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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. 137