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 Nothing written here is to be taken as necessary for open access. Instead, these musings are designed as thought experiments to determine the risks and beneﬁts of potential modiﬁcations. It is also true that much thinking has already taken place on such issues over the last twenty years.2 That does not mean, however, that I do not wish us to continue to think about this. As I hope has been made clear throughout this volume, I consider thinking about academic publishing as a form of reﬂexive critique. It is the histories of academic publishing that shape current practice and determine the possibilities for academic discourse and, therefore, communication. Thinking, in the contemporary tradition of this mode, must involve, as Michel Foucault reframed it, ‘a historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond’.3 While this is twisting Foucault a little for current purposes, it is in a similar vein of thinking about the historically contingent practices that structure our writing that I wish to proceed.

Peer review is often thought of as inviolable and can be held in extremely high regard. After all, what could be better than a community of self-regulating experts deciding on the merit of a piece of work, in some cases without knowing the author’s identity? It sounds like the ultimate form of meritocracy. All is not, however, quite so rosy in actual implementation. Indeed, as far back as 2003, it was proposed by Carlos Alonso, Cathy N. Davidson, John Unsworth and Lynne Withey that the problems of scholarly communication cannot merely be conﬁned to access and economics. As they note, ‘the “crisis” of the scholarly monograph, then, is not merely a crisis in the economics of scholarly publishing, but also in the processes of peer review and academic self-governance, prompting reﬂection on practices of scholarly evaluation that we have simply taken for granted’.4 In this ﬁrst section, I want to outline provocatively the potential ﬂaws in the extant systems of peer review before moving on to suggest new alternatives in an open-access, digital world. Some of the criticisms here will only apply in the most negative of cases; often, existing forms of review work fairly well. Nevertheless, if we value quality control mechanisms, it is important to consider the potential failings of our models, even if we eventually reject proposed