Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/136

 still rankles about the fact that the gatekeeper – whose blessing can, after all, determine whether an academic is hired or promoted and may condition how highly their work is valued by others – might here be deciding on the basis of commercial viability, however deﬁned. Even within market logic, this is ﬂawed. Who, for instance, can predict the future emergence of ﬁgures culturally neglected within their time? As with many forms of peer review, the scholarly monograph world is inclined towards a conservative model that privileges normative scholarship: work that will sell at the time of publication.

This, however, is merely the most negative sharp end of the book publication gatekeeping system. In the current setup, the form of editorial curation that takes place before peer review in the case of monographs, conducted by those with extensive experience in publishing, albeit not necessarily specialists in the ﬁeld, also has a discoverability function. This is because a well-curated list at a press is supposed to exhibit coherence and quality. It is supposed to be a space wherein a reader will ﬁnd a selection of the latest and greatest material on the particular subject at hand. This function, which is inextricable from the commercial aspect, is key to many presses’ successful online book bundles (the University Publishing Online system, for example, or Oxford University Press’s ‘Oxford Scholarship Online’). As will be noted below in Chapter 5, this function could be changing. Although it in no way requires it, open access does offer a moment in which to reevaluate other publication practices, such as peer review. While I will leave a full discussion of these aspects until later, it is worth noting, at this point, that the value of discovery through a coherent list may be diminished through digital mechanisms. For instance, as full-text search and online ranking mechanisms mature, the community might be able to rate good material internally while burying the bad. This is not to say anything of the value of curation by quality, however, which should mostly be handled by the academic peer-review process anyway. Monograph selection nonetheless continues to differ from its journal counterparts in one ﬁnal way. It is expected, with monographs, that a good non-academic editor or copyeditor will work with an author to improve the work. This view can be incredibly useful as