronic publishing model, I try not to support. Old-established periodicals like Philosophical Research and Natural Dialectics Communication are just like this; I would rather publish in a lower-impact university journal than bother to go to the post office and mail things off.
In my view, all these rigid rules imposed by journals are by no means some kind of fidelity to tradition; they are simply stubbornness. Their problem is not that they fail to forge ahead and refuse to change; it is precisely that they let change run wild and forget tradition.
Tradition exists both at the level of culture and spirit, and at the level of sheer form. For instance, the tax threshold for article fees is 800 yuan. That is a traditional rule. But when this rule was set thirty years ago, the consideration was to align it with the threshold for personal income tax. Today, when the income-tax threshold has been raised several times over, and wages and expenses have likewise risen several times over, if article-fee taxation still insists on the old rule, that is not called preserving tradition; it is precisely abandoning tradition. It completely severs the original intention behind the rule when it was first established.
Many of the “traditional” rules of journals are like this too: because they have cut themselves off from the true purpose behind the original establishment of these rules, they have now degenerated into sheer formalism.
For example, after submission you are told to wait three months, and unless you get through the second review, you will receive no notification of acceptance or rejection; either you wait passively, or you can only swallow your pride and call to ask. Such a rule was perfectly understandable in the postal era. The editorial office had to handle submissions from all directions, and if they replied one by one by mail, it would be time-consuming, laborious, and costly. Although some responsible journals still do reply individually, those that do not respond one by one are also understandable. But now, to reply with a simple “received” by Email, or to send a rejection reply after refusing a submission (usually a template can be used), is literally a matter of raising one’s hand; it can be done in a few seconds. Even if one says that journal editors are always swamped with a thousand matters, and have so many junk submissions to deal with, surely spending a minute or two even on the most junky submission to take a look at it is not an unreasonably high demand, is it? In those one or two minutes, how hard can it be to carve out another ten seconds to send back a “received” acknowledgment? Even setting up an automatic out-of-office reply on the email could put submitters a little more at ease, couldn’t it? Yet regrettably, among the ten or so journals I submitted to, so far only two have acknowledged receipt, plus one that sent an automatic reply.
Take another example: beneath the author’s name on every article, one must list the institution and postal code. Listing the institution is understandable, but why must the postal code be included too? If it is for sending complimentary copies or article fees, then it is hard to receive mail at that institutional address; I still have to attach my private mailing address separately. Besides, if it were really for paying article fees, there would be no need to paste the address onto a publicly published paper. But in fact, this is obviously another leftover custom from the postal era. In the postal era, scholars relied very heavily on correspondence, and many ideas burst forth in various letters. The root of academic journals was also precisely the “public mailbox”; one of the earliest academic journals, the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, was established on the basis of a scholarly correspondence network. Publishing articles publicly was not the meaning of an academic journal; what mattered more was the network of correspondence among scholars organized around these “public letters.” But what about academia today? The “achievement” represented by “publication” itself has long since overshadowed the real meaning of academic journals, namely “communication,” while the epistolary tradition based on the postal mailbox has already been replaced by electronic media. Scholars can now communicate more broadly and more quickly through email, forums, blogs, and the like. But the question is: do scholars still value communication? So long as scholars place more value on traditional print journals that display only an institutional postal code where no mail can be received, and not an Email address, than on building networks of communication through personal blogs, then this is a betrayal of the great academic tradition, not its preservation.
Take another example, the rules for notes: in a book, besides the publisher, one must also write the place of publication. Why must the place of publication be given? On the one hand, publishers generally do not involve confusion from identical names; a quick search by city will tell you which one it is, so why make extra work? Then again, why must one know which city a given publisher is in? That too is a custom from the pre-electronic era. In an era when the globalization of distribution and dissemination was not yet mature enough, if one wanted to trace a book’s provenance, one had to go to the place of publication for more certainty, unless one had access to a major library. But today, searching online for a book’s relevant information and the place where it is held is already a matter of simply lifting one’s hand. And under conditions of globalized information and logistics, a publisher’s location has no special advantage for finding books anymore; moreover, some large publishing groups may span several cities, so “place of publication” can no longer serve as an accurate marker of location. To still compulsively write “Beijing: Peking University Press” now is already meaningless.
In my attitude toward tradition and modernity, I am absolutely a conservative; but very often I may appear to be the reformer more eager to embrace new things. And that is precisely the key—where, exactly, should one be conservative? Should one preserve the spiritual substance of tradition, or preserve its formal rules? I always incline toward the former. Unless we are already unable to tell what a certain traditional ritual really means, then out of respect for our predecessors and reverence for culture, we should try to continue it, preserving a mysterious space of interval and distance; but once we clearly understand the true intention behind these customs, if we simply stand by and watch certain precious meanings continually drain away, then we can no longer hypocritically refuse reform.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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