About the Journal
- The Journal and its History
- Open Access and Copyright Statement
- Peer Review Policy
- Archiving
- Support
- Production
- Privacy Statement
The Journal and its History
The Gavin David Young Lectures bring a distinguished philosopher to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide to deliver a public lecture for the promotion, advancement, teaching and diffusion of the study of philosophy. The lecture series and journal owe their existence to a bequest made by Jessie Frances Raven in memory of her father, the late Gavin David Young. The rules governing the bequest were revised and the lectures reestablished in 2022.
The terms of the bequest require ‘publication of a revised written version of the lecture after delivery, online and freely accessible to the public and the scholarly community’. This journal exists to facilitate that end.
The journal is open access and peer-reviewed, though the nature of the lecture series means that peer review is only singly anonymised and we do not accept unsolicited submissions. Publication is annual.
The topics of lectures and subsequent articles in the lecture series are determined by the invited lecturers, and may span the range of contemporary research in philosophy. The bequest stipulates however that the topic should be ‘in broad alignment with the research activity in Philosophy at the University at the time of the Lecture’. Given the history and likely future trajectory of the discipline at Adelaide, lectures are broadly ‘Analytic’ in orientation.
The first lecture in this prestigious series was delivered in 1956 by Gilbert Ryle, and subsequent lecturers have included W V O Quine, Donald Davidson, David Lewis, Daniel Dennett, Hilary Putnam, and Frank Jackson, among other distinguished philosophers. Books and articles based on the lectures have been among some of the most influential and important works in twentieth century philosophy. It is our ambition that the new series of lectures will have equal impact, while lecturers and topics will be representative of the broader discipline as it enters the middle of the twenty-first century.
More details of the history of the journal, including information about our namesake and details of lectures in the original series, are available under our history.
Open Access and Copyright Statement
The Gavin David Young Lectures in Philosophy are published fully open access under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license. In brief, this permits free access, sharing, and adaptation of lectures published in the journal, as long as you give appropriate credit and do not use the material we publish for commercial purposes. Readers are free to use the lectures for any scholarly purposes in their research or teaching. Lecturers retain copyright in their lectures, including moral rights; publishing under a Creative Commons license simply means that the lecturers give others permission to reproduce, communicate, and build on their copyrighted material.
The Lectures are freely accessible to readers online without registration or the payment of fees. As researchers and teachers ourselves, the editorial team are dedicated to fostering the free and open exchange of scholarship, and to that end have decided to restrict commercial use of the material we publish. Commercial uses of research outputs have their place in the transition to open scholarship but ultimately we aim at an intellectual economy where the flow of ideas isn’t impeded or altered by the profit imperative.
Authors as the copyright holders are of course permitted to use their material for commercial purposes and to permit others to do so – we ask only that acknowledgment and attribution to the Gavin David Young Lectures in Philosophy be included.
Peer Review Policy
All lectures in the series are commissioned from distinguished scholars invited by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide. Lecturers are then given an opportunity to produce a written version of their lecture, taking into consideration the discussion following the delivery of the lecture.
On receipt of the written version, the editor reviews the manuscript and solicits comment from at least two independent expert scholars. As the identity of lecturers is public, this is a single anonymised review process, where the identity of authors is known to the reviewers but not conversely. Reviewers are asked to make constructive comment designed to improve the lectures, helping authors avoid difficulties and ensuring that the resulting publications are of the highest quality. In light of this distinctive reviewing task, the journal takes the unusual step of crediting peer reviewers by name on the final published version, except where reviewers prefer to remain anonymous.
Archiving and Persistent Identifiers
Content published in the journal is archived through the PKP Preservation Network to ensure permanent long-term access to material published in the journal.
The Journal also archives published articles through the catch-all repository Zenodo, and uses the associated DOIs to provide persistent identifiers. Our Zenodo community can be found at https://zenodo.org/communities/gavindavidyounglectures.
Support
Costs associated with the organisation and delivery of the lectures and their subsequent publication are covered by the bequest administered by the University of Adelaide. This enables us to make the lectures freely available to readers everywhere, without any charges levied on authors or instititions. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Department of Philosophy, the School of Humanities, and the Trusts and Bequests team.
Production
The journal is produced using Pandoc as a backend, with submitted lectures written in Pandoc-flavoured Markdown before conversion to pdf and html galleys using custom templates. Bibliographies are automatically styled using the Citation Style Language style developed for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
Privacy Statement
The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.