Flourish: the Student Journal for Positive Impact - Open for Submissions!
Flourish is a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed student journal looking for change-driven papers that, if taken seriously, could make the world a better place. Submit a research paper, topic essay, or even a literature or book review. We welcome both edited university papers and specially written pieces. Find out more and submit a paper here. First submission deadline is 15th March.
Who can submit?
We think we’ll be of most use to current undergraduates, however we also accept papers from recent graduates, high school students and Masters students. We’re open to entrants of all nationalities. We will use double-blind peer review process to ensure fairness.
What are we looking for?
You can read our review process, and style and format guides here.
Why might I want to submit?
Our best guess is that we’ll get two main categories of entrants:
- Remember the idea you had that’s been in the back of your mind? Now’s your chance to write it up!
- Get more out of an essay you wrote or research you’ve already done!
Successful entrants can join our scholars network, where you'll gain access to mentoring and special opportunities.
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People have criticism of peer review as a system (eg see here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/peer-review) . Have you given any thought to how it could be improved at Flourish?
Thanks for this, it seems like a cool opportunity. I had a look at the criteria and it seems like a crucial part of the evaluation criteria is whether a piece "if taken seriously" would "make the world better" and whether the piece is "related to positive impact/improving the world". These seem like overly restrictive criteria on submissions: for instance, book reviews that are critical of core EA messages (but nevertheless making valid points) or essays on topics that are only tangentially related to positive impact could be ignored or discounted under your review process. This would not be unsimilar to some of the arguments against the previous EA criticism competition.
I wonder if this would lead to an aggregation of submissions that have been self-censored and self-filtered for content and perspectives that are non-critical and non-combative with the EA concepts, simply by the fact that a criticism could be seen to not relate to positive impact or necessarily to making the world better but rather in drawing out a different viewpoint to the traditional EA "doctrine".
I would hope that good criticism of EA would "make the world better if taken seriously" by improving the EA ecosystem. That said, I do understand your concern-- I hope people will submit good criticism to the journal, and that it will be published!