Billed as “a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers,” PhilPapers is the brainchild of David Chalmers, a philosopher who directs the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, and David Bourget, one of Mr. Chalmers’s graduate students. First sustained by ANU, the project now has a two-year grant from Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee and support from the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, where Mr. Bourget is a rising postdoc.

Judged by the early numbers, PhilPapers has been a hit. It now has about 5,000 registered users, 60 percent to 70 percent of them graduate students and professors in philosophy, according to Mr. Bourget. Site traffic grew from 23,000 visits in February to 96,000 in May. The Chronicle asked Mr. Bourget for an update on how the experiment has unfolded so far and how it might spread. (Hint: This is not a model for philosophers alone.)

Q. What aspects of the site are working well?

A. We’re especially pleased with the steady stream of submissions to our repository we’ve been getting. We received about 2,200 submissions since we launched (four months ago). That’s quite high when you compare with other online archives, given the small size of the discipline and that we already have a lot of material in the index — people are not allowed to submit already existing items.

We’re also happy with the fruits of the new editorial structure we’ve just put in place two weeks ago. We solicited editors to help us classify all PhilPapers entries in some 3,000 fine-grained categories. We have now about 70 editors working with us, and the categorization is progressing at a good pace, though some areas are moving faster than others. On a good day we can categorize some 2,000 papers, or 1 percent of the index. Soon we will have covered most of the core areas of the discipline, and we will have a really useful platform for people to find articles on all the key topics. This is indispensable in philosophy because there isn’t enough regimentation in the terminology to be able to rely exclusively on search to cover a topic.

A. What would you like to change or add?

Q. Well, our discussion forums haven’t caught on as much as we were hoping. We would really like to see something like the forums be used systematically by professional academics to exchange ideas informally, but there are many obstacles to this that we’ve become more acutely aware of through our experience with the forums. So there is a need for change in this part of the site, but we don’t really have concrete plans yet. We’re going to give the current format more time before we turn our attention to this again.

There is a lot we want to add. One high-priority project is to set up a channel for publishers we currently can’t reach to submit their content in bulk. We also want to begin indexing the full text of articles, and to cross-link articles through citations. These improvements to our database will enable new services, e.g., impact factor statistics. We also plan to open up our index to third parties, and to add a number of new research and communication tools.

Q. Have other disciplines tried anything similar?

A. There are sites which provide subsets of PhilPapers’ services. For example, arXiv.org is a very successful online archive in the exact sciences, and PubMed a very comprehensive index of the literature in health sciences.

What’s distinctive of the PhilPapers approach is that we blend these two services together and integrate them with other services like content monitoring, community-managed classification, personalized bibliographies, authoring tools, etc. We try to exploit positive feedback loops between these different services, to make each of them better. As far as I know, there is no other site like PhilPapers in this respect.

It’s part of our aims to spread our technology to other disciplines where it might be needed. We’ve set up the DIVRE project for this purpose, and we’ve heard from a number of interested parties. The first release of DIVRE should be in one to two years from now. —Jennifer Howard