Here Comes ‘The Journal of Controversial Ideas.’ Cue the Outcry.

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{snip} These days, a paper that’s deemed offensive can unleash an online mob and turn an academic’s career and life upside down. It can also cause a journal editor to tiptoe away from a potentially important paper or a scholar not to put fingers to keyboard in the first place.

That’s why a group of scholars is creating The Journal of Controversial Ideas. They’re not taking submissions yet. They’re still negotiating with publishers and figuring out exactly how the journal will work. They see it as an annual, peer-reviewed, open-access publication that will print worthy papers from any discipline, and stand behind them, regardless of the backlash.

One of the proposed journal’s editors, Peter Singer, is certainly no stranger to controversy. Singer’s views on disability and abortion have led to protests and calls for his ouster from Princeton, where he is a professor of bioethics.

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One unusual feature of the journal will be giving authors the option to use a pseudonym (though the journal’s editors say they hope most will feel comfortable using their real names). {snip}

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The founders are interested in not so much controversy for its own sake but in providing an outlet for ideas that might not otherwise find one. The reason they want to publish one issue per year, Minerva says, is to focus on the quality of the submissions. They’ve put together an editorial board with 40 scholars in a number of fields who sympathize with their aims. They hope that the journal will send a signal that good ideas, even ones that inflame, deserve to be debated.

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