Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/157

 alternatives. In other words: there is always merit in playing devil’s advocate, at least temporarily.

The ﬁrst point to note is that the gatekeeper model – that is, the system of deciding on permissibility before publication through both publisher policies and peer-review practice – works on a series of unspoken ideological assumptions that are never wholly objective and apolitical, but are rather, at the extreme end, based on a series of exclusions and marginalisations. While much review certainly is aimed at improving work and there are often substantial efforts to bring work up to standard through iterative commentary, at high-end journals and publishers there must be a percentage of rejections based on notions of importance in order to match page budgets and preserve prestige. This is because a gatekeeper model sometimes pre-deﬁnes its audience and disregards a series of important questions. For example, how can one wholly know the value of the material that is pre-excluded given that we exist within ideologies that are not always explicitly clear from our immanent positions? How can we know what will be of value in the future? What do we make of the exclusions and other spaces that, under the gatekeeper model, we cannot even know at present? In other words, the model of review, as it currently stands, can only be bound by temporal norms: the conditions of the present. This makes it very good at selecting work that will be highly valued in the current instance, but contributes towards a signiﬁcant weakness in our system of pre-excluding material that might be of worth at a later date.

Secondly, in one (admittedly somewhat negative) reading of peer review, it is possible to see the ﬁlter-ﬁrst method as a development entwined as much with economics as with quality. Historically, one of the key functions of the gatekeeper has been to reduce the quantity of permissible material; clearly, for economic reasons, not everything that is submitted can be published. This was not only an effort to avert what is now called ‘information overload’ and what are perceived as low standards, but also because each issue of a print journal or each book had a speciﬁed page budget. In the world of print and physical commodities, there is a need to restrict the quantity of output because there is a material cost for each page that is printed and distributed. This is, clearly, no longer directly the case (although every output has correlative labour that must be