For Sociology: Philip N. Cohen

What if academic research — much of it funded by taxpayers — were freely available to anyone who wanted to read it? That's the simple but radical idea behind SocArXiv, the open-access preprint repository that this episode's guest, Philip Cohen, founded in 2016.

Philip is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the 2025 Kohli Infrastructure Prize for Sociology Laureate. In this conversation, he takes us behind the scenes of the fight to make social science research open, faster, and more equitable. We later zoom out to tackle a bigger question: What happens to sociology when the government starts treating it as the enemy?

Guest
Philip Cohen
Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland
Founder & Director, SocArXiv
2025 Kohli Infrastructure Prize for Sociology Laureate

Chapter Markers
00:00 — Podcast Welcome
00:45 — Meet Philip Cohen
02:17 — What Is SocArXiv?
03:23 — How It Started
05:03 — Why Open Access Matters
07:09 — Journals and Preprints
09:02 — Openness and Trust
10:29 — A Personal Origin Story
12:36 — Rethinking Peer Review
14:52 — Building and Funding SocArXiv
16:52 — Adoption and Resistance
17:53 — Who Uses It
20:03 — Pitching It to Researchers
22:36 — Versioning and Retractions
24:30 — Surprises and AI Spam
25:46 — The Flood of AI Papers
26:16 — Plagiarism and Access
27:51 — "Publish Less, Better"
29:15 — Beyond Journals
31:45 — Data and Review
32:50 — Post-Publication Review
33:40 — Rapid-Fire Questions
37:52 — Sociology Under Attack
42:10 — Lessons From Europe
44:26 — Questions for the Next Decade
46:04 — Closing Credits

Rapid-Fire with Philip
Book he wishes he'd written: The Marriage-Go-Round by Andrew Cherlin
If not a sociologist: Rockstar
Does his best thinking: Early morning, before the phone wins
Sociological concept everyone should know: The sociological imagination
Biggest misconception about sociology: That researchers already know the answer before they begin

Links & Resources
SocArXiv: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv
Center for Open Science: https://www.cos.io/
Kohli Foundation for Sociology: https://kohlifoundation.eu/
The Marriage-Go-Round by Andrew Cherlin