What Journal Of Consciousness Studies Actually Is
The Journal Of Consciousness Studies is an interdisciplinary academic publication that covers the nature, mechanisms, and philosophy of conscious experience. Founded in 1994, it has built a reputation for taking consciousness seriously as both a scientific and philosophical problem without forcing a single theoretical framework on its contributors. The journal publishes empirical neuroscience research alongside philosophical analysis, which creates a peculiar but useful editorial environment. Most academic journals stick to one lane. Consciousness research doesn't fit in one lane. That is both the journal's strength and its fundamental tension.
Getting a Paper Published in Journal Of Consciousness Studies
The submission process is handled through their website. You create an author account, upload your manuscript as a PDF or Word document, and fill out the metadata form. The journal uses a double-blind peer review process, which means both reviewers and authors are anonymized. This is important for philosophy-of-mind papers where the argument might align with or attack a living researcher's position. The average time from submission to first decision is roughly four to six months. Not fast, but normal for this field. I submitted a paper on predictive processing and phenomenal binding about three years ago, and it sat at "with reviewers" for about five months before the first round came back. One reviewer loved it, one reviewer thought the whole framework was category error. The editor offered a revise-and-resubmit rather than reject, which is standard practice here. You should format your manuscript to match their guidelines before you submit. They have specific requirements for reference style, section headings, and figure resolution. Pages where you skip this step get returned unreviewed until the formatting is corrected. I wasted three weeks on my first submission because I used APA format when they wanted something closer to Chicago style for the bibliography. Don't make that mistake.
What Makes This Journal Different
The most counter-intuitive thing about Journal Of Consciousness Studies is that it does not have a stated theoretical home. Some journals loudly advertise their orientation — materialist, dualist, panpsychist, illusionist — and filter submissions accordingly. This journal does not. You will find papers arguing for physicalism next to papers defending property dualism next to papers proposing radical new frameworks. The editorial board is large and deliberately cross-paradigm. This means your argument has to carry its own weight. You cannot lean on the journal's pre-committed theoretical position to do work for you. That is good for rigorous research and bad for people who want their preferred framework validated by association. The other thing nobody tells you is that the journal has a real problem with papers that try to do too much at once. Consciousness studies naturally attracts writers who want to solve the hard problem, explain qualia, ground free will, and unify neuroscience all in one manuscript. The editors see this constantly. Papers that attempt to resolve the entire philosophy of mind in 8,000 words get desk-rejected within two weeks. Narrow, well-executed arguments perform significantly better even if they do not claim to be revolutionary.
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I learned this after my second submission got that treatment. I rewrote it as a focused argument about attentional gating and phenomenal detail, dropped the broader claims entirely, and it passed review in the next round. The difference was essentially the scope.
The Practical Side of Publishing Here
Open access is available but not required. If you choose open access, there is an article processing charge that runs somewhere in the range of £1,500 to £2,000 depending on current pricing. The standard subscription model costs nothing to publish in. The journal is also indexed in Scopus and PhilPapers, which matters if you are working in a department that tracks those metrics. Citation practices in consciousness studies are unusual. Papers from this journal get cited heavily in both cognitive science and philosophy departments, but the two communities rarely talk to each other. If your goal is departmental promotion in a philosophy unit, your citations from neuroscience researchers may not count the same way. If your goal is impact in a psychology department, philosophical citations may be undervalued. This is not specific to this journal but it is worth keeping in mind when you decide where to submit. The journal's online presence is functional but outdated. The website loads slowly, the search function is unreliable, and navigating back issues requires more clicks than it should. None of this affects your paper, but if you are a first-time author reading submissions guidelines for the first time, the website friction is real. Take screenshots of the instructions. They do not always appear consistently across browsers.
Common Mistakes I See
Many authors write introductions that spend three pages establishing that consciousness is a problem. The reviewers know. They have been in this field. A shorter introduction that gets to your specific argument faster is always preferred. Two paragraphs establishing the context and then moving into your contribution works better than a survey that covers every major position since Churchland. Another frequent issue is the confusion between correlation and explanation. A paper that shows neural activity correlates with subjective report is fine as an empirical contribution. But when that same paper claims to have explained consciousness, the philosophy reviewers will tear into it. The journal accepts both types of papers, but they are evaluated differently. Empirical papers are judged on methodology and data. Philosophical papers are judged on argument structure and engagement with existing literature. Mixing the two evaluation standards in one manuscript is a reliable way to get contradictory reviewer reports. References to Chalmers, Bayne, Frankish, and Matthen are expected. If your literature review does not engage with at least some of the recent work from the last five years in this specific journal, reviewers will note the gap. Citing only classic texts from the 1990s and 2000s signals that you have not been tracking the current conversation.
The journal accepts longer papers than most. A typical article can run 6,000 to 10,000 words. There is no hard ceiling enforced strictly, but going beyond 12,000 words without clear justification will draw editor comments. I have seen 14,000-word papers published when the argument genuinely required the space. I have also seen 9,000-word papers asked to cut 2,000 words for redundancy. The distinction usually comes down to whether every section earns its place.
Should You Submit Here
If your work sits at the intersection of empirical research and philosophical analysis, this journal is one of the few places that will take it seriously on its own terms. If you are purely experimental with no conceptual framing, you will likely find a better home in neuroscience journals. If you are purely philosophical without engaging empirical findings, philosophy journals may expect more rigorous engagement with the science than this journal will require. The review quality is generally good. Reviewers tend to be knowledgeable and substantive rather than performative. I have never received a review from this journal that felt like the reviewer was trying to prove something about themselves rather than engage with the paper. That is not a small thing in this field. The main bottleneck is time. Four to six months for first decisions is standard, but revisions and resubmissions add more time. A typical publication timeline from initial submission to online appearance runs eight to fourteen months. If you are on a job market next year and need a publication in print by August, this journal will not help you meet that deadline. Plan accordingly.
