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 compensated and so has an economic scarcity) but persists through a culture that, as I have already noted, Gary Hall calls our ‘papercentrism’.5 Under this traditional model of review and economics, the price of a subscription to a journal must cover not only the cost of the material that is printed and owned but the cost of the editorial labour that was invested in administrating the pieces that are rejected. As it is with icebergs, so it can be with editorial labour; it is easy to forget that, in a ﬁlter-ﬁrst mode, the majority lies hidden below the surface.

Thirdly, single- or double-blind forms of peer review assume an honourable motivation for reviewers and provide few ways of holding readers publicly accountable for their decisions. Hypothetically and provocatively: is it right that a mere two academics, in most instances, although sometimes only one, have the private, unaccountable, ﬁnal word on an article’s or book’s acceptability, particularly when there has been intense debate over the statistical signiﬁcance of the number of reviewers, even in scientiﬁc disciplines?6 For Early Career Researchers (ECRs) this private decision can be the difference between a lifetime of employment in academia and a lengthy period of retraining. Furthermore, reviewers and journals are often only evaluating a piece with one speciﬁc audience group in mind; if judging on the ‘importance’ of work, it is crucial to ask ‘for whom?’ Different journals and presses, of course, have different target audience constituents, but even these sub-ﬁelds may be fractured and subject to competing notions of ‘importance’ within a discipline. In other words, how can one accurately pre-judge, within one’s own temporal, geographical and disciplinary immanence, what may be of worth to scholars free of these constraints? While it could be argued that the speciﬁcity of journal and publisher remits renders such considerations irrelevant, this lack of accountability and, as will be explored below, logic in the admissibility of papers is a problem that is exacerbated by the traditional double-blind system.

Fourthly, the term ‘double-blind’, as well as carrying ableist insinuations about the partially sighted in its language, can actually be a misnomer. Theoretically, the author should be unaware of the identity of his or her reviewers and vice versa, a mode used in most journal reviewing. The beneﬁts of this are easy to articulate: it is designed to encourage an impartial assessment of the work, rather