Philosophy Open Letter Pushes Journals on Industry Funding Disclosure

A group of philosophers is asking the journals they publish in to start treating industry money the way biomedicine has for decades. The open letter, circulating for signatures, argues that philosophy's expanding work on climate change, AI, and technology has pulled industry partnerships into a field that has not built norms for handling them.

The asks are specific. Every philosophy journal should require a disclosure at submission covering "funding, employment, collaboration, or other relationships with any industries related to their research," modeled on the conflict-of-interest standards Science and Nature already use. The letter wants those disclosures published alongside the paper, not filed away, and it wants them backfilled retroactively for previously published work with industry ties. It also wants journals to commit to consequences when disclosures turn out to be missing or incomplete, including corrections and retractions. Crucially, the letter pulls non-financial relationships — unpaid affiliations, data access, personal connections — into the same frame as employment, consulting, investments, and grants.

Why this lands now: philosophers writing on AI ethics, climate, and technology are increasingly funded by, employed by, or collaborating with the same companies whose products they assess, and the field has nothing like the disclosure infrastructure that biomedicine spent decades building. The letter points at frameworks from NSF, NIH and ERC as evidence that the tools exist and the discipline simply has not adopted them.

The honest caveat is that the page is a demand on journals, not a journal policy. It does not name signatories on its public face, does not say which editors or boards have engaged with it, and does not give a count of how many philosophy journals are even considering this. There is also a real open question about how a field without standardized grant-reporting or data-access agreements would administer something like a non-financial COI checklist in practice.

Still, the direction is the part worth watching. If even a handful of philosophy journals add a Science-style disclosure box at submission, AI-ethics readers get something they currently lack: a clearer read on who is paying whom in the work that increasingly shapes how the public talks about these systems.