chapter 5
Innovations
As I have already noted, there is nothing in the concept of open
access that means anything must be done differently except to lower
price and permission barriers to research. Indeed, Peter Suber is at
pains to specify that open access is not about circumventing peer
review;1 an especially important observation given some of the misconceptions identified by the OAPEN-UK project. In this light, it
might be fair to ask why it is necessary to discuss innovation, changes
to editorship or modifications to peer review at all. After all, such
discussions surely muddy the waters of open access. I would suggest,
however, that there are three reasons why peer review and other
forms of experimental innovation must not remain the elephant in
the room when we talk about open access. Firstly, it is necessary to
keep talking about peer review, in particular, because of the recurring
misplaced belief that open access must inherently refer to lower
standards of quality control (it means no such thing). Secondly,
these shifts in publication practice allow us the space to rethink peer
review and other practices and to ask whether there are analogous
changes, facilitated either socially or technologically, that could be
worth exploring at this time of transition. In fact, just as one of the
arguments for open access is that it is culturally elitist and untenable
to presume that a broader audience can neither understand nor
appreciate scholarship, there are, I would argue, parallels in peer
review and editorial practice that could reflect this same principle
inside the academy. Thirdly, peer review is a key element for discussion because the economics of scholarly publication are intertwined
with systems of value.
In this chapter, I want to flag up several ways in which the current system of academic publishing could be reformed in a new digital era.
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