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 review. If approved (perhaps after revision), the postprints are also deposited in an archive with some indication that they have been approved. One such indication would be a new citation that included the name of the journal. Another could be a link from the journal’s online table of contents. A third could be new metadata associated with the ﬁle. An overlay journal might be associated with just one archive or with many. Because an overlay journal doesn’t have its own apparatus for disseminating accepted papers, but uses the pre-existing system of interoperable archives, it is a minimalist journal that only performs peer review.18

To unpack this a little, the basic idea of an overlay journal is that papers are deposited on preprint servers (i.e. the work is made publicly available in a repository prior to peer review) before an editor decides to arrange for peer review of a new manuscript. The manuscript is then reviewed in the traditional way, including the upload of a new postprint version (also to the repository) incorporating revisions if required. Finally, a version is uploaded that indicates that the paper was reviewed and accepted by an overlay journal and the journal itself adds the paper to the table of contents.

Overlay journals, though, have shifted in their deﬁnition and function. With the advent of the megajournal – a single, multidisciplinary journal containing thousands of articles, sometimes operating on a post-review framework, exempliﬁed by PLOS ONE – the concept of an ‘overlay’ has a different role. Instead of adding peer review outright, as the material is drawn from a megajournal with some form of quality control built-in, in this situation an overlay journal could bring the curational role of the editor to the fore in a fashion similar to an edited collection.

This concept of an overlay journal, which derives (as does much of the OA movement) from theoretical physics, is highly signiﬁcant in speciﬁc scientiﬁc disciplines. Indeed, in physics, where the subject can change very rapidly, it is important for the ﬁeld that information is available as quickly as possible and it is important for the scientists that their author precedence be recorded. Now, it could be argued that, in many humanities disciplines, these needs do not exist or are less signiﬁcant. I would like to close this section with some observations to the contrary, noting that precedence, turnaround and, most importantly, the explicit positioning of the editor as the centre of prestige here, could have very real and positive effects for the