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 open for comment and revision, before being released by New York University Press. Likewise, Palgrave Macmillan ran their own form of open peer-review experiment (although, for reasons of caution, they selected titles that had already been through a traditional process ﬁrst).14 From what is visible on the archive of that project, it seems there was, likewise, a low degree of takeup as it is very difﬁcult to incentivise something without speciﬁcally targeted readers and deadlines.

Most importantly, though, I want to use my ﬁnal words here to reiterate, but modify, my opening gambit. Fitzpatrick astutely notes that, in this case (and others), ‘the system that needs the most careful engineering is less technical than it is social’.15 Bearing this in mind, it is crucial never to succumb at any point to a techno-fetishism but always to consider whether technology facilitates desirable social changes.16 The academy has built, over many years, systems for appraising the individual rather than acknowledging the way in which knowledge is collaboratively produced and, for the ﬁrst time in many years, there may be an opening through which to address this. Open access does not require any changes to peer-review practices any more than the codex meant that readers had to abandon their palaeographic antecedents. There might, however, be practical ways in which a moment of technological change could enable us to see, with apologies for inverting Winston Churchill’s well-known aphorism, that perhaps our review practices are not so wholly democratic, not so entirely objective, fair or community-based; that they may only be the best that have been tried, apart from all the others.

Overlay journals: editing as social curation

A further region in which new experiments are emerging in an online, open-access ecosystem is in the editorship space. This can be seen in the rise of a speciﬁc type of formation known as an ‘overlay journal’. The term ‘overlay journal’, originally coined by the creator of arXiv Paul Ginsparg in 1996,17 can be speciﬁed as:

An open-access journal that takes submissions from the preprints deposited at an archive (perhaps at the author’s initiative), and subjects them to peer