Publication: 'Before the law: open access, quality control and the future of peer review'

Originally published on eve.gd on 1 July 2013.

Read this post on the web (with images, PDF and citation details)

In this piece on the future of peer review for the British Academy, I assert that, in the humanities:

OA is not about abandoning peer review but it does provide the opportunity to rethink its role and our methods.
67% of existing OA journals do not charge APCs and yet academics have tended to steer clear of them.
People opt for recognised outlets because of the (erroneously) perceived emphasis on publication venue by accreditation structures such as RAE/REF/tenure.
In the print world peer review was historically linked to page limits; these do not apply in the electronic realm.
Double blind review is a misnomer and even then preserved anonymity can be problematic.
The alternative is to publish everything that meets a certain threshold of academic soundness and to let readers decide what should last; in effect a kind of post-publication, or peer-to-peer, review.
This modification of peer review could lead to more collaboration and less insistence on an individual finished product.

The piece is available to freely download (as well as appearing in a hard copy edition), as is the whole collection. The piece is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

to freely download
whole collection