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 (i.e. advanced selective peer review). This is because the cost of putting something on the internet, in raw form, can be extremely low. Once the material is online, Shirky intimates, it might then be possible to create social and technological ﬁlter mechanisms that glorify the good and bury the bad.10

At ﬁrst, this standard of publishing all papers that are ‘technically sound’ appears to have no analogue for many disciplines in the humanities. This may prove to be correct. As a hypothesis, though, a technically sound paper in the humanities could: evince an argument; make reference to the appropriate range of extant scholarly literature; be written in good, standard prose of an appropriate register that demonstrates a coherence of form and content; show a good awareness of the ﬁeld within which it was situated; pre-empt criticisms of its own methodology or argument; and be logically consistent. These are, indeed, the exact checks that one would expect an editor to make before sending a piece out for review. While this is just a cursory stab at a deﬁnition and not meant to be ﬁnalised, implementable criteria, many of the problems of the review system as it stands could certainly be addressed through the formation of explicit consensus as to what constitutes an acceptable barrier to entry in the humanities.

Secondly, though, the inversion that PLOS ONE effects could leave it open, as was the very ﬁrst scientiﬁc journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, to John Hill’s 1751 critique: the inclusion of ‘trivial and downright foolish articles’.11 In other words, by inverting the review methodology, PLOS ONE could expose itself to admitting rubbish. The difference from the contemporary situation, however, lies in the economic models and technological ﬁlters at our disposal. In 2014, sophisticated full-text and social search mechanisms exist that can bury unpopular material on the furthest pages of results but without removing such items from the economy altogether. This is not, therefore, a removal of selection, but rather a different way of ﬁltering. There is still selection of material but, at a later date, it also becomes possible to see those manuscripts that were not initially favoured. The advantage of this, as with the arguments for open access more generally predicated upon an anti-elitism, is that we do not presume to know what will be important for all time. Instead, we replace such a system twofold with the ability to ensure