This is my personal advice for engineers and philosophers who want to publish fPET-related work.
An informal aside first: Where to publish often depends on what your goals are.
· fPET’s mission is about having engineers and philosophers engage for the mutual benefit of both: no one has all the answers. Having engineers get together and actually engage with philosophers and other humanities and social science scholars is not only fun, but it’s also fertile ground for new ideas and theory. And it can be a place to reflect on what we want the culture of engineering to be, too.
· Peer review is often the coin of the realm for those building a career in academia, and it conveys a rigor and quality that others can cite. It can at times be maddening to push interdisciplinary work through journals, especially if reviewers are coming from different disciplines or have a hard time engaging the work on its own terms. To publish in a discipline-specific journal can often require a lot of dedicated focus on learning the background literature that reviewers in that journal expect.
· If you want to change the culture of engineering, it can be challenging to decide on what or where you should write. Peer review can be a drawback in that respect. Many practicing engineers, especially in industry, don’t have access to peer-reviewed journals, and generally are so busy that they wouldn’t take the time to read a dense peer reviewed article even if they had access to it.
If you want research to actually inform the direction of engineering in society, it’s hard. I list below some ‘big think’ venues like Issues that encourage reflection. But even there it can be hard to get engineers to take the time and read. (This is in part why in-person spaces like fPET can be so important.)
Engineering audience venues for publications:
Many engineering societies have magazines or publication venues that would be interested in fPET related work. The IEEE Society for Social Implications of Technology (SSIT) is particularly prolific in this regard:
· IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, which is also peer reviewed, is a wonderful venue for publishing interdisciplinary work and reflections.
· The IEEE SSIT Newsletter is a great place to share news of events and occasionally contains think pieces and reflections.
If you’re an engineer approaching philosophical issues for the first time, exploring venues like these may be an ideal entry point, and have the virtue of also being read by actual engineers!
If framed properly, fPET research could be submitted to engineering journals. Contributing research in these areas can be very field-specific, so it’s hard to have universal advice there. (Please do share if you publish fPET-related research in engineering journals; this piece in Design Science was fun but challenging to do).
‘Big Think’ Engineering and Science-focused venues for publication:
The quarterly magazine Issues in Science and Technology, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University, is a wonderful place for reflective research and has published many works by engineers and philosophers over the years, including my favorite piece by Carl Mitcham on the true grand challenge of engineering. Issues also has the feature that it is read by engineers and scientists in the federal government and by science policy leaders in Washington, D.C. This might be one of the best places to publish fPET-related research.
The New Atlantis, edited by Ari Schulman, describes itself as “A Journal of Technology and Society.” It publishes reflective essays on technology, engineering and culture.
For philosophy-focused or science and society-focused peer-reviewed journals:
· Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology has long been a mainstay of the Society for Philosophy and Technology.
· Philosophy & Technology, founded in 2011, publishes a great deal of strong work in the field.
· Engineering Studies, the journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies and currently edited by Jessica Smith from Colorado School of Mines, has also been taking a renewed interest in philosophy of engineering questions.
· Science and Engineering Ethics is one of many journals that touches on ethical issues.
· IEEE’s Transactions on Engineering and Society is a peer-reviewed journal.
· Several philosophy of science journals, such as British Journal for Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Science itself, could be open to engineering.
· There are also many science, technology and society (STS) journals, drawing on the long lineage of STS scholarship that exists.
As noted above, peer review for an engineer in these journals might involve a bit of a learning curve!
Springer’s Philosophy of Engineering and Technology (POET) Series
The Springer POET editors have been prolific and thoughtful and published many books in the POET series. fPET conference co-chairs have often published edited book volumes coming out of the fPET conference series. For a list of fPET specific books, see the end of this fPET community page.
As the lead editor for the 2021 book volume, I can say that there are a lot of benefits for publishing in an fPET anthology. I was able to steer the book to potentially be more readable to the broader audiences of fPET. I particularly valued working with engineers, like Daniel McLaughlin, who wrote an interdisciplinary paper on engineering judgment, And Springer had a thoughtful process for getting a blind peer review of the book. There can be drawbacks, though. Depending on whether you need formal peer review publications for purposes like academic tenure, publishing in a highly ranked peer reviewed journal may be a better strategy. And it can still be hard to get engineers or policy leaders to take the time to read a POET volume chapter.
Other notables:
There are also a variety of science policy and interdisciplinary journals that can be valuable venues for this work, including Research Policy, Science and Public Policy, Journal of Responsible Innovation, and many others.
-Zachary Gallagher Pirtle
